Richard Bauckham > Quotes

“[Jesus'] resurrection is therefore God's promise of new creation for the whole of the godforsaken reality which the crucified Jesus represents. It is therefore an event of dialectical promise: it opens up a qualitatively new future, which negates all the negatives of present experience. It opens up a future which is not simply drawn out of the immanent possibilities of present reality, but radically contradicts present reality. It promises life for the dead, righteousness for the unrighteous, freedom for those in bondage.”
― Richard Bauckham, Theology of Jürgen Moltmann

“Testimony should be treated as reliable until proved otherwise. “First, trust the word of others, then doubt if there are good reasons for doing so.”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

“We can answer the question “Who is God?” only by attending to who God has revealed himself to be.”
― Richard Bauckham, Who Is God? (Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology): Key Moments of Biblical Revelation

“When the slaughtered Lamb is seen `in the midst of' the divine throne in heaven (5:6; cf. 7:17), the meaning is that Christ's sacrificial death belongs to the way God rules the world.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“But for neither Moses nor Elijah did the opposition lead to violent death. Moses died peacefully and honored at an advanced age. Elijah was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind. But for Jesus the bitter opposition he is to encounter will lead to his being put to death, as he has just recently tried to get across to Peter and the others. Paradoxically, being the beloved Son puts him in a special category that entails his violent death. God did not let Moses or Elijah suffer such a fate, but his unique and dearly beloved Son—him God will hand over to mocking, torture, and an abandoned death.”
― Richard Bauckham, Who Is God? (Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology): Key Moments of Biblical Revelation

“This means that “meeting the current toward elimination of names is the counter current of late development, which . . . gave to simplified matter the verisimilitude of proper names.”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

“But they are sufficiently few to make the reapplication of the images to comparable situations easy. Any society whom Babylon’s cap fits must wear it. Any society which absolutizes its own economic prosperity at the expense of others comes under Babylon’s condemnation.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Young scholars, learning their historical method from Gospel scholars, often treat it as self-evident that the more skeptical they are toward their sources, the more rigorous will be their historical method. It has to be said, over and over, that historical rigor does not consist in fundamental skepticism toward historical testimony but in fundamental trust along with testing by critical questioning…”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

“If Jacob is now to find himself apart from his family, if he is to find who he can be in this newly uncertain world in which he is alone, he must also now find God as his own God. Not that he thinks of this for himself. It is not Jacob who turns to God but God who turns to Jacob.”
― Richard Bauckham, Who Is God? (Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology): Key Moments of Biblical Revelation

“At the outset of Jesus’s ministry God tore apart the curtain of the heavens in order to come down and be present and active in Jesus. At Jesus’s death he tore apart the curtain in the temple in order to come out and be present and active through Jesus in the world at large.”
― Richard Bauckham, Who Is God? (Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology): Key Moments of Biblical Revelation

“the Bible contains the record of a dynamic, developing tradition of thought, and the aim of interpretation should be to let Scripture involve its reader in its own process of thought, so that the reader's own thinking may continue in the direction it sets”
― Richard Bauckham

“The profoundest points of New Testament Christology occur when the inclusion of the exalted Christ in the divine identity entails the inclusion of the crucified Christ in the divine identity, and when the christological pattern of humiliation and exaltation is recognized as revelatory of God, indeed as the definitive revelation of who God is.”
― Richard Bauckham, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament

“Thereafter, the enduring form of God’s presence with his people is as the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, present and active within believers.”
― Richard Bauckham, Who Is God? (Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology): Key Moments of Biblical Revelation

“However it—or the kind of extreme individualistic epistemology it embraces—can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly to those sources that were intended to recount and inform events of the past, that is, testimony in this restricted sense. Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything the sources claim be accepted only if historians can independently verify it…..”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

