As a Christian, it is expected that you believe what is in the Bible. In fact, that’s a pretty important part of the whole “going to heaven” thing. We believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ, in His crucifixion, in God’s love for us. So why is it so hard for us, in the 21st century, to wrap our heads around the Revelations? I believe this is largely because we are so habituated to a world judged by rationality and earthly order, and the narrative of the Revelations challenges this worldview in a way that the stories of Jesus’ preaching, for example, do not.
To believe what is contained in Revelations, one must first believe that Jesus is the Messiah, sent to earth to die for our sins. This “leap of faith”, while certainly difficult for many, is the first step, and we will presume to have taken it for the sake of this argument. Then, we must believe that the visions written by John, as told to him by Christ, are indeed that which will happen in the end times. As we discussed in class, some Christian scholars like Bultmann believe that this step is simply too hard for us moderns to undertake. Bultmann comes from the intellectual and scientific worldview that still grounds our world today. We seek to explain everything by our laws of rationality.
These laws are not always bad—they keep us away from danger. I am personally very grateful to “science” that I can live without asbestos in my walls, or get on a plane and know that, because its engineers followed certain rules based on axioms that function in the real world, I will not crash and die. Furthermore, this type of thinking has helped to produce some of the greatest Christian scholarship in the form of Scholastic thought.
And yet it seems foolish, even prideful, to try to measure the Divine by our own human systems of thought. It is natural for us to do so, to try and understand the beauty and the majesty of the world that God has created, and this impulse is not an inherently bad one. However, we ought to tread with more caution when analyzing the metaphysical world, and particularly when analyzing that which the Bible explicitly tells us not to.
Hugh of St Victor, in his On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, points us to Acts 1 and 7 “No one can know the times which the Father hath put in his own power”, and writes that “Therefore to compute the times, that is ‘chronous’, that we may know when the end of this world of the coming of the Lord is, seems nothing else to me than to wish to know what He himself said that no one can know.” (452) I find Hugh of St. Victor to be very helpful in understanding how to approach the Revelations, particularly when considering his views on time. While we cannot know and should not seek to know more than that is for us to know, Hugh of St. Victor places his considerations within the context of biblical passages, using the word to interpret how we should understand the end times.
For example, in Book II part 17.IV “Why he will be freed at the very last”, Hugh of St. Victor explains that Satan cannot be freed until the end of times because the last persecution of the Holy Church will be persecuted by the whole city of the devil upon earth will occur at the end times. Therefore, Satan can only participate in his open persecution at this exact moment. (453). Here, Hugh of St. Victor does not claim to read into signs or happenings on earth as a sort of “empirical evidence” to explain the Bible, instead using the bounds of his human reason to contextualize the holy words.
Hugh of St. Victor also dedicates himself to understanding what it means for God to perform seemingly impossible actions, such as the instantaneous raising of the dead. I was particularly interested by how he applied human biological understanding to explain (but not necessarily to rationalize) how the final judgement might make sense to us. He writes in II.17.ix “And as the ray of our eye does not reach nearer objects more quickly, and more distant ones more slowly, but traverses both intervals with equal speed, so when in the twinkling of an eye, as the Apostle says (Cf. 1 Cor. 15, 52), the resurrection of the dead takes place, it is as easy for the omnipotence of God and for His ineffable will to raise all bodies recently dead as those which fell a long time ago”. (456) I particularly liked this explanation because I think it successfully uses a rational structure that we humans can understand (how vision works) to comprehend something divine and metaphysical without attempting to prove or disprove this divine act by our own human laws.
Of course, this measured and thoughtful contemplation is not as inviting for our modern minds as grabbing onto the ideas of someone who claims to have figured out the answers to everything, stirring us up into a frenzy about the end times. As we have learned again and again through our course, understanding even a fraction of God requires what all good and holy dedications ask of us: time, prayer, love, and devotion.
SHM
There are mysteries packed within mysteries here! I see at least four different levels of reality at play in your discussion: 1) the physical world (what engineers tend to concern themselves with, when not building portals to demonic realms ;); 2) the workings of time (which involve the beginnings of the physical world, but also the philosophical experience of time, as well as the desire to know the ending of the story, thus the desire to calculate the timing of events); 3) the reality of visions, which may or may not point to things that happen in the physical world, but may still show realities in the invisible or spiritual realm; and 4) the meaning of resurrection, including both its material, bodily reality and the significance of person (what Professor Bynum talked about in the chapter we read). These take some disentangling, which Bultmann was clearly unwilling to tackle. You are absolutely right that it takes time, prayer, love, and devotion to engage with these mysteries—I hope you keep working on it!
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