Old Orthodox Apocalypse Wall Painting
from medieval Osogovo Monastery, Republic of Macedonia
by Edal Anton Lefterov
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The Post Traumatic Stress Bible
Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians
December 2020
We now enter into Advent, the liturgical time that Fleming Rutledge has called, “the Apocalyptic Season,” one in whose readings hope for a new world eclipses our despair and trauma at the current one, where there is a great conflict between the forces of light and darkness, and where the story arc inexorably goes through trial and horror into joy and peace.
In times of peace and prosperity, we
tend to avert our eyes from what is amiss in the world and in ourselves. In times like the current era—with pandemic plague, economic uncertainty, and
failed community in our political and social life—it is easier to hear what apocalyptic
literature is saying.
The Book of Revelation is a good example of Apocalyptic literature, a style of
writing in Judaism (and, later, Christianity) common in the Maccabean and Roman
periods. The Greek word apokalypsis means “an uncovering” or a “revealing.”
What is uncovered is God’s purposes and the final direction for things, not some
preview of coming events à la “Left Behind” or “Late, Great, Planet Earth.” As the Revelation says itself, it is about
things that will “come to pass soon” (Rev 1:1). That doesn't
mean soon to us, but soon to the writer.
Apocalyptic literature is persecution literature. It reflects the trauma
and stress of being hounded, tortured, and, yes, killed, for your faith. It
seeks to understand present persecution of the righteous and encourage
resistance to the persecutors. It takes the rich, symbolic imagery of
late prophetic literature (like Ezekiel) and develops it into a code to
communicate with its readers. The authors of Apocalyptic write to encourage their
readers to not lose faith, and to keep resisting the oppressors who persecute
the faithful, whether the persecutors were Romans under the Emperor Domitian—as
in Revelation—or the Greek Syrians under Antiochus Epiphanes—as in
Daniel. They place it all in rich images and code so that the readers can
get the message without the censors and secret police of the oppressing power
catching on and then torturing and executing the author and readers. It
is thus very much about “current events” as seen by the author. It looks
to the future and uses rich symbolic language to argue that no matter how bad
things get, in the end God and the righteous will triumph and all the suffering
will be vindicated. It is only about the future in the sense of its
talking about the ultimate ends of God and the final triumph of Good. It
is NOT a key-word coded guidebook to previews of coming events in the distant
future. It is important to
remember when reading the rich, extreme, and sometimes almost paranoid images
of Apocalyptic, that this is first and foremost a literature of trauma. Its authors suffer from post-traumatic
stress.
The 666 symbol, for instance, is almost certainly code for Nero and a belief
that Domitian was Nero come alive again (“Nero Caesar” in Aramaic at that time
has the numerical value 666-- Aramaic and Hebrew, like Latin, gave numerical
values to letters of the alphabet.) Because the imagery of this book is
so rich and loaded with emotion, over the centuries people have applied its
various images to people and events in their age, always with the idea that
God’s ultimate triumph would happen soon. Many people today do the
same thing, and thus believe these books predict in order specific events of
our day. I suspect that they will be shown to be as wrong in their
specific prediction of coming events based on this analysis as the people over
the ages who have made the same arguments in centuries past.
But that doesn’t mean these books aren’t valuable. Whatever the specifics
of the final consummation of history that still awaits us, we must remember
that these books are about hope and perseverance, and the ultimate triumph of
God. In times of trauma like our own,
Apocalyptic speaks to us all the more:
it tells us do not give up hope.
Hang in there. Keep on keeping
on. In the end, all will be well.
Grace and peace.
Fr. Tony+
No comments:
Post a Comment