“The first is rarely noticed. John’s work is highly unusual in the sheer prolific extent of its visual imagery. It is true that symbolic visions are typical of the genre. But in other apocalypses other forms of revelation are often as important or more important.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The fact that John explicitly and carefully contextualizes his prophetic message in seven specific contexts makes it possible for us to resist a common generalization about Revelation: that it is a book written for the consolation and encouragement of Christians suffering persecution, in order to assure them that their oppressors will be judged and they will be vindicated in the end. The common, uncritical acceptance of this generalization probably has to do with the fact that it is a generalization often made about apocalyptic literature as a whole.10 We need not discuss here how far apocalyptic literature in general functions as consolation for the oppressed, because in the case of Revelation it is quite clear from the seven messages that encouragement in the face of oppression was only one of the needs of the seven churches. The messages show that John addresses a variety of situations which he perceives as very different. By no means all of his readers were poor and persecuted by an oppressive system: many were affluent and compromising with the oppressive system. The latter are offered not consolation and encouragement, but severe warnings and calls to repent. For these Christians, the judgments which are so vividly described in the rest of the book should appear not as judgments on their enemies so much as judgments they themselves were in danger of incurring, since worshipping the beast was not something only their pagan neighbours did. Worshipping the beast was something many of John’s Christian readers were tempted to do or were actually doing or even (if they listened, for example, to the prophet ‘Jezebel’ at Thyatira) justified. Whether the visions bring consolation and encouragement or warning and painful challenge depends on which of the groups of Christians depicted in the seven messages a reader belongs to. Moreover, as we shall see in chapter 4 of this book, the call to ‘conquer’ which is addressed to all the churches in the seven messages, transcends both consolation and warning. It calls Christians to a task of witnessing to God and his righteousness for which the consolations and warnings of the seven messages are designed to prepare them.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Perhaps enough has been said to indicate that the imagery of Revelation requires close and appropriate study if modern readers are to grasp much of its theological meaning. Misunderstandings of the nature of the imagery and the way it conveys meaning account for many misinterpretations of Revelation, even by careful and learned modern scholars.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The range of different situations in these seven churches is sufficient for any Christian church in the late first century to find analogies to its own situation in one or more of the messages and therefore to find the whole book relevant to itself. Churches in later periods have been able to do the same, allowing for a necessary degree of adjustment to changing historical contexts.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The Old Testament allusions frequently presuppose their Old Testament context and a range of connexions between Old Testament texts which are not made explicit but lie beneath the surface of the text of Revelation. If we wonder what the average Christian in the churches of Asia could make of this, we should remember that the strongly Jewish character of most of these churches made the Old Testament much more familiar than it is even to well-educated modern Christians. But we should also remember the circle of Christian prophets in the churches (cf. 22:9, 16) who would probably have studied, interpreted and expounded John’s prophecy with the same kind of learned attention they gave to the Old Testament prophecies.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Hence perhaps the most important contrast between the forces of evil and the army of the Lamb is the contrast between deceit and truth.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“His task is to proclaim the fulfilment of what God had revealed to the prophets of the past. The whole book is saturated with allusions to Old Testament prophecy, though there are no formal quotations. As a prophet himself, John need not quote his predecessors, but he takes up and reinterprets their prophecies, much as the later writers in the Old Testament prophetic tradition themselves took up and reinterpreted earlier prophecies.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The whole of Revelation could be regarded as a vision of the fulfilment of the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Your name be hallowed, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’ (Matt. 6:9–10). John and his readers lived in a world in which God’s name was not hallowed, his will was not done, and evil ruled through the oppression and exploitation of the Roman system of power.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Truth is the reality we see when all the illusions and delusions of sin are dispelled by the word of God. To get past all the seductive images of the good life that contemporary society constructs for us with such consummate expertise, to see beyond them to the real truth of things, is liberation ... Truth is personal, and what liberates is the encounter with the reality of things in the person of Jesus who reflects his Father's divinity and models true humanity.”
― Richard Bauckham

“In the first place, John’s work is a prophetic apocalypse in that it communicates a disclosure of a transcendent perspective on this world.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“the images of Revelation are symbols with evocative power inviting imaginative participation in the book’s symbolic world. But they do not work merely by painting verbal pictures. Their precise literary composition is always essential to their meaning. In the first place, the astonishingly meticulous composition of the book creates a complex network of literary cross-references, parallels, contrasts, which inform the meaning of the parts and the whole.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Thus Revelation seems to be an apocalyptic prophecy in the form of a circular letter to seven churches in the Roman province of Asia.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“As well as their pervasive allusion to the Old Testament, the images of Revelation also echo mythological images from its contemporary world.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“It is clear that John saw himself, not only as one of the Christian prophets, but also as standing in the tradition of Old Testament prophecy.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“However it—or the kind of extreme individualistic epistemology it embraces—can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly to those sources that were intended to recount and inform events of the past, that is, testimony in this restricted sense. Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything the sources claim be accepted only if historians can independently verify it…”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

“Always it refers to God’s favor and care for those he chooses to be “with.” It makes all the difference to their lives.”
― Richard Bauckham, Who Is God? (Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology): Key Moments of Biblical Revelation