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Revelation for Progressive Christians: A Seven Session Study Guide
The biblical book of Revelation is filled with intriguing text about plagues, judgments and end of worlds, but what is the true message that should be deciphered from Revelation? It’s easy to get lost in all the interpretations available. This study guide can lead you through the biblical book and help you decide what it might really be saying to you.
Did you know that the book of Revelation doesn’t really talk about the end of the world? Nor does it talk about some people being “left behind” – despite the popularity of some popular fiction that says otherwise. It doesn’t talk about the anti-Christ, either. And through it all, the book keeps offering hope, reminding early Christians that enemies and opponents are no real threat because God will always triumph.
Just as the book of Revelation offered hope to early Christians during frightening and uncertain times, this study guide can help make sense of this wonderful book for our world today, and remind us that there is hope in the midst of seeming chaos and confusion. The study guide will not tell you what to think, but it will invite you to get past some of the traditional interpretations and look at the biblical text in a fresh and exciting way.
Revelation for Progressive Christians is a seven-session study guide that invites readers to explore Revelation as a fun, hope-filled book that contains a lot of fanciful imagery and symbolic references, to be sure, but that, at its core, offers words of assurance and hope to the church and its people today.
Did you know that the book of Revelation doesn’t really talk about the end of the world? Nor does it talk about some people being “left behind” – despite the popularity of some popular fiction that says otherwise. It doesn’t talk about the anti-Christ, either. And through it all, the book keeps offering hope, reminding early Christians that enemies and opponents are no real threat because God will always triumph.
Just as the book of Revelation offered hope to early Christians during frightening and uncertain times, this study guide can help make sense of this wonderful book for our world today, and remind us that there is hope in the midst of seeming chaos and confusion. The study guide will not tell you what to think, but it will invite you to get past some of the traditional interpretations and look at the biblical text in a fresh and exciting way.
Revelation for Progressive Christians is a seven-session study guide that invites readers to explore Revelation as a fun, hope-filled book that contains a lot of fanciful imagery and symbolic references, to be sure, but that, at its core, offers words of assurance and hope to the church and its people today.
113 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 4, 2018
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January 30, 2021Not quite my cup of tea. Liberation theology and leftist history of religion is more my thing. But I enjoy bible studies, and my neighbourhood United Church was hosting a bible study on Revelation based on this book. Many in that church have an appetite for that ‘historical criticism’ stuff, but I'm not as interested in it as they are.
I surprisingly enjoyed reading Revelation a lot more than I thought I would have. Revelation 12, from which the Virgin of Guadalupe is based on, is something I’m becoming very interested in. I’m actually reading about this now in a book called “From Patmos to the Barrio”, and how the Virgin of Guadalupe is often a symbol of Latinx migrant solidarity and resistance. You can see images of the Virgin of Guadalupe at migrant protests and in the background of Ceasar Chavez rallies, which is something I find fascinating.
Also, one of the most striking things for me while reading Revelation was the sort of ecological destruction it alludes to, which I think is very relevant to the apocalyptic circumstances we find ourselves in now with respect to climate change. Schmidt does mention this, but I just think the text from Revelation speaks best on its own terms:
“a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up… A third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed… a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter.”
One actual critique of Schmidt’s book is that I sometimes encounter these over-confident assertions about authorial intentions or meanings. Some examples:
“Welcome to this study on the book of Revelation. It is subtitled “for those in progressive churches” because, sadly, the book of Revelation has largely been taken over by those in more conservative churches who see it as being filled with doomsday punishments for “bad guys,” and predictions about how the world will end.”
“Revelation is not about the end of the world at some future date.”
What I wonder is: can we not confess that, yes, this text was trying to predict the future and the end of the world, but it was just wrong (at least in its specificity to Rome’s demise) — rather than limiting John of Patmos’ writing solely to a political critique of Empire? Why is there this latent embarrassment over the bible making ill-conceived predictions? Of course John was denouncing Roman imperialist power, but he also was furious with it, believed God was furious at it, and would bring it to nothing. I think he was clearly talking about “doomsday punishments for ‘bad guys’” and it is not only conservative churches who would see that.
