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Book of Revelation is Vision of God's World, Bishop of London Tells Bowen Conference

Episcopal News Service. April 30, 2001 [2001-95]

Paul Ashdown, Professor of Journalism at the University of Tennessee

(ENS) The Book of Revelation has befuddled Christians for centuries because its vivid language and symbolic richness is intentionally disorienting, the 132nd bishop of London told some 140 participants at the annual Bowen Conference at Kanuga Conference Center in North Carolina.

"The difficulty of this book is part of the point," said the Rt. Rev. Richard J. C. Chartres, the keynote speaker at the March 19-22 conference. "Getting irritable because it is not possible to understand it absolutely and tie it up is exactly missing the point."

Revelation, he argued, is nothing less than a vision of the structure underlying the universe.

"There are constant doors opening in Revelation, doors to heaven, doors into the future. These symbols are presented in a way that is meant to reverberate, to lead us on, to take us to a different way of being aware, of thinking and perceiving in the world," he said.

We can, Chartres said, therefore be re-inspired by St. John's method, using the imagery of Revelation "to unlock the Deep Structure of enduring patterns of life."

Imagining the book

The theme of the conference was Christ in a New Millennium: Imagine the Book of Revelation with a Master Teacher. Kanuga has sponsored the Bowen Conference since 1989. Buford Bowen of Tryon, North Carolina, and Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, endowed the series of conferences to explore areas of Christian commitment.

Chartres' lectures were complemented by talks on the history and interpretation of the Book of Revelation by the Rev. Dr. A. Richard Smith, a Lutheran who teaches at the School of Theology of the University of the South, and meditations by the Rev. Canon John L. Peterson, secretary general of the Anglican Communion.

Those attending the conference participated in creative studios in writing, music, dance, and art during which they "imagined" the Book of Revelation. Their work was presented during a concluding Eucharist at the conference.

No manual of predictions

Chartres said interest in Revelation increases whenever people feel "time is running out." Such a time is again upon us, he suggested, both superficially in the aftermath of the Y2K fervor, and more significantly in the growing awareness of global problems that seem to be racing out of control.

Accordingly, Revelation is sometimes viewed as series of specific predictions about current events.

"Revelation is not a manual of precise predictions written hundreds of years removed from the events. It's not the prophecies of Nostradamus," the 16th-century French astrologer famous for his predictions of the future. "We have a way of getting mesmerized by the details and missing the big picture," Chartres said.

Chartres said the West was in the throes of a "great malady" in which "aspects of the culture frustrate us in communicating with God."

People in the West are often more in touch with their ideas about God than they are with God--and this is an error, he said, because "it's God who is the transformer, not our notions about God or our notions about the world." Rather, it is when we are in communication with God through Jesus Christ that transformation actually occurs.

Reading Revelation, then, can be rewarding to the extent that we actually engage scripture as a pathway to direct experience.

"There is positive value in approaching a text like this that is defamiliarizing, disorienting, as Jesus Christ in his teaching method was continually disorienting. It stirs you up," he said.

"My conviction is that there is the possibility of an openness of profound belief, an openness of profound conviction and communication when you do the work with your creative imagination working with the biblical story. I believe it illuminates the way Jesus Christ taught. The word of God did not dwell among us and become texts," he insisted, but the word was embodied in Jesus Christ.

A suspect book

Bishop Chartres explained that Revelation has always been a controversial book to the Church, especially in the East.

"Revelation has been a suspect book for good and bad reasons," the bishop said. "For good reasons because it has been the happy hunting ground of fanatics. And it's been a suspect book for bad reasons because the Church very early on gave up looking for a denouement, for transformation, in history and the Church became easy in the world and not willing to be disturbed."

The consequence, according to Chartres, was the "migration of hope" to politics and the acceptance of the Enlightenment project as a way of living in the world without God.

He discussed forms of structural sin and evil that are part of the human condition, pointing out that turning information into a commodity is a pressing problem.

"We're in a difficult situation because of how we communicate with one another," he said. News of the world reaches us through the distortions of media engaged in a fierce ratings war. This leads to the sale of information as a commodity at the extremes of actual experience, bringing about "a systematic distortion in the way we communicate over long distances, and this is very dangerous."

Inequitable distribution of resources throughout the world, and inadequate reporting about global problems, exacerbates problems and leads to a kind of structural sinfulness, the sense of which is at the heart of what John of Patmos is writing about.

The Book of Revelation reminds us that "this is God's world. There are consequences if you live in immoral ways," Bishop Chartres said.

Envisioning God's world

Quoting the Bishop of Rome, Bishop Chartres said we are called upon "to transform history," and not merely to accept patterns of human experience. Revelation stimulates and encourages us to be able to envision the world that God intends, and not merely to envision the world in terms of political solutions.

"Here in the present, we have a present of potentiality," he said. "What the faith community can do is enlarge the room for political maneuver. Our truth is for the public realm. We must live attentively to the needs of our neighbor. If we don't then consequences will follow."

Part of our current dilemma is that we are caught in "the acceleration trap," a speeding up of life in such a way that we are "not able to live with the givens of life."

In the acceleration trap, he said, "we have a vision of a civilization that has lost its Sabbath principle." Properly understood, the Sabbath is a sign of "enoughness," of sufficiency. By losing the Sabbath principle, we hasten "growth without limits, with no end to it."

Valuable signs

The present generation, however, has been granted two valuable signs that should alert us to alternative futures, he said. The image of the mushroom cloud, which has been with us since the end of the Second World War, is now juxtaposed with "the sapphire globe" seen from the reaches of outer space.

"The bomb is a vision of terror. One truth we've had to live with is that we can destroy all of human life on this planet in a way no previous generation has. The sapphire globe shows us we will live as one world or not at all. That's why the world needs Jesus Christ in the public realm," he said.

As John of Patmos addressed his present, we can address our own Present, Chartres said. While Revelation is not a book of timetables, the Second Coming of Christ is a vital element in scripture. "God wants transformation in the world until He gets here," he said.

There is "a future that is coming to meet us, the future God intends," he concluded. "The urgent message of Revelation is that our business is in solidarity with Christ to transform history. The vision is that the whole world is to be the dwelling place of God's glory."

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