Elaine Pagels' book on the Book of Revelation

Biblical scholar Elaine Pagels has done a popular book on the Apocalypse of John, aka, the Book of Revelation, called Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, & Politics in the Book of Revelation (2012).

By "popular", I mean it's not a scholarly book as such. She doesn't lead the reader through discussion of Greek participles.

But it is written from a scholar's viewpoint. She's analyzing the history of the book and the story of how it came to be included in the New Testament canon during the fourth century CE. As she explains, the first list of the enduring New Testament canon of which we know is from a letter from the Bishop Athanasius in 367 CE.

A specialist in the Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi in 1945, Pagels uses some of those esoteric works to recreate some of the religious and historical context in which the Book of Revelation was written and understood until it became part of the established Christian canon of Scripture.

She doesn't walk us through the history of the book through the following 15 centuries. But she does make some informed observations about the persistence of its popularity, for better or worse:

We need not rehearse the history of religious violence-from crusaders fighting "infidels" and inquisitors torturing and killing Jews to save their immortal souls, to Catholics and Protestants fighting religious wars from the sixteenth century on, or Christian groups engaged in vigilante violence to the present time, or the wartime rhetoric of world leaders - to realize how often those who wield power and see themselves standing' on God's side against Satan's have sought to force "God's enemies" to submit or be killed. Such apocalyptic fervor, whether engaged in by Christians or Muslims, allows no neutral ground between God's kingdom and the lake of fire, and no room for compromise, much less for human-or humane-interaction. [my emphasis]

She notes that the notion of justice in history, or maybe it should be History, is one of the ideas that people have taken from Revelation.

Yet John's Book of Revelation appeals not only to fear but also to hope. As John tells how the chaotic events of the world are finally set right by divine judgment, those who engage his visions often see them offering meaning-moral meaning - in times of suffering or apparently random catastrophe. Many poets, artists, and preachers who engage these prophecies claim to have found in them the promise, famously repeated by Martin Luther King Jr., that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

That saying is also a favorite of President Barack Obama's.

And it is also important to remember that John's Apocalypse promises a bright ultimate future for the elect:

Finally, too, this worst of all nightmares ends not in terror but in a glorious new world, radiant with the light of God's presence, flowing with the water of life, abounding in joy and delight. Whether one sees in John's visions the destruction of the whole world or the dark tunnel that propels each of us toward our own death, his final vision suggests that even after the worst we can imagine has happened, we may find the astonishing gift of new life. Whether one shares that conviction, few readers miss seeing how these visions offer consolation and that most necessary of divine gifts - hope.

The philosopher Karl Löwith argued that the concept of meaning in history was based on Jewish and Christian thought: "it is only within a preestablished horizon of ultimate meaning, however hidden it may be, that actual history seems to be meaningless. This horizon has been established by history, for it is Jewish and Christian thinking that brought this colossal question into existence." (my emphasis) (Löwith, "The Theological Background of The Philosophy of History" Social Research 13:1/4; 1946)

Revelation originally spoke to a world in which Christians were persecuted by the secular power of Rome in "actual history". But it promised that this "actual history" was, if not exactly meaningless, insignificant seen against the ultimate victory of the Lord over the forces of evil. "The very existence of a philosophy of history and its quest for a meaning is due to the history of salvation; it emerged from the faith in an ultimate purpose," writes Löwith. He argues that it is in the Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature in particular that we find the roots of Western theories of meaning in history, even the distinctly secular ones:

The Greek historians wrote pragmatic history centered around a great political event; the fathers of the church developed from Jewish prophecy a theology of history focused on the supra-historical events of creation, incarnation and consummation; the moderns elaborate a philosophy of history by secularizing theological principles and applying them to an ever increasing number of empirical facts.

One of the issues around the Book of Revelation is to what degree it was a specifically Christian document. As Pagels explains, the author was likely a Jewish Christian follower of Jesus who does not specifically refer to himself as "Christian". The initial followers of Jesus were Jews like himself, of course. But the Jesus movement among Jews fast developed distinctive features and Gentile converts started coming in significant numbers soon after Jesus' death. The conflicts between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians are evidenced in Paul's letters and in the Acts of the Apostles. Over time, Christians defined themselves in more hostile terms toward Judaism. But Jewish Christian groups survived in the Middle East for centuries; the Prophet Muhammad almost certainly had contact with them and was likely significantly influenced by them.

G.W. Bowersock in a review of Pagels' book (Apocalypse Then New York Review of Books 04/05/2012; behind subscription) notes that John Marshall (2001) and Daniel Boyarin (2011) have made a strong case for the Jewish nature of Revelation. As Bowersock delicately puts it, this "raises the deeply complex issue of the Jewishness of the first Christians," an issue which Pagels discusses in her book.

My own favorite chapter of Revelation is Chapter 12, with its cosmic story of the woman in the heavens and the dragon after her. It apparently intrigues Pagels, as well, because she has some interesting suggestions about it. Her caution in a footnote that the symbolism of that chapter may be "multivalent", I tend to think she's right to note identify the woman with Mary but I would question the identification of the child with the Messiah.

Psychedelic apocalypse

Tanker's post Apocalypse next week? 02/16/08 reminded me of one of my favorite psychology books, Power: The Inner Experience (1975) by David McClelland. Despite the New Agey title, it's a mainstream psychology book. McClelland is probably best known for his organizational studies that look at the dynamics of participants' needs for power, "affiliation" (community) and achievement.