If you read liberation theologians, especially those like Ernesto Cardenal, who discusses biblical texts with rural peasants in Latin America. They still see in texts like Revelation, a divine punishment awaiting the capitalist landowners and the ruling class. Why abandon the fiery rhetoric of these prophetic texts for milquetoast liberal spiritualizing that does not challenge bourgeois society? There’s that cliche that says prophetic voices like Jesus came to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Why are liberals so uncomfortable with Revelation? Maybe because they themselves are too cozy with the ruling class, or they outright belong to it.
So yes it’s a good question why the Messiah has yet to (re)arrive, oppression still exists, a new imperialist power has taken Rome’s place, etc. Part of the painful legacy of Christianity was that Christ’s life nor Christ’s death brought about peace and justice fully, and that is the context in which Christian eschatological yearning exists. Christ did not return within the lifetimes of those he spoke to in the Gospel of Matthew. Why must we view this phenomenon of incorrect predictions as some old fool’s task relegated to the past. Marx was wrong about the impending collapse of capitalism. Keynes was wrong that we’d be working 15 hours a week. And I believe accelerationists are wrong that all production will be so easily automated within the coming century, and more laughably that ownership of this technology will be socialized. Are those things possible, yes, but maybe it’s a lot more difficult to reach those ideals than we initially believed. What’s wrong with contemplating our failures?
What I do love about Revelation is its radical rhetoric. It’s where Steinbeck’s title Grapes of Wrath is derived from, before it was woven into Battle Hymn of the Republic, as it mingled with the revolutionary ode to John Brown. As James Cone suggested, the wine of Eucharist is the blood of Christ, is the blood of the lynched African American, the blood of the oppressed slave, but those who live by the sword will die by the sword, for that violence will erupt out of the wrath of the oppressed, and Judgement has its own sort of bloodshed. When the poor have no more to eat, they will eat the rich. (Or John of Patmos will call the birds to eat the rich, either way works. This is a joke btw, please don't arrest me. I'm just quoting the Rousseau and the bible.) As Steinbeck wrote:
“in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
And the harvest is the revolutionary moment. The end of the world as we know it, and the beginning of something new. Some excerpts from Revelation 18 and 19:
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!
…the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her,
and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxury.
…As she glorified herself and lived luxuriously,
so give her a like measure of torment and grief.
…she will be burned with fire; for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.”
And the kings of the earth, who committed fornication and lived in luxury with her, will weep and wail over her when they see the smoke of her burning…
…The merchants of these wares, who gained wealth from her, will stand far off, in fear of her torment, weeping and mourning aloud,
…Alas, alas, the great city,
where all who had ships at sea
grew rich by her wealth!
For in one hour she has been laid waste.”
…With such violence Babylon the great city
will be thrown down,
and will be found no more;
…and the sound of the millstone
will be heard in you no more;
…for your merchants were the magnates of the earth,
and all nations were deceived by your sorcery.
…And in you was found the blood of prophets and of saints,
and of all who have been slaughtered on earth.”
…Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly in midheaven, “Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of the mighty.”
I do think it is rather unfortunate about the slut-shaming imagery here, but I do love when the angel calls the birds to eat the flesh of kings, lol. The new eucharist.
One other thing I’m very interested in here in Revelation 20 (but also in many other parts of the Christian canon) is this notion of ‘reigning with Christ’:
“They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years… Over these the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him a thousand years.”
This sort of Christian theology is prevalent also in the Gospels and especially in Paul. What it initially reminded me of early on was something Rick Rodick said in a lecture on Habermas:
“the Equality provision… understood communication would have a symmetry condition like this: everyone would have an equal opportunity to talk and listen. Let me try to explain why this is more politically interesting than it sounds. It means everyone has an equal right to command as to obey. That’s a speech act. That’s a communicative act — means everyone has an equal right to question and to answer. This symmetry condition has more political power than it seems at first. It is a very egalitarian principle Habermas believes that we couldn’t have understood communication without it.”
