Reading Revelation: Part 3, Passing or Picking a Fight

In Brian K. Blount's commentary on the book of Revelation he offers a twist on how I've typically read the social setting of the book. 

Specifically, as described in the last post, I've read the social setting as being one of acute persecution. Revelation was written, therefore, to give the persecuted community hope. The theme of vindicated martyrs along with associated judgment upon the persecutors features large in Revelation.

Blount gives this setting a bit of twist. Yes, the church was being persecuted, but Christians were not being actively hunted down. As long as the Christian communities accommodated themselves to Roman culture and worship things were okay. According to Blount, it was this accommodation that Revelation is so fiercely calling out. As Blount describes:

[Christian] complicity in artisan, trade, and funeral associations allowed for upward social and economic mobility. They passed themselves off as Roman cultic devotees in order to avail themselves of Roman resources...

[John] wants the Christians to see that they are caught up in a draconian, prostituting system. The only challenge to that system resides in the will of those who refuse to participate in its many social, economic, and political benefits. Whatever it costs them, those Christians must find a way to stand up and opt out. That, in essence, is his prophetic charge.

This changes how we think of the word "martyr." Instead of a murdered person Blount asks us to pay attention to the meaning of the word. A martyr is a "witness." Not just or primarily in death, but in the visible contrast and nonconformity of our lives. Blount writes:

[John's] confessional witness (martys) language is, then, his prophetic language. Martys is a word of active engagement, not sacrificial passivity. A believer's witness might provoke such a hostile response that it leads to the believer's death, but always, at least in the first-century mind-set, it seems, transformative focus was on the provocative testimony that had to be given, not a passive life that had to be extinguished. When someone in John's turn-of-the-century environment said "witness," she meant witness, not martyr. 

In short, the prophetic and pastoral concern of Revelation, according to Blount, isn't persecution per se, but the Christian avoidance of persecution, refusing to stand up and become a witness. Christians were "passing" as Romans, reaping the social and fiscal benefits of political and religious conformity. John wants this accommodating behavior to stop. And he knows that if the Christian community comes "out of the closet," as it were, they are going to face fierce opposition, and even death. Fearlessly stepping out into the open as a Christian to face these hostile forces and bitter consequences is the demand of Revelation. Blount shares:

Here is where both John's prophetic call and a consummate prophetic problem arise. If John was indeed asking his people to stand up and stand out in a world they had accepted and that that accepted them, a world into which they had covertly and successfully passed, he was essentially telling them to go out and pick a fight! No matter the consequences! He was ordering his people to self-identify, to declare that they were not nonaccommodating Christians who could no longer participate in a world that had not really noticed them since they had heretofore been accommodating to it. In a classic "Don't ask, don't tell" (that I'm a Christian) kind of environment, John was essentially ordering his Christians to be about the business of telling on themselves, with a full knowledge of the repercussions such telling might bring...He was asking them to come screaming out of the Christian closet, knowing that it could well solicit the same consequence it had attracted to the Lamb: slaughter. 

John's visions operate in support of his effort to incite his followers to self-identify and then stand behind that self-declaration, that revelation, no matter what the consequences...

I love this, and these are stirring words. And yet, I'm mindful how easily they might be misconstrued. In the culture wars there's a whole of Christians "picking a fight" with the culture. But much of this conflict misunderstands the social context of Revelation. John wasn't asking the church to "win back" Rome. Following Blount, John was asking Christians to stop passing as Romans. In Revelation, the state is Babylon and the Christians are called to "come out" of her exploitive political, religious, and economic practices. Ponder the economic aspects of Babylon and how disconcertingly similar they are to America. In short, the proper way to translate Revelation into our context is to see America, not as Zion, but as Babylon, and to demand that Christians stop passing as Americans. 

Now that's a provocative question to ask! What might that mean to stop passing as an American? And what sort of persecution might that provoke? Such are the questions, I think, Revelation places before us.