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 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

“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

“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

“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

“Revelation is a literary work composed with astonishing care and skill. We should certainly not doubt that John had remarkable visionary experiences, but he has transmuted them through what must have been a lengthy process of reflection and writing into a thoroughly literary creation which is designed not to reproduce the experience so much as to communicate the meaning of the revelation that had been given him. Certainly Revelation is a literary work designed for oral performance (1:3), but as a complex literary creation, dense with meaning and allusion, it must be qualitatively different from the spontaneous orality of most early Christian prophecy.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“We may still ask in what sense Revelation belongs to the genre of ancient religious literature we call the apocalypse. J. J. Collins defines the literary genre apocalypse in this way: ‘Apocalypse’ is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.2 The reference to eschatological salvation would be disputed in some recent study of the apocalypses. Although the apocalypses have conventionally been thought to be about history and eschatology, this is not necessarily true of all of them. The heavenly secrets revealed to the seer in the extant Jewish apocalypses cover a rather wide range of topics and are not exclusively concerned with history and eschatology.3 John’s apocalypse, however, is exclusively concerned with eschatology: with eschatological judgment and salvation, and with the impact of these on the present situation in which he writes.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“It is worth noticing how far from anthropocentric is this vision of worship. Humanity is radically displaced from the centre of things where human beings naturally tend to place themselves. At its heart and in its eschatological goal the creation is theocentric, orientated in worship towards its Creator. But even among the worshippers human beings are not pre-eminent. The four living creatures who lead the worship of the whole creation are not portrayed as anthropomorphic beings, as angelic beings often are. Only the third has a face resembling a human face. The others resemble a lion, an ox and an eagle, and with their six wings and myriad eyes all have a heavenly superiority to all earthly creatures (4:6–8). Their representative function is to worship on behalf of all creatures, and therefore it is fulfilled when the circle of worship expands to include not only humans, but ‘every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea’ (5:13).”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of 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

“Once we have fully recognized the specificity of the seven messages to the churches, it is possible to ask whether John also envisaged other readers. Why does he write to seven churches? These were by no means the only Christian churches in the province of Asia, and John must surely have expected his work to be passed on from these seven to other churches in the area and even farther afield. The definitiveness with which he seems to envisage his prophecy as the final culmination of the whole biblical prophetic tradition suggests a relevance for all Christian churches. This is what the number seven must indicate. We shall observe quite often in this book the symbolic significance which attaches to numbers in Revelation. Seven is the number of completeness.11 By addressing seven churches John indicates that his message is addressed to specific churches as representative of all the churches.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“A second important sense in which Revelation stands in the tradition of the Jewish apocalypses is that it shares the question which concerned so many of the latter: who is Lord over the world?”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Thus it is a serious mistake to suppose that Revelation opposes the Roman Empire solely because of its persecution of Christians. Rather Revelation advances a thorough-going prophetic critique of the system of Roman power. It is a critique which makes Revelation the most powerful piece of political resistance literature from the period of the early Empire. It is not simply because Rome persecutes Christians that Christians must oppose Rome. Rather it is because Christians must dissociate themselves from the evil of the Roman system that they are likely to suffer persecution.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“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

“The device of the seven messages enables John to engage appropriately with seven different contexts in which his book would be read and also to integrate those contexts into the broader perspective of the rest of the book, in which John is concerned with the worldwide tyranny of Rome and, even more broadly, with the cosmic conflict of God and evil and the eschatological purpose of God for his whole creation. In this way he shows the Christians of each of the seven churches how the issues in their local context belong to, and must be understood in the light of, God’s cosmic battle against evil and his eschatological purpose of establishing his kingdom.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Whether they were Jews or Gentiles, most of John’s readers were used to belonging to a city. Most citizens of the great cities of the province of Asia would have thought it possible to be fully human only in the public life of a city. For those of John’s readers who had the social status and affluence sufficient to participate in this public life – and probably many of them did – the most difficult and alien aspect of Christianity would have been the extent to which it required them to dissociate and to distance themselves from this public life, because of the idolatry and immorality bound up with it. There is plenty of evidence in the seven messages to the churches to show how disinclined many of them were to do this. Not only a comfortable life, participating in the prosperity of the cities’ economic life, was at stake, though this was a major factor. There was also the need to belong to the civic community, with its rituals of identity and civic pride. And in the first century AD this was inseparable from the public and official enthusiasm for their connexion with Rome which the cities of Asia displayed. Of course, for the poor among John’s readers belonging to a city and to the Roman Empire would have had more ambivalent, though not always merely negative, connotations.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of 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

“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

“The method and conceptuality of the theology of Revelation are relatively different from the rest of the New Testament, but once they are appreciated in their own right, Revelation can be seen to be not only one of the finest literary works in the New Testament, but also one of the greatest theological achievements of early Christianity. Moreover, the literary and theological greatness are not separable.”
― 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

“Misinterpretations of Revelation often begin by misconceiving the kind of book it is.”
― 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