While Habermas is often associated with the Frankfurt school, and studied under Freudo-Marxists like Marcuse and Adorno, he is almost never thought of as a Marxist, because the large body of his work is not Marxist in nature at all. But this comment by Rick Rodick on Habermas always reminds me of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ — especially when he says “everyone has an equal right to command”.
In those days when I was a mystical reformist anarchist of the Tolstoyian type, I had a certain aversion to this notion of having power. Messiah is Lord, meaning no one else is Lord. Yet repeatedly, there is this notion of ‘reigning’ with Christ, and it’s hard not to see a line from this notion all the way to modern conceptions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The hope is not so much for a disembodied heaven than a hope that “the meek shall inherit the earth”.
With respect to the failure that surrounds us today, the brutality of global capitalism, American militarism and imperialism, ecological catastrophe — this is the context from which we stubbornly insist that ‘another world is possible’. This is where the apocalyptic and eschatological potential of Revelation has great force. I’m thinking of Ingmar Bergman’s film “The Seventh Seal” a reference to Revelation 8:1:
“When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.”
Schmidt reads this in a weirdly positive way:
“There is a moment of silence. It is as if the thing that mattered was not the devastation that was spoken of, but the survival of those who will give themselves to the Lamb (Jesus).”
I understand where Schmidt is coming from though. This seventh seal is like the pause of Sabbath. It seems like a moment to rest from all the turmoil of the apocalypse. Or Sabbath is often associated with the Jubilee, another eschatological utopia.
What I find fascinating is Bergman’s reading of this silence, is more chilling. God’s silence is almost emblematic of God’s absence. Or to put it more moderately, a type of absence. In that our eschatological yearning is God’s presence here on earth, as expressed in Revelation 21:
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
...Death will be no more.”
If God’s presence is something to come, then God's absence is epitomized in the ever-more delayed arrival of the Messiah, as the cruelties of everyday life never stop — the all-pervasive social relations of late capitalism and it’s ecological destruction persist.
Revelation ends with a city, yet one properly situated in peaceful relation to the rest of creation. It is (counter to one might expect) not a Romanticist return to the garden, but a new Jerusalem existing in harmony with the earth’s ecosystems. Through the heart of this city flows a river. The river of life.
I’m back at it with these rivers. It’s no mistake, in my view, that a river was a central part of William Morris’ utopia in “News from Nowhere”. Here in Mississauga, the Missinihe (Credit River) was utterly destroyed by projects of deforestation and the industrial mills that came along with them, which decimated the salmon populations that the Anishinaabe relied on. It is the rivers of Manchester that Engels describes as putrid and bearing the wounds of industrial capital. But in Revelation we hear that in Rome, “the sound of the millstone will be heard in you no more.” It’s hard to read someone like Marx without thinking back to the great revolutionary narratives of the Jewish prophets, of Jesus, of John of Patmos here. I think this is a nice theological quote to finish on from Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”:
“This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”
I mean, the teleological fervour of Marx sounds odd to modern political ears, but there’s something theological about it that makes it feel so compelling. Marx’s political convictions seem deeply coupled with the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible and the later Christian canon. Islam also belongs to this constellation of eschatological convictions, as I’m sure many other faith traditions are also. I think there’s a lot a lush green terrain for people of faith and leftists to share here, in common. As Gerard Winstanley wrote:
“The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others. From the beginning it was not so.”
And one day it will not be so again.
I surprisingly enjoyed reading Revelation a lot more than I thought I would have. Revelation 12, from which the Virgin of Guadalupe is based on, is something I’m becoming very interested in. I’m actually reading about this now in a book called “From Patmos to the Barrio”, and how the Virgin of Guadalupe is often a symbol of Latinx migrant solidarity and resistance. You can see images of the Virgin of Guadalupe at migrant protests and in the background of Ceasar Chavez rallies, which is something I find fascinating.
Also, one of the most striking things for me while reading Revelation was the sort of ecological destruction it alludes to, which I think is very relevant to the apocalyptic circumstances we find ourselves in now with respect to climate change. Schmidt does mention this, but I just think the text from Revelation speaks best on its own terms:
“a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up… A third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed… a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter.”
