Can I Get a Witness?

Reading Revelation through African American Culture

Brian K. Blount

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781611642254
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In this accessible and provocative study, Brian Blount reads the book of Revelation through the lens of African American culture, drawing correspondences between Revelation's context and the long-standing suffering of African Americans. Applying the African American social, political, and religious experience as an interpretive cipher for the book's complicated imagery, he contends that Revelation is essentially a story of suffering and struggle amid oppressive assimilation. He examines the language of "martyr" and the image of the lamb, and shows that the thread of resistance to oppressive power that runs through John's hymns resonates with a parallel theme in the music of African America.

Chapter 1

The Revelation of Culture

Revelation obscures. That is not, of course, John’s intent. He seems to think he has cleared everything up. In picturing what God has revealed to him, he apparently presumes that he has clarified how believers are to live their lives. He is at his explanatory best in the opening three chapters. After capturing the imagination of his listeners with chapter 1’s thrilling expose of Jesus’ cosmic power and eternal majesty, he turns to the mundane affairs of his all too fallible seven churches (2:1–3:22). A master motivator, he uses his images of the powerful and ever-present Christ to ratchet up feelings of devotion and obedience. His ethical mandates and pastoral castigations draw their strength from the carefully drawn revelation that Jesus is, always has been, and always will be Lord. His hearers and readers are to follow the ways of that Lord, witness to the rule of that Lord, suffer and die for the glory of that Lord, and believe in the imminent coming of that Lord to right the wrongs of history and vindicate the people who have suffered so tragically because of them. Above all, as the Lord’s representatives, they are to initiate his victory by living out a witness of active and aggressive resistance against any power, human or supernatural, that would contest his lordship by establishing and promoting its own.

But it is just here, at the point where he should be his most clear, that the seer stumbles into the proverbially murky deep end. Beginning in chapter 4, he ushers us into the heavens and reveals a barrage of otherworldly images that are supposed to have a decidedly this-worldly instructional impact. Impact to what end, though, we clearly do not know. Stunned by the visual onslaught, centuries of interpreters have squinted through John’s dark looking glass in an often futile effort to determine exactly what this apocalypse really reveals about God’s expectations for faithful discipleship.

It is crucial that we determine what John is saying about Jesus, since the expectations for our behavior as disciples are based on the revelation of his identity as Lord. But that is precisely why we have a problem. The shocking visions that constitute the bulk of John’s work, chapters 4–22, while undeniably awe-inspiring, provoke many more questions than answers. The magisterial God whom John pictures, and the Lord Jesus who follows in God’s imperial wake, are caught up in a vengeful, misogynistic, hyperviolent, genocidal war whose cataclysms devour entire swathes of human, environmental, and cosmic being. What can that possibly mean for how humans are to live their lives as followers of that Lord? Can this Lord and the God he brings to life be the ones we are to emulate? Instead of clarifying, this Revelation obscures. It obscures God’s intent for human involvement in the maelstrom leading up to and ultimately climaxing the end of time.

Fortunately for us, culture reveals. By enveloping an object of interpretation the way a carefully selected frame surrounds and thereby shapes the reading of the portrait it holds, culture contributes to meaning even as, and precisely because, it supplies context.¹ The revelation here is that the cultural context of the interpreter plays a powerful role in shaping the meaning that interpreter builds from his or her interaction with a text like John’s Apocalypse.

Language is the foundation of every text. Language is potential. Language creates choice. It provides both the persons who draft it and those who subsequently encounter it with the opportunity to decode its audible sounds and visible markers. Words, for example, do not convey meaning; they convey meaning potential. That potential, that opportunity for choice, becomes meaningful only when it is performed and accessed in a certain context. One might consider the example head. Clearly polyvalent, it could refer as easily to the leader of some organization or group as to the body part occupying the space between your shoulders. In some colloquial settings it could even be paired synonymously with as unlikely a partner as bean or noggin. A sailor in search of a particular kind of relief might access it in a totally different manner still.

In such a way, the single word attracts many different but still “correct” decoding choices. The “meaningful” choice depends on the context. Each word, then, is like a prism whose shape allows the refraction of many colors. The color or colors you see will change, depending on your position and the position, angle, and source of the light interacting with the prism.

