Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 37:1 (NA 1986)
Article: The Political Thought Of The Book Of Revelation
Author: Oliver O’Donovan

TynBul 37:1 (1986) p. 61

The Political Thought Of The Book Of Revelation

Oliver O’Donovan

The Tyndale Ethics Lecture, 1985

Something rather curious occurs in the final chapter of John Howard Yoder’s deservedly celebrated book The Politics of Jesus. The chapter is entitled ‘The War of the Lamb’; and in it the author, having dealt extensively in the rest of the book with the foundations for Christian political thought in the Gospels and Paul, proposes to ‘characterise briefly’ the political stance of the Book of Revelation in the course of drawing some conclusions for the whole. The characterisation is indeed brief. It occupies one and a half out of the eighteen pages of the chapter, and attends solely to the image of the slain Lamb in chapter 5. Then, on the concluding page (having found space in the meantime for a four-page exposition of Phil. 2:6) the author returns to Revelation once more, to deplore, with some indignation, what he calls ‘the beginning assumption of the irrelevance of apocalyptic, which has so often made it hard to see social meaning in the book of the Apocalypse, even though its entire message has to do with kingdoms and empires’. And finally, like the reluctant schoolboy athlete who breaks into a trot a few yards from the finishing-line, Yoder concludes his book with a rousing Latin quotation: Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur.1

We may well sympathise with Yoder’s ambivalence. On the one hand it appears that the Book of Revelation must be important for Christian political thought; on the other, the universal prejudice of church and scholarship is against it. The close scholarly attention paid to the general field of apocalyptic during the last quarter- century has elevated a long-standing instinct of caution into an academic orthodoxy. Apocalyptic, we are told, is

TynBul 37:1 (1986) p. 62

a flight from the realities of society and history. As Hans Dieter Betz wrote in 1969: ‘To the apocalypticist “world history” in its entirety is identical with the “evil eon” and thus falls under that absolutely negative judgment. . . The apocalyptic view of history is indeed “indicative of a great loss of historical sensitivity” and has, in fact, dispensed with historical thinking. Accordingly, history cannot in this view possess any revelatory character.’2 One response to this orthodoxy, which might prove attractive to someone who was interested not in apocalyptic in general but in this one New Testament example of it, would be to stress the distinctiveness of John of Patmos�...