One actual critique of Schmidt’s book is that I sometimes encounter these over-confident assertions about authorial intentions or meanings. Some examples:
“Welcome to this study on the book of Revelation. It is subtitled “for those in progressive churches” because, sadly, the book of Revelation has largely been taken over by those in more conservative churches who see it as being filled with doomsday punishments for “bad guys,” and predictions about how the world will end.”
“Revelation is not about the end of the world at some future date.”
What I wonder is: can we not confess that, yes, this text was trying to predict the future and the end of the world, but it was just wrong (at least in its specificity to Rome’s demise) — rather than limiting John of Patmos’ writing solely to a political critique of Empire? Why is there this latent embarrassment over the bible making ill-conceived predictions? Of course John was denouncing Roman imperialist power, but he also was furious with it, believed God was furious at it, and would bring it to nothing. I think he was clearly talking about “doomsday punishments for ‘bad guys’” and it is not only conservative churches who would see that.
If you read liberation theologians, especially those like Ernesto Cardenal, who discusses biblical texts with rural peasants in Latin America. They still see in texts like Revelation, a divine punishment awaiting the capitalist landowners and the ruling class. Why abandon the fiery rhetoric of these prophetic texts for milquetoast liberal spiritualizing that does not challenge bourgeois society? There’s that cliche that says prophetic voices like Jesus came to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Why are liberals so uncomfortable with Revelation? Maybe because they themselves are too cozy with the ruling class, or they outright belong to it.
So yes it’s a good question why the Messiah has yet to (re)arrive, oppression still exists, a new imperialist power has taken Rome’s place, etc. Part of the painful legacy of Christianity was that Christ’s life nor Christ’s death brought about peace and justice fully, and that is the context in which Christian eschatological yearning exists. Christ did not return within the lifetimes of those he spoke to in the Gospel of Matthew. Why must we view this phenomenon of incorrect predictions as some old fool’s task relegated to the past. Marx was wrong about the impending collapse of capitalism. Keynes was wrong that we’d be working 15 hours a week. And I believe accelerationists are wrong that all production will be so easily automated within the coming century, and more laughably that ownership of this technology will be socialized. Are those things possible, yes, but maybe it’s a lot more difficult to reach those ideals than we initially believed. What’s wrong with contemplating our failures?
What I do love about Revelation is its radical rhetoric. It’s where Steinbeck’s title Grapes of Wrath is derived from, before it was woven into Battle Hymn of the Republic, as it mingled with the revolutionary ode to John Brown. As James Cone suggested, the wine of Eucharist is the blood of Christ, is the blood of the lynched African American, the blood of the oppressed slave, but those who live by the sword will die by the sword, for that violence will erupt out of the wrath of the oppressed, and Judgement has its own sort of bloodshed. When the poor have no more to eat, they will eat the rich. (Or John of Patmos will call the birds to eat the rich, either way works. This is a joke btw, please don't arrest me. I'm just quoting the Rousseau and the bible.) As Steinbeck wrote:
“in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
And the harvest is the revolutionary moment. The end of the world as we know it, and the beginning of something new. Some excerpts from Revelation 18 and 19:
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!
…the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her,
and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxury.
…As she glorified herself and lived luxuriously,
so give her a like measure of torment and grief.
…she will be burned with fire; for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.”
And the kings of the earth, who committed fornication and lived in luxury with her, will weep and wail over her when they see the smoke of her burning…
…The merchants of these wares, who gained wealth from her, will stand far off, in fear of her torment, weeping and mourning aloud,
…Alas, alas, the great city,
where all who had ships at sea
grew rich by her wealth!
For in one hour she has been laid waste.”
…With such violence Babylon the great city
will be thrown down,
and will be found no more;
…and the sound of the millstone
will be heard in you no more;
…for your merchants were the magnates of the earth,
and all nations were deceived by your sorcery.
…And in you was found the blood of prophets and of saints,
and of all who have been slaughtered on earth.”
…Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly in midheaven, “Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of the mighty.”
I do think it is rather unfortunate about the slut-shaming imagery here, but I do love when the angel calls the birds to eat the flesh of kings, lol. The new eucharist.