If words are by themselves this polyvalent, one can imagine that the potential for meaning will increase exponentially as we collect words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into entire texts. The boundaries of choice widen even further in poetic texts, where an author intends that his or her words accommodate a high degree of symbolic elasticity. The language of apocalyptic, John’s language in Revelation, is consciously poetic. Symbolic to the core, it invites choice at almost every linguistic turn.² The cultural space one occupies will therefore be a critical factor in determining how and what that language means.

No doubt this is why interpreters of historical critical persuasion have routinely anchored their interpretations of the Apocalypse in the presumed first-century cultural context of John and his first hearers/readers. The presumption is clear; John’s writing context will clarify John’s writing intent.

There are two problems. First, scholars don’t discover John’s culture. They reconstruct it. That reconstruction operates from historical and literary clues. John has embedded some of the most important of those clues in his writing. For example, he locates his churches in Asia Minor at a time when believers in the lordship of Jesus Christ were subject to varying forms of social and political hostility from those who represented the power, lordship, and influence of Rome. Such clues, however, are suggestive, not determinative. It is no wonder then that there has been considerable debate over John’s actual historical circumstance. Was there a widespread pogrom against Christians, or was the hostility, while often deadly, sporadic and specifically targeted? Was Domitian the emperor of record? Or was John’s Babylonian beast steered by some other shepherd? When even answers to such elementary questions are open to debate, it is clear that while the historical and literary clues offer meaning potential, they do not provide meaning, in the form of objective, historical fact. Historians and exegetes use that potential in their reconstructive efforts. They access that potential through the lens of their own historical, social, political, and religious cultural contexts. The end result? The context into which researchers situate and thereby shape their interpretation of John’s Revelation is rigged as much by the presumptions of their own cultural locations as by any alleged historical facts.

The second problem derives from the first. Historical critical researchers presumed that the past meaning they divined from a careful consideration of John’s Revelation in light of John’s historical context would be the one objective meaning that was stable and therefore meaningful for every reader in every place and time. Ironically, this quest for the past meaning obscured the fact that different interpreters from different contemporary contexts were reading the literary and contextual signals differently. Even when historical critical interpreters were fortunate enough to come to some consensus about John’s historical context, they still found different and often opposing objective meanings.³ Why? Culture. Not John’s culture. The Johannine interpreter’s culture.

Culture reveals. Revelation seen (the Revelation we see) is always Revelation read (the Revelation we read) through a particular cultural lens. It is therefore the Revelation of and for a particular, present culture. If that is indeed the case, if—whether we want it to or not—culture plays a key role in the revelatory process, why not do a cultural studies reading of Revelation? Instead of clinging to a fruitless search for a universal, objective interpretation whose one counsel pretends to fit everyone in every conceivable context, why not deploy a cultural studies model that can clarify Revelation’s meaning for us and reveal the kind of apocalyptic discipleship God expects from us?⁴

No matter what investigative methods are deployed, in the end a clear Revelation is always our Revelation. When we try to make someone else’s Revelation our Revelation, that effort obscures and mystifies; it speaks to and for their culture, not ours. No wonder, then, that it so often ends up sounding like so much mythological mumbo jumbo. This is precisely why any critical attempt to locate the Apocalypse in its first-century context and then to divine the universal, objective meaning for the book out of that context is an abortive enterprise from the start. Even if an interpreter is so fortunate as to reconstruct John’s first-century context with sharp historical accuracy, and is subsequently skilled enough to use some methodological apparatus to inoculate himself from his own cultural predispositions and influences, his objective, accurate reading of Revelation will still be obscure. It would not make sense to a twenty-first-century reader precisely because its sense would be permanently lodged in the cultural confines of the last decade of the first century (or whatever decade that proficient interpreter finally determined was the work’s accurate date). That fortunate interpreter would find himself in possession of an interpretive fossil from some dead community in the past, not an instructive meaning for some particular living community in the present.

