Worlds at War, Nations in Song

Dialogic Imagination and Moral Vision in the Hymns of the Book of Revelation

Haloviak Valentine

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498204897
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Rather than representing the book of Revelation as a single "apocalyptic" genre, Kendra Haloviak Valentine demonstrates that the work in fact reflects several genres--apocalyptic, prophetic and liturgical--within the overall framework of an epistle. This study focuses on the sixteen hymns, a largely neglected part of the literary construction of the work. Responding to the insight of Mikhail Bakhtin that literary genres carry ways of thinking about the world, this important study calls attention to the multiple voices within the text that need to be heard--voices that soften the book's transcendent, future focus so that it is not allowed complete dominance. Hymns, as the sites of colliding and collaborating genres, engage the reader. Worlds at War, Nations in Song explores the role of these liturgical elements within the moral enterprise to suggest that the book of Revelation provides readers with a moral vision linking the future with the present. Readers are called to respond in worship and witness. By calling attention to the multiple voices within Revelation, Haloviak Valentine demonstrates the invalidity of seeking "one" correct interpretation. Recognizing this dialogic approach may help prevent the misinterpretations that led to such tragedies as Waco and Jonestown.

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Introduction

Reading the Book of Revelation after Waco

Worlds at War

During the Spring of 1993 as I was gathering the necessary materials for applying to graduate schools, a tragedy took place in the United States which deepened my desire to do interdisciplinary work in New Testament studies and ethics. The tragedy took place on April 19, 1993, in Waco, Texas. After the flames engulfing the Branch Davidian compound, Mount Carmel, ceased, seventy-four people, including twenty-one children, were dead. Along with hundreds of thousands of television viewers, I watched the inferno as I had watched the preceding standoff between government agents and the Branch Davidians.1 After fifty-one days the war between two very different worlds was over.

Relatives of people living in the compound, members who left prior to the standoff and survivors of the fire have provided information about life inside Mount Carmel.2 The world has gradually learned about the convictions of the people living there and about the community’s leader, Vernon Howell, who had changed his name to David Koresh. A thirty-three-year-old former member of the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church, Koresh aggressively recruited people (mostly from SDA churches in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia) to join Mount Carmel, which Koresh referred to as “Ranch Apocalypse.” Life in the compound meant delegated jobs for the group’s daily living, Bible study, and worship experiences. During the final years of Mount Carmel, Koresh’s role included that of community leader and “husband” of all women (some as young as twelve years of age) on the compound, worship and rock band leader, spiritual guide, and interpreter of Scripture. Koresh took it upon himself to provide the community with a single and final interpretation of prophetic portions of the Old and New Testaments. Conversations that questioned Koresh’s biblical interpretations or leadership decisions were rarely tolerated.3 For members of the community, Koresh’s voice was the only authoritative voice. No matter how complex the biblical text to be studied, Koresh explicated his one and only interpretation. After sharing such finalized meanings with the community, Koresh expected his word on God’s Word to end all questions.

Mount Carmel, Seventh-day Adventism, and the Search for Monologic Truth

For the Seventh-day Adventist denomination, my own faith community, the standoff in Waco, Texas, between government agencies and the people of Mount Carmel was a public relations nightmare. The first news reports identified Koresh’s community as an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, a protestant denomination with almost eight million members worldwide.4 The denomination’s world headquarters (located in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC) immediately sent representatives to Waco to inform reporters that the denomination was in no way connected with, or sympathetic to, the behavior of Koresh and his followers. The stockpiling of weapons on the compound was foreign to the traditional stance by Seventh-day Adventists as noncombatants in United States military actions.5 Like the rest of the country, Seventh-day Adventists were appalled at the allegations of child abuse and the reported sexual practices at Mount Carmel. Koresh certainly could not be an Adventist, for he did not act like one.