One other thing I’m very interested in here in Revelation 20 (but also in many other parts of the Christian canon) is this notion of ‘reigning with Christ’:
“They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years… Over these the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him a thousand years.”
This sort of Christian theology is prevalent also in the Gospels and especially in Paul. What it initially reminded me of early on was something Rick Rodick said in a lecture on Habermas:
“the Equality provision… understood communication would have a symmetry condition like this: everyone would have an equal opportunity to talk and listen. Let me try to explain why this is more politically interesting than it sounds. It means everyone has an equal right to command as to obey. That’s a speech act. That’s a communicative act — means everyone has an equal right to question and to answer. This symmetry condition has more political power than it seems at first. It is a very egalitarian principle Habermas believes that we couldn’t have understood communication without it.”
While Habermas is often associated with the Frankfurt school, and studied under Freudo-Marxists like Marcuse and Adorno, he is almost never thought of as a Marxist, because the large body of his work is not Marxist in nature at all. But this comment by Rick Rodick on Habermas always reminds me of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ — especially when he says “everyone has an equal right to command”.
In those days when I was a mystical reformist anarchist of the Tolstoyian type, I had a certain aversion to this notion of having power. Messiah is Lord, meaning no one else is Lord. Yet repeatedly, there is this notion of ‘reigning’ with Christ, and it’s hard not to see a line from this notion all the way to modern conceptions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The hope is not so much for a disembodied heaven than a hope that “the meek shall inherit the earth”.
With respect to the failure that surrounds us today, the brutality of global capitalism, American militarism and imperialism, ecological catastrophe — this is the context from which we stubbornly insist that ‘another world is possible’. This is where the apocalyptic and eschatological potential of Revelation has great force. I’m thinking of Ingmar Bergman’s film “The Seventh Seal” a reference to Revelation 8:1:
“When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.”
Schmidt reads this in a weirdly positive way:
“There is a moment of silence. It is as if the thing that mattered was not the devastation that was spoken of, but the survival of those who will give themselves to the Lamb (Jesus).”
I understand where Schmidt is coming from though. This seventh seal is like the pause of Sabbath. It seems like a moment to rest from all the turmoil of the apocalypse. Or Sabbath is often associated with the Jubilee, another eschatological utopia.
What I find fascinating is Bergman’s reading of this silence, is more chilling. God’s silence is almost emblematic of God’s absence. Or to put it more moderately, a type of absence. In that our eschatological yearning is God’s presence here on earth, as expressed in Revelation 21:
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
...Death will be no more.”
If God’s presence is something to come, then God's absence is epitomized in the ever-more delayed arrival of the Messiah, as the cruelties of everyday life never stop — the all-pervasive social relations of late capitalism and it’s ecological destruction persist.
Revelation ends with a city, yet one properly situated in peaceful relation to the rest of creation. It is (counter to one might expect) not a Romanticist return to the garden, but a new Jerusalem existing in harmony with the earth’s ecosystems. Through the heart of this city flows a river. The river of life.
I’m back at it with these rivers. It’s no mistake, in my view, that a river was a central part of William Morris’ utopia in “News from Nowhere”. Here in Mississauga, the Missinihe (Credit River) was utterly destroyed by projects of deforestation and the industrial mills that came along with them, which decimated the salmon populations that the Anishinaabe relied on. It is the rivers of Manchester that Engels describes as putrid and bearing the wounds of industrial capital. But in Revelation we hear that in Rome, “the sound of the millstone will be heard in you no more.” It’s hard to read someone like Marx without thinking back to the great revolutionary narratives of the Jewish prophets, of Jesus, of John of Patmos here. I think this is a nice theological quote to finish on from Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”:
“This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”
I mean, the teleological fervour of Marx sounds odd to modern political ears, but there’s something theological about it that makes it feel so compelling. Marx’s political convictions seem deeply coupled with the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible and the later Christian canon. Islam also belongs to this constellation of eschatological convictions, as I’m sure many other faith traditions are also. I think there’s a lot a lush green terrain for people of faith and leftists to share here, in common. As Gerard Winstanley wrote:
“The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others. From the beginning it was not so.”
And one day it will not be so again.
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