*an unexpected injury has left me without the use of my dominant hand, reducing my ability to write beyond single finger type with my non-dominant hand. It has been reminding me of why long form writing is such an integral part of how I process. Such a practice remains limited, but I also don’t want to abandon it, even if a single reflection like this requires a great deal more time to compose and my ability to engage this space will inevitably be a lot more sparing for the time being.
Some thoughts on a recent course on Revelation Jen and I have been working through:
My wife (Jen) and I recently signed up to audit a masters level course on Revelation. As is the case for many seminaries looking to adjust and respond to the specific challenges of declining enrollment, one of our primary and most reputable local institutions (Providence College and Seminary) has been taking more and more of these courses out of the classroom and into the churches as a way of reimagining how learning takes place. Its a reminder (as my pastor said to me) that these seminaries were always meant for the building up of the body, attached as it is to the exercising of the mind. For me, its a reminder of how much I missed this space, long removed from my own seminary days.
An interesting (for me) backstory to signing up for this course. A while back I was looking into signing up for a new online course being offered by an old professor of mine back when I was working my way through a masters program in Christian studies. This prof has since moved on to Tyndale, and the course of interest was titled The Trinity and the Christian Life.
That is when news dropped of this in person remote offering of this masters level course on the book of revelation, hosted by my own church (which has its fair share of Providence alumn). Convenient. Enticing. But the two courses were happening on the same days at precisely the same times. I had been waffling back and forth for a while, ultimately landing on the Trinity course for the sole reason that I have spent a decent amount of time studying Revelation while, in comparison, very little time on the history and relevance of trinitarian theology.
That all shifted and changed however following a dinner at my inlaws, where a random discussion regarding a recent encounter with a local Manitoba filmmaker and their subsequent dinner conversation with this individual had found its way towards the subject of Revelation. Turns out this filmmaker’s observation that they did not believe the concept of the rapture and end times rhetoric to be a “true” thing had caused quite the stir in my inlaws household, immersed as they are in a very real and very lengthy history of that particular stream of evangelical culture and theology.
The question was then posed to me. I sided with the filmmaker. Which is a difficult conversation to bridge if someone has never encountered the “why” of that stated position. This then opened a door of opportunity for Jen and I to take the long road together towards that bridge, using our two differing vantage points (someone who has worked through this material before, and someone who hasn’t) as a case study.
Thus, the way (and reason) we found ourselves in this course. Which thus far has proven to be a rewarding journey towards unpacking the complex baggage that this particular part of evagelical culture tends to bring with it, much of it rooted in the very real and very deep rooted fears the idea of the rapture and end times rhetoric tends to represent. As my wife mentioned at one point, if the story is not about worrying about “being left behind,” what is the point? My own response: if thats the only story we believe can reveal and make sense of God and Christianity, thats all the more reason to set it to the fire of a robust interrogation. Or perhaps her subsequent observation is more stark and revealing: “If the story I’ve been taught all these years is a lie, how can I trust that any of this is true.”
To which I said, I know that feeling well. I’ve been there.
I also happen to believe that the process of having old paradigms challenged does not mean there aren’t better and more coherent stories waiting to be recovered from the muddled mess. This is not an abandonment of the concept of Truth itself. In fact, for me the moniker “lies” is probably not the best descriptive to evoke in the first place. What we have is our particular cultural context and formation, one in which we were both immersed in and shaped by this particuar “theology.” This is as much a part of who we are as anything we might discover along the journey, and whether we recognize it or not, all of this baggage is rooted in very real and very relevant concerns and questions relating to the world we observe and experience. The first obstacle is thus discovering the grace to extend to that experience and those questions. End times theology and the concept of the raprure doesn’t come out of nowhere, even if it might prove to be problematic and misguided. This just means it requires humility to wade through and work to unpack.
One of the great joys (for me) in bringing in the sort of study and critique that can challenge our narrowed conceptions and open us up to a much wider world of history, thought and development, is in fact an opportunity to grow not just our perceptions but also our convictions, rooted as this is in our (lived) faith. Such a process is not only about seeking a better story, it is about finding better questions. Questions that can bring us to greater understandings of why the story we are building our lives around makes the best sense of our lived experience. Here the “academics” can play an important and integral role in a life of faith. To borrow one citation from the course;
“The strength of the language and composition of the (Apocalypse) lies not in its theological argumentation or historical information but in its evocative power inviting imaginative participation.” (Florenza Schussler)
Beginning with, if not the “rapture,” then what? A question that, for me, begins with or presupposes a simple observation about the nature of hope itself, one of the most essential and defining elements of the human experience. One cannot speak to the idea of hope without the word opening up subsequent questions about a life and a world that demands and needs it. It is not an element of the human experience that we construct, it is the sort of word that unveils, the central force of the word apocalpse (a revealing), a greater reality to which such an experience is responding to. This then is the invitation of such a study, to enter into the world that lies behind the text in order to uncover something of what compelled their own need for hope, asking along the way “where do we locate our own selves within this mix looking back on this history today). Perhaps this is one of the biggest things we can begin to reimagine on our way to answering “if not the rapture, then what.” What does it look like to encounter revelation through a lens of hope rather than fear?
Or, as a rather profound observation from someone taking this course amidst facing their own very real struggle with a terminal diagnosis put it, “in reflecting a lot on my own ‘end times’ as of late, I wanted to spend some time exploring the ‘end times’ of all things.” By which they meant, setting this concept of beginnings and endings to the fire of a robust and honest interrogation and seeing what comes out on the other side. Or more importantly, how these two things relate to one another.
Here it becomes impossible to conclude that this book’s driving force is about anythimg less than the “apocaypse (revealing) of Jesus Christ” (Revelation 1:1). However it is that we make our way into the question of why Jesus mattered and what Jesus accomplished, this is the hopeful word on which everything else rests. This is the story capturing the writer and early readers of this text, which bears witness to a robust and profound reception history that sees this hope being bound up in a persistant pattern of recontextualization within worlds of what we can call “imminent” concern. A text that is soaked in the language and imagery of the OT (creation, exodus/exile, the prophets) that infotms its own story of “new” or restoried/restored creattion. At its heart is this simple truth: encounters with what they saw to be the resurrected Christ left them wrestling with the question of what this resurrrection actually accomplished in the midst of the (present) world that they occupied together. A question we are all invited to ask in the midst of our own “present” moment in 2026 from the vantage point of that same narrative. Somehow and in someway a single defined (read: tangible, observed, witnessed) resurrection in the middle of history mattered to the hope of these people, and somehow it made a difference not just to their lives, but their understanding of a cosmic history. And one of the unique things about this book, which gets lost in our distance from the language itself, is that it has always held the distinction of being a circulating text. Meanimg, by design it existed as a text that could move through and be shaped by subsequent communities well beyond its original audience(s). The only other letter arguably shaped like this would be the letter to the Ephesians (which the prof theorized could very well be the long lost letter to Laodicea, but thats a whole other aside).
That just emphasizes part of the tragic reality that while Ephesians as retained a ptominant place in peoples awareneses, Revelation has tended to be buried and neglected, sadly in large part because of the ways it has been subsumed by the fear and confusion which end times rhetoric and the rapture creates. In the spirit of Revelations posture and language of imminance, there is never a better time to reclaim it from those ashes then the present.
