To Follow the Lamb

A Peaceable Reading of the Book of Revelation

Ted Grimsrud

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781666725704
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

For many, the book of Revelation seems hopelessly hard to interpret. It gives the impression of being full of frightening and confusing visions. However, To Follow the Lamb: A Peaceable Reading of the Book of Revelation shows that Revelation actually is fascinating, inspiring, and empowering. The key to reading Revelation is simple. Let's take seriously the opening words of the book that tell us it is a "revelation of Jesus Christ." Let's expect Revelation to help us understand Jesus and his will for us. We may expect that Revelation shares the same basic sensibility that we find in the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament.Revelation is an exhortation to discipleship--follow the Lamb wherever he goes! It offers a sharp critique of the world's empires and of how people of faith find ways to be comfortable within the empires.Revelation portrays God as merciful and peaceable--but engaged in a battle against the spiritual powers of evil, as fought with the weapons of love, not worldly violent weapons. To Follow the Lamb opens up Revelation's blueprint for faithful living: Resistance to the empires and embrace of the compassionate and healing love of the Lamb.

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Introduction

Why This Book Matters

When it comes to the Bible, the book of Revelation is like the unruly youngest child in a large family. Many of the more stable and conventional family members frown at this child and may even wish that it wasn’t part of the family. Revelation was somewhat marginal in early Christianity and was included with the rest of what became the New Testament in only some collections. In time, though, Revelation came to be accepted (albeit reluctantly) by various Christian groups as part of their Scripture.

Revelation’s ultimately accepted place in the New Testament did not mean the book would get equal attention with the other parts. Famously, the sixteenth-century Reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin both ignored Revelation as they wrote voluminously about most of the rest of the Bible. Various lectionaries that provide schedules for the reading of the Bible in Christian worship services usually leave Revelation aside and only occasionally list small snippets of the Bible’s last book.

The attractions of the book of Revelation

On the other hand, and perhaps not coincidentally, Revelation did draw a great deal of attention from various marginalized, heterodox, and visionary groups on the edges of mainstream Christianity. If the established church was not going to provide authoritative teaching about the contents of this wondrous book, nonestablished prophets and seers would fill the vacuum.

I didn’t know anything about the reputation of Revelation when I first encountered it after my conversion to Christianity just before my senior year in high school. It turned out that my initial immersion in roiled waters of Revelation study came in a faith community that was on the edge of mainstream Christianity—though I wasn’t aware of this marginality at the time.

I joined a rural Baptist congregation where the pastor preached continuously about how we lived in the last days and that we could be raptured out of life on earth at any moment to be with God. The signs of the times all pointed toward Jesus’s soon return. These were the early 1970s. The war on Vietnam raged nightly on television. The Communist threat loomed large. Race riots spread widely, and the sexual revolution was making clear just how decadent American society had become. And all the long-haired hippies!

I didn’t know much about the Bible or about Christianity in general, just that I did want Jesus to be my Savior. The people in my church were warm and welcoming to me. I was bright and curious and ready to learn what I could about this new faith I was becoming part of. I read avidly and listened to taped sermons. Names I remember are Jack Van Impe, Salem Kirban, Dwight Pentecost, and John Walvoord. And, most importantly, Hal Lindsey.

Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth had been published the year before my conversion. It quickly became the go-to book for those interested in future-oriented biblical prophecy. It sold millions of copies and became the best-selling book, secular or religious, in the United States during the decade of the 1970s. I read it several times along with others of his books. I also listened to dozens of Hal Lindsey tapes.

I now have negative feelings about the few years that followed my conversion. I remain grateful that I was treated well in that church community. People were kind and generous throughout my time there. However, I believe now that the theology I learned (especially what I was taught about Revelation and the end times) had a doubly hurtful impact on me.

First, it was bad theology that gave me wrong ideas about every other element of my faith—salvation, who Jesus is and what he cares about, heaven and hell, how to read the Bible, the meaning of the church, and on down the line. I had a lot to unlearn later. As it turns out, thankfully, that unlearning was not particularly difficult or traumatic once my sensibility changed. But I wish I would have had a more intellectually healthy introduction to the faith.

