Hearing John's Voice

Insights for Teaching and Preaching

M. Eugene Boring

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780802875464
• eBook ISBN:
  9781467456371
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

This book is written in the conviction that the church is called into being and nourished by the Word of God that comes through Scripture. But how can Scripture offer any specific guidance for hearers lives today? What are modern readers to make of the dragons and slaughtered lambs in the book of Revelation? What are we to make of a man who turns water into wine while comparing himself to bread? Can people today know what the Bible says and means? 

The world of the Bible is strange and distant, not only in time and space but also in language, culture, and in its basic assumptions about reality. The first task in both pulpit and pew is not to be in too great a hurry to overcome this distance, but to acknowledge it and respect it. Communication across the gap is the task of the church's preachers and teachers. 

Drawing on his years of teaching and study, Gene Boring offers a way of opening the ears of those who take the message of the Bible seriously, a message from a world different from our own. Beginning with Revelation, Gene provides a historically informed and pastorally sensitive reading of the various Johannine voices in the New Testament for contemporary preachers and teachers.

Chapter 1

Beginning at the End

Some of us preachers and teachers in the church might suppose that those who hear us on Sunday mornings, or even we ourselves, don’t have conversations about the “meaning of life,” “what it’s all about,” “where it’s all going,” and all that. And why should we? Why not just live in the now, enjoying the trip? Or is such talk dangerous self-deception?

Human beings seem to be hardwired to ask ultimate questions, aware that we live from the future. We don’t need a biblical revelation to know that our life always stretches out ahead of us. Not only biblical prophets and sages but also personal experience, psychologists, and social scientists insist that life as such always resides on the moving line between memory and hope. Whoever has no memory has no identity; whoever has “nothing to look forward to” has no present either. To be given a future is to be given a present. We always live prospectively but interpret retrospectively, seeing the significance of the present only in the later light of the end. But how can anyone know where the road is going?

God the creator “has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

—Ecclesiastes 3:11 NRSV

“In order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going.”

—Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self:
The Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 47

One of the embarrassing things about being a human being is that—despite our self-centered desire or claim to be in control—getting a glimpse of “what my life is all about” requires our seeing it in its context on the road we travel with all other human beings, and also requires some idea of where the road is finally going. But only God sees the whole picture, the end from the beginning. God is the one who says,

I am God, and there is no other;

I am God, and there is no one like me,

declaring the end from the beginning

and from ancient times things not yet done,

saying, “My purpose shall stand,

and I will fulfill my intention.” (Isa 46:9–10)¹

Seeing the future requires a revelation from God. We are speaking, of course, not of the particulars of the historical future, as “foretold” by fortune-tellers and “interpreters of biblical prophecy,” but of the Ultimate Future. Where is everything going?

The issue turns out to be: Has there been a revelation, or are we on our own?

The Christian faith, as confessed by the church through the centuries and around the world and as documented in the New Testament from its first book to its last, claims that our understanding of who we are, where we are going, the meaning of our fleeting lives, and the meaning of the road itself is not something some of us may have figured out but is something that has been revealed. For Christian faith, God’s definitive revelation is in Jesus Christ. This is not something we have worked out on our own, as though we observed what Jesus said and did and decided, on the basis of sound common sense, that he must be a revelation from God. Some examples:

• Matthew 16:15–17: “He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed (apokalyptō) this to you, but my Father in heaven.’ ” Other people, many of them sincere seekers, looked Jesus over, checked him out by their criteria, decided he was a threat to law and order and to sound religion, and took the appropriate action.
• Matthew 11:25–27: “At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed (apokalyptō) them to little children (NIV; NAB “childlike,” CEV “ordinary people”). . . . All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal (apokalyptō) him.’ ”
• Romans 16:25–26: “Now to God who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation (apokalypsis) of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed, and through the prophetic writings made known to [us] . . .”
• 1 Corinthians 2:9–10: “But, as it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, / nor the human heart conceived, / what God has prepared for those who love him’—these things God has revealed (apokalyptō) to us through the Spirit.”
• Galatians 1:11–12: “For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation (apokalypsis) of Jesus Christ.”

Beginning with Revelation

The New Testament book with the most explicit claim to be a revelation from God has the word “revelation” (apocalypse) as its first word. Every New Testament book makes this claim implicitly, but it is unavoidable in Revelation, uncomfortably so. We preachers and teachers of the church might thus begin our soundings into biblical theology with the last book of the Christian Bible. This is not necessarily because we will be preaching a lot of sermons from this strange book, nor because we must affirm its apocalyptic worldview as our own. It is because we must understand biblical texts in their own terms—coming within hearing distance—before we interpret them and integrate their message into our own theology. We begin with Revelation because it presents us with a number of crucial issues that face us throughout the New Testament. In other biblical books we may sometimes be unaware of them or able to avoid them, but if we seriously try to understand Revelation (as opposed to merely using the text for our own agenda), we face unavoidable hermeneutical problems. Other New Testament apocalyptic thinkers such as Matthew and Paul are also hard to interpret, but in them we might suppose that we can find texts more congenial to our purposes: in Matthew the Sermon on the Mount, in Paul 1 Corinthians 13 (rarely noticing that both are built on an apocalyptic foundation). It is obvious that to understand Revelation we must understand apocalyptic. This is true of the New Testament as a whole. In this regard, the difference between Revelation and other New Testament documents is in degree, not in kind. Again, a few examples:

