I have often thought that the Book of Revelation should be banned. It is, I know, a shocking thing to want as no book of the Bible should be banned, and John's Revelation stands out insofar as it contains an exclusive blessing to those who come to understand its great mystery.
My conviction does not come from the Book itself, but from the litany of failed prophecies that have been propagated by a parade of false prophets engaged in doomsday theatrics, who, as far as I can tell, are almost always American. Instead of approaching the Book of Revelation with the humility such a text requires, these end times charlatans, with no sense of moral or intellectual clarity, do nothing more than exploit the fears and desires of believers as they proclaim one false teaching after another from the pulpits of an end times industry they have erected. While it would perhaps be unfair to blame Americans for this monstrosity of biblical hermeneutics, it remains true, to me at least, that this industry has taken on a distinctive American flavor. I suspect that this has probably been the case because of America’s pre-eminence in global affairs of late, coupled with the particularly assertive and religious nature of American patriotism and its historical grounding in that unique American sense of manifest destiny. While appealing to a particular brand of American Christian nationalism, this type of patriotism has nevertheless left many Americans incapable of appreciating that there are other countries besides America and the countries America decides to bomb into freedom.
To provide some clarity as to what I mean, I am not suggesting that the Book of Revelation should be burnt in the streets nor am I advocating that it be banned to everyone, except maybe Americans. Instead, I suggest it should be banned to those who do not yet have the requisite knowledge that understanding such a text requires. An appropriate level of knowledge in this regard would include a proper knowledge of the Old Testament and the Mosaic Law, the political and social context within which the Revelation was written, and the literary tradition from which this text is associated with. That this would inevitably result in nearly everyone being banned from reading the final chapter in the Bible speaks to the great complexity, depth and mystery of this book than it does to any fault in the believer, except probably Americans whose education system has clearly failed them.
I have come to this decision over time, but the virtue of this radical proposition became especially clear during the Covid lockdown years. It was in those dark times that the true destructiveness of the End Times industry and its false prophets and orators of nonsense became evident. When people were faced with harrowing decisions regarding their jobs and livelihoods and struggling with the isolation that governments forced upon us – with some even succumbing to suicide – that there were believers who thought that the only course of responsible action was to shout, ‘vaccine bad’ and ‘mark of the beast’ was clear proof that access to the Book of Revelation should be severely restricted. It was true then, and remains true now, that the non-believer who checked on the welfare of their neighbour, who snuck a visit to someone struggling with the cruelty of mandated isolation, did so much more for the Kingdom of God than did the believer who incessantly yelled at everyone about shredding and DNA changing microchips.
It is of course perhaps necessary to provide some theological basis for my proposition beyond just lambasting another terrible American export. Theologically then, the problem as I see it is not just that the Book of Revelation and a focus on the end times makes believers say and do at times profoundly misguided things, it is that such a focus orientates one's faith that is in contradiction to the spirit of the Torah and the teachings of Jesus. It is taught throughout the Bible that our mission has always been the sanctification of earth – that is, to build the Garden of Eden here on God’s green planet. Those who have made "the End Times" the centre of their faith have vacated this God given mandated mission. While these types of believers would no doubt disagree, convinced as they are that they are at the forefront of Biblical wisdom, there type of faith permeates with a fatalism that is marked by a timidity that lacks conviction and a defensive, reactionary stance. Perhaps the greatest evidence of this is that those whose faith has descended into an obsessive focus on when everything will end and the forces that will bring about this end, inevitably obsess over predicting when Jesus will return and sort everything out. It is of course true that only the Prince of Peace can bring us the final peace, but nevertheless, such is their intense focus on the evils of the world that they become incapable of being the light we are commanded to be. Instead, these believers retreat behind walls where they take solace in a false sense of purpose and action as they preach what is mostly a false truth, instead of living the truth and seeing tribulations and travails as rallying cries to serve our brothers and sisters as Jesus did. It is no wonder they do this, one cannot live the truth when one’s truth is Illuminati bad and Rapture tomorrow.
As far as I can tell, the only appropriate way then to address these issues is to ban the reading of the Book of Revelation except for the truly enlightened amongst us. There is a precedent for this. In Judaism, it is said that one cannot begin to study the Zohar until one has studied the Torah for at least forty years, and this is something I believe people who believe in the Bible should adopt when approaching the Book of Revelation, though I would add another ten years or so for Americans just to be sure. Of course, for those believers whose faith exists purely on the precipice of the apocalypse, this is not something I imagine they will ascent to. Nevertheless, the implementation of this rule would ensure that believers would be protected from the influence of false prophets, the believers who commit themselves to fantastical feats of intellectual acrobatics to justify the errors of false prophets and Americans who believe John was writing about their own country because they do not understand that there are other countries beyond America and the resource rich countries that have a habit of requiring American bombs for democracy.