Ignoring, for the most part, Koresh’s way of reading Scripture, SDA leaders and laity renounced his ethics, proclaiming Seventh-day Adventism’s location within mainstream Christianity. Although some would later argue that Koresh held much in common with traditional SDA approaches to apocalyptic texts,6 by then the whole embarrassment would be over. Tragically, by then, the lives of seventy-four people would also be over. Few Seventh-day Adventist publications analyzed or even acknowledged the high percentage of former SDAs among Koresh’s recruits.7 By emphasizing the stark differences in social ethics between Mount Carmel and Seventh-day Adventism, SDAs were able to maintain theological distance from the people of Waco. This distance would have been significantly reduced had Adventists known (or, in some cases, acknowledged) the religious backgrounds of Koresh’s followers.

Although Koresh’s moral behavior was clearly out of harmony with SDA practices, his approach to Scripture, especially to the book of Revelation, was familiar to the people who joined Mount Carmel, the vast majority of whom were former SDAs.8 As one Seventh-day Adventist theologian says of his initial reaction to the news of David Koresh: “I heard about a man who had Revelation solved. . . . The man, and most of his followers, had once belonged to Adventist churches. Many in these churches thought—think!—that we have Revelation solved.”9 Not only does this attitude reflect an elitism that places the community (whether Mount Carmel or Adventism) above others, it assumes a view of the book of Revelation as a puzzle to be solved or a code to be broken. Another SDA theologian describes the dangerous effects of approaching the imaginative language of Revelation using a “wooden literalism” that proposes to solve the book.10 Koresh assumed that each scriptural symbol or image could be decoded by making reference to other biblical texts.11 Once the passage under consideration was definitively interpreted for his audience, Koresh moved the group on to the next biblical phrase or symbol or image. In such an approach, the decoded final words of the book of Revelation conclude the process of interpretation and, presumably, the book’s message. Koresh not only had ethical problems, he had hermeneutical problems. And, sadly, such an approach to interpretation is currently shared by many Seventh-day Adventists who, in their eagerness to make sense of the challenging passages of the book of Revelation, consider the book a code that anticipates a single, consistent, and final meaning.12 Such readers search for the message of Revelation, a monologic truth in code, by uncovering it bit by bit.

Monologic truth is an idea which proposes to be expressed and comprehended by a single consciousness. Many who seek monologic truth assume that meaning is best articulated as a proposition separate from any specific context and thus made universally relevant. Such an approach assumes that meaning can be stabilized, and therefore closed.13 Koresh approached the book of Revelation assuming and finding such monologic truth.

In conversations with many SDAs after the tragedy at Waco, I heard frequent criticisms of Koresh’s particular interpretation, but rarely a challenge to his approach to interpretation as a process of decoding texts. One prominent Seventh-day Adventist theologian, William Shea, wrote that the key theological difference between the traditional SDA interpretation of Revelation and that of Koresh was Koresh’s futurist emphasis. According to Shea, Koresh placed Revelation’s judgment scenes in the imminent future, while SDAs understand the judgment sequences as reflecting various eras in (primarily past) human history. Shea states: “He [Koresh] said that he and he alone knew what the seven seals mean. . . . They lie in the immediate future and are of catastrophic magnitude for the inhabitants of the earth. . . . Seventh-day Adventists have also said that they know what the seals represent, but they have put them back in past history.”14 For many, such a “distinction” actually suggests methodological affinity.

Of course, Koresh had an ethics problem. And, of course, his method of teaching, of not allowing other people to speak, should have been suspect by his followers. However, his approach reflected his understanding of truth as an abstract and finalized proposition expressed by a single voice. Koresh could hold thoughtful people captive, both for hours in Bible study and literally inside a surrounded compound, in part because most of them had grown up hearing similar approaches to the book of Revelation by probably less charismatic and able Bible teachers.15 While the events surrounding the tragedy at Waco emit complexity, Koresh’s approach to the book of Revelation is important for this study. His approach exposes some of the limitations and dangers of reading monologically. This present book ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Hymns to an Immanent Creator and a Transcendent Lamb
• Chapter 3: Hymns Celebrating the Presence of the Future
• Chapter 4: Hymns Responding in Worship and Witness
• Chapter 5: The New Testament Psalter
• Bibliography