• In Matthew 19:28, Luke 22:30, and 1 Corinthians 6:2, the Jesus of Matthew and Luke—as well as Paul—utilizes the imagery of Christians and their leaders participating in the final judgment involving rebellious humans and angels. Revelation gives expansive elaboration of this imagery that is already found in Paul and the Gospels.
• The powerfully weird imagery of Revelation 12–13, in which the dragon gives the beast from the sea its power (13:2, 4), is only an elaboration of the imagery presupposed in Luke 4:6, where it is Satan who gives the empire its power.
• In Luke 10:18, Jesus sees Satan fall from heaven, and John 12:31–32 pictures the demonic ruler of the world cast out when Jesus is lifted up on the cross.
• In Luke 12:5, Jesus speaks: “But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!”
• In Galatians 4:26, Paul refers in passing to “the Jerusalem above”; that is, he presupposes and only alludes to what Revelation elaborates.
• Paul describes the church as the fiancée of Christ (2 Cor 11:2), but the bride of Christ in Revelation expands and repeatedly elaborates the image.
• Paul promises that God will shortly crush Satan under the believers’ feet (Rom 16:20; cf. 16:25) but does not expand the image; Revelation fills in the picture already present in Romans.
• In 1 Thessalonians 3:13, Jesus returns at the end of history with all his holy ones, a climactic concluding image elaborated in Revelation.
• The imagery and vocabulary of the “wrath (orgē) of God,” portrayed with frightening or repugnant intensity in Revelation, are common to New Testament theology. The Greek word orgē is found thirty-six times in the New Testament, mostly referencing the wrath of God or Jesus (e.g., Matt 3:7; Mark 3:5; Luke 21:23; John 3:36; Rom 1:18; 2:5, 8; 1 Thess 1:10; Heb 3:11).

We cannot escape apocalyptic by fleeing to Jesus or Paul. In the Gospels and Paul’s letters, such images can be passed over as incidental (though they are fundamental), but not in Revelation. If our preaching or teaching is based on texts we choose ourselves, in most New Testament books we can simply avoid those that seem too apocalyptic. If we preach from the lectionary, there will usually be something in one of the texts that strikes a responsive chord in our own agenda, something we can handle without getting involved in apocalyptic imagery and worldview. In Revelation, our self-constructed little world comes to an end, and there is no place to hide (Rev 6:12–17). Revelation is a whole lot of what all the New Testament is some of. To learn to hear the Christian gospel in its original apocalyptic context is to open up much else in the New Testament to more authentic interpretation. Come clean with Revelation, and we become more honest and capable interpreters of the rest of the New Testament, which will have a better chance of making its own message heard in our preaching and teaching.

Here we mention a few key topics, each explored in the following chapters and subsequent volumes in this series in ways more appropriate to each author’s own mode of communicating the faith.

Christology

The Messiah comes at the end. The world is in a mess, always has been, but the world is a story, and the story is not over. Jewish Scriptures and theology looked toward the future, the promise of God to make everything right at the end. The fundamental Christian confession is that the Christ has come, and he is the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. This confession, whether or not dulled by familiarity, is strange: it involves the anointing (pouring olive oil on the head) of someone who, it is claimed, is prophet, priest, and king. Prophets do not announce their considered opinions but the Word of God; priests offer sacrifice, atone for sin, intercede for sinners; kings have absolute authority and call for obedience, take responsibility for justice and salvation, and make the laws, which they interpret and enforce. Faith in Jesus as the Messiah is inseparable from eschatology. We democratic moderns don’t like any of this. Some thoughtful Jews and Christians regard eschatology, especially its apocalyptic version, as either wishful thinking or nonthinking.

Revelation presents Jesus as the truly human one, who has already lived and died (been killed) on this earth. Hardly anything of the earthly life of Jesus is narrated in Revelation, but Jesus is proclaimed as the one who is united with us in the most human of all acts. He dies. Yet this human one, who stood before the Roman power and was faithful unto death, is not presented merely as a past hero to be remembered, whose ideals are to be followed by those who choose to take up his cause. He is the truly divine One who was present at the creation, who has been exalted to the transcendent world and shares the throne of God, and who continues to speak, to call the church into being through the Word of God, to call for faithfulness even to death. He is the one we will meet at the end of our own lives, and at the end of history. He is the one who not only came to earth; he is the one who is coming again.