It is my hope that now that Donald Trump has won the election Americans may be contented somewhat that the end has been delayed by there elected Messiah, though I am not confident of this and suspect the continual end times dribble will carry on. It remains one of the great mysteries of our faith that the Book of Revelation has retained such a strong influence over believers despite how many times it has been abused and exploited. Any other book would have no doubt been tossed aside as the nuisance it is, yet John’s letter has stubbornly retained its influence in the Christian imagination and Western thought. So powerful an impact has Revelation had on the Christian mind that the Chinese Communist Party thought it necessary to devise its own account because of the threat to earthly power this letter posed.
Whilst we have come to accept that Revelation was written to future believers, not just Americans, to identify the end of times, John’s letter was, and is, so much more than just a symbolic eschatological compass for Americans to get all excited about. Of course, the tendency to read oneself or country or cause into the Book of Revelation has not been a unique American problem, many religious wars in Europe began with the belief that this pope or that king was an anti-Christ requiring destruction. The prophetic use of Revelation in this regard has always been socially and culturally mediated to reflect the anxieties and fears of the current time. In recent times we have been subject to teachings warning Christians that Barak Obama was the anti-Christ, and prior to that, when George Bush decided he would bomb the entire Middle east into oblivion and freedom, it was Muslims that many Christians wrote into Revelation. In both instances, these interpretations of Revelation were mediated through American (and Western) Christian anxieties, anxieties that have increasingly heightened throughout the Western world as our once Christian civilization has taken on a more aggressive secularism as Church pews have slowly emptied out.
This sense of apocalyptic anxiety that has ensured Revelation’s continued prominence in the Christian and Western mind was perhaps best captured by W.B Yeats. Many years ago, after World War 1 and with the onset of the flu pandemic that nearly took the life of his pregnant wife, he wrote the Second Coming. In full, it went;
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my might: somewhere in the sands of the desert.
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
When writing this poem it was reported that Yeats dedicated hundreds of sessions to perfecting the metaphors that best described the apocalyptic mood he hoped to express. It was a task at which he was well positioned to capture. The flu pandemic was spreading, the Bolsheviks were engaged in a fight to the death with Tsarist Russia, and in his homeland, the IRA were fighting the British in a War of Independence, all of which was occurring as Europe was still recovering from the industrial scale murder that was World War 1. As time would tell, it seemed he did his job well, as throughout history in times of crises, the Second Coming and its metaphors would emerge to give voice to a mood that only a poet it seemed could adequately express.
What perhaps gave this poem its most enduring quality was the unnamable beast, that manifestation of change lurking at the poems edge, leaving one to wonder at what new world would emerge from the distant horizon. It was fitting then that Yeats ended his poem in a question. Despite the poem’s Christian iconography, common throughout Yeats’ work, Yeats saw no Christian revelation at hand, he was a mystic versed in the occult and saw this beast as some post-Christian order. Despite whatever inclinations he may have had as to the identity of this beast, Yeats knew that the outcome of great change was always shrouded in uncertainty and so he could only marvel, and one detects with both longing and despair, at what metamorphosis the rough beast would go through once it reached its hallowed destination.
Yeat’s Second Coming best captured the sense of existential dread, the anxiety, that has always lurked in the shadows of our apocalyptic fears. And as has always occurred, the Christian mind has turned to Revelation to allay those anxieties and give hope that all will be as God wills. What has been so destructive has been the reduction of Revelation to a PowerPoint presentation outlining who or what is the Anti-Christ, or the Whore of Babylon and the toxic mix of John’s Revelatory language with conspiracy theories that have spread more for their psychological benefits than for the supposed truth they reveal.
I am not arguing that the Book of Revelation is not prophetic, much of the Bible is as Solomon alluded to when he taught that there is nothing new under the sun. The Book of Revelation is certainly an uncovering and a prophecy, but it is also so much more. At its most basic, John’s Revelation is an assault on the senses and an emotional roller-coaster. Unlike other accounts in the Bible, there is no omnipresent narrator, we experience the vision as John did and are given no clues as to the meaning of each vision and interaction. Like John, we are bombarded with these visions in an experience that demonstrates both heaven and earth as intimately connected players in a cosmic struggle. John’s great Revelation shows us that no matter who we are, we are all participants with God in a cosmic struggle against monsters, great powers and all sorts of evil.
In the end, perhaps the greatest irony is that the very book so many have misused to fuel fear and confusion was meant to encourage and strengthen believers in times of crisis, not paralyze so many into doomsday cultists. John's Revelation, with all its mystery and visions of cosmic battles, isn't a prescription or a mandate for apocalyptic voyeurism or to simply understand such things. Rather, John’s Revelation is a challenge—a call to confront the world’s darkness with courage and conviction, to build the "kingdom on earth as it is in heaven" rather than obsess over the sky splitting open any day now.
For all its visions of the world's end, Revelation ultimately directs believers toward living out their faith with steadfastness in the present moment, carrying light into a dark world that has always been full of monsters and dark forces, without fixating on the shadow of Armageddon. This is perhaps what Jesus meant when He said the Kingdom of God is near. We have been destined, from the beginning, to live in the shadow of the coming end, and John’s final letter to believers has been that ancient reminder that despite this shadow, this beast lurking on the horizon as Yates described it, believers have nevertheless been called to look past the chaos and take action in shinning God’s light on this great wonderful Earth we all call home.
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