But that is, dare I say it, good news. A cultural studies approach to Revelation clarifies what is otherwise obscure and makes what is otherwise incomprehensible meaningful because it operates with a conscious degree of particularity. Culture reveals, specifically. A cultural reading reveals the meaning of Revelation for those who share its contextual dynamics. In other words, a cultural reading reveals what Revelation means for us. That does not mean that readers in other cultural contexts cannot find our conclusions helpful. A cultural reading of the Apocalypse not only brings new light to our understanding of Revelation; it does so in a way that appreciates how communal groups different from our own will draw their own culturally derived meaning conclusions. It subsequently fosters communication between us and them.

Readers learn more about Revelation when they listen to what people from other cultures have to say about the way Revelation reveals itself through the lens of their cultural encounter with it. This is the paradox: Global comprehension of the book occurs only when readers surrender the quixotic quest for the one objective meaning that overrides all cultural limitations. Instead of immediately rejecting another culture’s reading of the book as a corrupted, self-interested, and therefore biased eisegesis, the cultural reader recognizes that the only way to expand meaning is to value the fact that readers in different cultures will access meaning potential in ways that, while different, may well be no less worthy, no less meaningful.

This is how culture reveals. It is also why I want to pursue a cultural studies reading of Revelation. Given what I have just said, I obviously cannot do that by myself. I can only participate in what is by definition a joint process. I can start by reading Revelation from my own cultural location, allowing it in the process to clarify God’s apocalyptic intent for my discipleship and the discipleship of those located with me. That meaning I will subsequently share with cultural Others. My research, then, does not intend to deliver the interpretive answer about the discipleship meaning of Revelation; it expects instead to initiate and benefit from an intercultural conversation. I therefore propose to use the cultural studies model to study the meaning of discipleship in Revelation through the lens of African American culture. I intend to offer that reading as another point of access to the meaning potential of Revelation. Before I can begin to do that, however, I must first define cultural studies, demonstrate its promise, and then share how it has already begun the conversational process of clarifying what has otherwise seemed quite obscure.

Cultural Studies: A Definition

The problem with defining cultural studies is that it resists definition. Its articulation as a plural noun is no mistake; it is not a single entity. In an academic world that rewards the meticulous scholar who works within the disciplined confines of a uniform analytical approach and punishes the one who does not, this poses a problem. John Storey is blunt: “The problem is this: cultural studies has never had one distinct method of approach to its object of study.”⁵ “I want to insist on that!” Stuart Hall agrees. “[Cultural studies] had many trajectories; many people had and have different trajectories through it; it was constructed by a number of different methodologies and theoretical positions, all of them in contention.”⁶ Is the approach as disheveled as it sounds? Angela McRobbie not only thinks so; she appears to wallow exuberantly in the resulting mire. “Because, in my view, cultural studies was always messy. Characterized by intense internal theoretical conflict, it was also a messy amalgam of sociology, social history, and literature, rewritten as it were into the language of contemporary culture.”⁷ She goes on to say that cultural studies has been and should always be “a contested terrain of study. Not only contested but also resistant to disciplinary purity.”⁸ Why? Because there is a certain interpretive magic that happens as a result of methodological diversity. Freed from arbitrary methodological constraints, an interpreter has the freedom to match subjects of study with the methods of inquiry that fit them best. That interpreter also has the dexterity to make a methodological shift the moment a subject area declares itself resistant to whatever analytical approach is already underway. In this way, “Cultural Studies draws from whatever fields are necessary to produce the knowledge required for a particular project.”⁹

The approach’s ability to bridge the gulfs that divide interpretive communities is equally significant. Academic methodologies are themselves invested with the ideological interests of the academic communities that create and champion them. The selection of a particular methodology is therefore as much a political choice as it is an investigative one. By refusing to signal sole allegiance to any single approach, while simultaneously seeking the capabilities of every applicable one, cultural studies not only allows for the mixing of multiple ideological agendas in the interpretive process; it invites them. As Cary Nelson, Lawrence Grossberg, and Paula Treichler put it, “cultural studies holds special intellectual promise because it explicitly attempts to cut across diverse social and political interests.”¹⁰

Multiform as it is, cultural studies maintains certain constants, traits and tendencies shared by its practitioners, that enable its identification as a single, if also dynamic, field. The first such shared trait is its very definition of the concept “culture.” Raymond Williams, one of the early high priests of cultural studies, defined culture anthropologically, as “a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group.”¹¹ Succeeding scholars have been more sp...