Second, and more subtly, I believe that my immersion in the version of Baptist fundamentalism I encountered cost me a college education. I was inoculated against the kind of natural curiosity and excitement that I think would have characterized my college experience had I been educated differently as a new Christian. I was taught to be suspicious of ideas, questions, and intellectual diversity. Instead of getting a background that would serve me later in graduate studies, I was encouraged to simply accept the simple doctrines I was presented with. I spent the first three years of college in an intellectual fog, learning very little and living with a sense of suspicion toward the entire enterprise of higher education.

Things changed dramatically for me at the end of my junior year. Interestingly, a crucial catalyst came in a conversion with a mentor in the small, nondenominational, conservative church I had joined when I moved for college. We were discussing end times theology. As he explained the different points of view among Christians, I was shocked to learn that the future-prophetic view I had been taught was not the only view that Christians had. In fact, my mentor said, most Christians don’t hold that view. This revelation rattled me, but I happily took it as an invitation to explore some of the other views. If what I had been taught was not the only option, perhaps I could find something better.

As it turned out, I happened upon some writings a few months later that very ably explained why the future-prophetic view of the end times was, in fact, deeply flawed. As an indication that my convictions about that viewpoint were not nearly as deep-seated as I might have imagined, I quickly rejected that entire theological orientation.

My final year of college became a time of intense reading and talking as I entered with enthusiasm the world of academic theology at an introductory level. A key resource for me was Francis Schaeffer, who confirmed my rejection of the future-prophetic schema and who encouraged me to ask questions and to pursue truth wherever it led me. As it turned out, such a pursuit actually led me away from Schaeffer’s own narrow theology.

With the end of my fixation on the end times, I lost interest in Revelation for several years and pursued other interests. After Schaeffer, I turned to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jacques Ellul as important thinkers. And, partly under their influence, I embraced pacifism as a core conviction (this was the end of the Vietnam War years and I had faced the possibility of being drafted and going to war). The excitement about pacifism led to discovering the writings of John Howard Yoder and other Mennonites and to some intense discussion in our little church.

At some point, perhaps 1978, our church had a formal debate about pacifism. The person arguing against pacifism asserted that while Jesus certainly was nonviolent during his life on earth, we know from both the Old Testament and the book of Revelation that God at times approves of war. Now, I had read a bit on the issue of the Old Testament and war and felt like I had a good sense of how to counter that argument. But his point about Revelation had me stumped. From what I remembered of Revelation, I had to agree that it seemed to be pretty okay with violence, some of which would be initiated by God. Since becoming a pacifist, I hadn’t really thought about Revelation.

The tension I felt at that time stemmed from two powerful convictions. The first was that Jesus would have us be pacifists (that is, never support or participate in war or in other death-dealing violence against human beings). The second was that the Bible was true, from Genesis to Revelation, and it came from God. Thus, since God wants us to be pacifists, and the Bible is God’s word, the Bible must support pacifism. But were both of these convictions actually correct—at the same time?

As I mentioned, I had come to some peace of mind about the Old Testament. It would be a challenge to work through all the issues related to divinely initiated and divinely supported violence in the Old Testament, but I was confident it could be done. But what about Revelation? I realized that I had to figure this one out. So, I started to read Revelation and read about it. It was an exciting project because I discovered that the anti-pacifist assumptions expressed in our church debate did not reflect the scholarly consensus on Revelation.

As with the Old Testament, the scholarship on Revelation concerning divinely initiated violence was diverse. Not only fundamentalist Baptists argued that the Bible affirms violence. However, many argued a contrary view. I fairly soon learned of what I now call the peaceable Revelation stream of interpretation. A key figure was British scholar G. B. Caird1 who wrote an influential commentary i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: A Revelation about Jesus
• Chapter 3: Power in Weakness
• Chapter 4: Weakness in Power
• Chapter 5: What is God Like?
• Chapter 6: An Angry Lamb?
• Chapter 7: Theology by Numbers
• Chapter 8: How Not to Inspire Repentance
• Chapter 9: Standing by Words
• Chapter 10: Fighting the Beast
• Chapter 11: How to Read Revelation
• Chapter 12: Transforming Babylon
• Chapter 13: Seeking the Peace of the City
• Chapter 14: Confessions of a Birthright Imperialist
• Chapter 15: The War That’s Not a War
• Chapter 16: The Judgment That’s Not a Judgment
• Chapter 17: What is Paradise For?
• Conclusion
• A guide for further reading
• Bibliography