One of the chapters of his book is called "Visions of Power". It looks at various examples of what he calls power visions: the dream of the Sioux mystic Black Elk known from the book Black Elk Speaks; the Christian Bood of Revelation; some contemporary Christian power visions; and, a power vision from Richard Alpert, aka, Ram Dass. (Okay, maybe it's a tiny bit New Agey!)

The Book of Revelation is my favorite book in the Christian Bible for literary value. One of these days I'm going to post about how I myself have stood on the "throne of Satan" mentioned in Revelation. No, really. (Hint: it's in Berlin.) McClellan gives a great description of the book:

Revelation is a strange book. It reads like a dream - or, more precisely, like the experiences of someone who has just taken LSD or some other psychedelic substance.

Although I'm guessing most people would consider that a "bad trip", as the hippies used to say.

It is full of bizarre visual images - of dazzling thrones and angels, of horrible beasts and tortures. Difficult to understand in terms of ordinary interpretations of reality, it has led to considerable confusion among theologians who have tried to make sense of it. From the psychological point of view, however its thematic content is farily easy to understand. John, a disciple of Jesus Christ, reports the vision to seven Christian churches in Asia Minor whose members are being persecuted by Roman officials. His purpose is clearly to encourage them, to help them remain loyal to the church despite their sufferings. The whole first section of the book reports a message received directly from Jesus Christ stating unequivocably that He is planning to come again quickly. His followers, therefore shoud remain loyal, because when He comes He will reward them and punish forever those who do not believe in Him.

Such visions from the Bible obviously still speak to people today in some of the same ways that the presumably did in John's time. But there can easily be major translation problems, not just from the koine Greek but even more so from their conceptual world to ours. Dreams, visions and miraculous healings were a part of the lives of people in that time in a way that they are not for contemporary people, even mystical-minded Christians. And Revelation does indulge in an extreme polarization of good and evil.

To Frederick Nietzsche, the Western concept of evil originated in situations like those faced by the persecuted Christian churches. In his view, the Greek societies depicted in Homer and the classical tragedies knew good and bad, not good and evil. Or rather, the aristocrats who ruled those societies viewed the world that way. What was aristocratic was good, what was not aristocratic was bad. Not evil, in the sense of being despicable, horrible, repulsive, awful, etc., but bad. Bad to them primarily meant non-aristocratic.

He thought that Judaism developed a "slave morality", in which that aristocratic values were inverted but also changed. What was good was the life values of the slaves, the oppressed Jews. Their oppressors and their values were not just other, not just "bad", but "evil", absolutely to be condemned. And Nietzsche thought the Christian religion intensified that sense. His concept of the "slave morality" fits pretty well with the perspective of Revelation. The persecutors weren't just opponents, they were evil agents of Satan who must be destroyed and cast away into eternal fire.

McClellan summarized some of the psychologically valuable things and also more problematic implications of the power visions he studied, include Revelation. On the beneficial side of the ledger:

The virtues of power visions are self-evident. They deal effectively with the problems that originally bothered Buddha - the problem of suffering that arises from desire, the fear of death or non-being, and the impermanence of the material world (in Pali, dukkha, anatta, and anicca). Ideally through meditation and other techniques, one is able to experience union with the ultimate ground of being and to recognize desire, the ego, and material possessions as transitory and unimportant. One transcends them. In our psychological framework, the individual is released from the self as an origin of powerful acts and experiences submission to a power beyond the self. In a culture like the contemporary American culture, such an orientation has particular value, since Americans tend to overstress the self - the importance of self-reliance, of self-actualization, of making right choices for which the individual will be held accountable. (my emphasis)

But then there are definite down sides:

The limits of the power vision are equally apparent. It does not deal directly with problems of action and social organization; if it becomes the overwhelmingly dominant form of expression of the power need, it can even draw attention away from these problems. Black Elk found that his power vision was of little assistance in helping his people prosper as a nation. Personally it made him more effective, particularly in healing people, but as a means of helping to save his Sioux nation as had seemed possible, it was a failure. The same can be said of the Christian power vision in the early days after Jesus' death. It helped many people individually, but as a group they continued to be martyred and persecuted. John's vision promised that Jesus was to come quickly and straighten things out in the Day of Judgment. Yet He failed to come, at least in the worldly sense, and the church was left to solve the problems of action and social organization in other ways. Ram Dass' vision makes no promises about producing a better social order. It is oriented towards individual rather than social salvation. (my emphasis)

Then there's this:

Furthermore, the power vision works best in a social organization that is hierarchically arranged and run by one supreme authority, whether at the level of the ashram or of the nation state. In such situations, organizational matters are taken care of by a simple chain of command, and there is no necessity for committees to plan what should be done, for discovering methods of sharing power to make decisions at various levels, and so on. Although such organizations have an appealing simplicity, and often produce high morale, moder organization theory shows their limitations for accomplishing many tasks.

The sort of power vision that polarizes good and evil an such an extreme way as the Book of Revelation fits very well to authoritarian organizations and movements. We see it not only in many elements of the Christian Right but in cult groups of various kinds.

Tags: authoritarianism, book of revelation, christianity, david mcclellan