Apocalypse

All that Revelation has to say is expressed in the imagery and thought world of apocalyptic (including the messages to the seven churches in chapters 2–3, sometimes thought to be less apocalyptic and more preachable). To understand Revelation, we must understand apocalyptic thought, with its bizarre imagery and the-end-is-coming-soon conviction. The early church, and the New Testament as a whole, grew out of a historical context permeated with apocalyptic thought, which it partially adopted, partially adapted and modified, partially rejected, but could not and did not ignore. This means that not only Revelation but also the New Testament in general will not be understood in its own terms unless heard as responding, in one way or another, to this apocalyptic thought world. In other New Testament books, it is possible to find “preaching values” and “lessons for today” without coming to terms with an apocalyptic worldview so different from our own, and to regard Revelation’s apocalypticism as marginal and dispensable. Actually, however, John’s fundamental worldview is more like than unlike the rest of the New Testament. Though it remains a disputed point among exegetes and historians, the view that apocalyptic is central to understanding the New Testament is by far the majority view of international New Testament scholarship. Whatever views Jesus himself may have held, whoever wants to understand the New Testament must be familiar with apocalyptic.

Violence, Power, and Judgment

Apocalyptic is a powerful and disturbing literary and theological genre. To read or hear an apocalyptic text such as Revelation all at once, to take its images, sounds, and smells seriously, is to be shaken, perhaps repulsed or even disgusted, by its intense, unrelenting violence. One wonders if this can be the same merciful God of Hosea, the same compassionate Christ of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. Although Hosea and Matthew have pictures of divine violence (e.g., Hos 5:8–14; Matt 24:37–50), in their books we can find a lot of other material more unproblematically preachable, providing more wiggle room for our personal preferences and homiletical imaginations. Not so in Revelation. But learn to deal honestly with Revelation, and we become more authentic interpreters of Hosea and Matthew.

Ecclesiology, Jews, and Christians

Again, the questions of the relation of the followers of Jesus to Judaism, then and now, are found throughout the New Testament. The church is pictured as the continuation of Israel, sometimes in ways that can be understood as claiming that the church is the new Israel, perhaps even Israel’s replacement. Harsh things are sometimes said about the Jews. This issue is intensified in Revelation, where Jews are called the “synagogue of Satan” and Christians are promised that someday Jews will come and grovel at Christian feet (Rev 2:9; 3:9). How should followers of Jesus today, New Testament in hand, understand the church? Can one love Jesus the Jew and disdain the church, which supposedly misunderstood and domesticated him? In Revelation, the church’s identity and self-understanding, and its relation to Jesus, Israel, and Judaism, are front and center. Revelation cannot be understood without grasping its ecclesiology. But this is true of the New Testament as a whole. Deal with it here, and countless New Testament texts appear in a new and more authentic light.

Strange New World within the Bible

To read the book of Revelation—better, to hear it read in toto by a good reader in a service of Christian worship—is to enter a new world. This is true of narratives in general, of course, and powerfully true of the Bible narrative as a whole, but it is inescapably, overwhelmingly, even painfully true in reading Revelation. The risen Christ appears, eyes of fiery flame, with trumpet voice like mighty waves crashing against the shore, holding seven stars in his right hand. A throne in the heavenly sky appears, the Almighty seated on the throne, the heavenly court—zoological and humanoid—singing eternal praise. A slaughtered Lamb receives a sealed book, opens it, and great terrors strike not only the earth with its fish, animals, and humans, good and evil alike, but also the solar system, the planets, and the stars. Seven-headed beasts emerge, who demand the worship that is due only to the Lord God Almighty. Those who resist are beheaded; their death is called their “conquering.” A beautifully seductive whore rides one of the beasts, but she is destroyed, as are the beasts and Satan who empowers them. The world is redeemed, the heavenly city New Jerusalem descends to earth, all God’s people celebrate the ultimate happy ending.

A summary paragraph in no way can replace the experience of reading or hearing Revelation, but the point is made: here we are confronted with a new world, not just some weird things that intrude into our ordinary world but leave it intact. That, we can handle. Nor is it the fantasy world of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth or the pungently entertaining science fiction of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That, too, we can handle. The strange new world within Revelation is not merely a matter of red dragons and fiery pits but turns our everyday world, which we assume to be the real world, upside down (Acts 17:6)—the world of which we are the center, the world in which our values are supreme and the meaning of life is centered in our will being done on earth, with the assumption that heaven agrees and supports our “values.”

Revelation claims to reveal how the world, the real world, ultimately is—albeit through the medium of bizarre apocalyptic imagery (on which more below). Here is a world created and ruled by...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Thomas G. Long
• Preface
• Prologue
• 1. Beginning at the End
• 2. The Revelation of Jesus Christ and the One True God
• 3. Tensions and Conflicts in the Beloved Community: The Johannine Letters
• 4. Retelling the Jesus Christ Story: Soundings in the Theology of the Gospel of John
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources