Nullus Diabolus—Nullus Redemptor: Apocalyptic Perspectives on the Cosmic Struggle for Life Against Death

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Revelation 2:7). To the church in Ephesus, the message was: “[Y]ou have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first” (Revelation 2:4-5). To the church in Sardis the message was: “I know your works; you have the name of being alive, and you are dead. Awake, and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death, for I have not found your works perfect in the sight of my God” (Revelation 3:1-2). To the church at Laodicea the message was: “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked” (Revelation 3:15-17).

And what is the Spirit now saying to the churches of America? Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying to the churches of today. Is not this why we come together in conferences like this one? Are we not here to open our ears and listen to what the Spirit is saying to our churches?

Here, we have heard a lot already, a lot from persons whose wisdom is seasoned by long experience in the struggles for life within a “culture of death.” I cannot add much to what they have said.

But as a theologian, and occasionally as a preacher, I have often pondered, “Why, just why, are we so hard of hearing? Why is it so difficult for us to listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches?” Why can we not see what is happening to a civilization and to a culture that once so proudly called itself Christian?

The Recovery of a Certain Imagination

Could it be that we have lost the ability to discern the spiritual dimensions of the cultural warfare in which we are engaged? I believe it is so. To put it another way, we have largely lost the apocalyptic imagination to understand the language of the Spirit—to fix our “minds on the things that are above” (Colossians 3:2).

The apostle Paul, who called it “discerning the spirits,” realized that “we are not contending against [mere] flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). Without spiritual discernment, we cannot comprehend the greatness and the hiddenness of the cosmic struggle being fought out on planet earth. And though we say we are Christians, and though we believe in Christ, without the apocalyptic worldview and cosmic framework, we lose sight of Christ’s purposes in this world. “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). That is an example of apocalyptic utterance, and we have lost the ability to get it.

We all know, of course, that the term apocalyptic is notoriously difficult to define. Scholars routinely accuse each other of using the term without defining it. I think the reason is that apocalyptic—as both a type of literature and a view of the world (a Weltanschauung)—is a multifaceted thing. Therefore, it is not subject to a simple, one-line definition. Vaguely we sense that apocalyptic has something to do with eschatology, another conspicuously imprecise word. But we would all agree that eschatology includes the idea of the inbreaking of the kingdom of God from the future into the present, and the interpretation of history from the perspective of the end times. The word apocalypse most straightforwardly means revelation. Thus the apocalypse is the revelation of final mysteries and meanings hidden from ordinary eyes. Only those specially given eyes to see and ears to hear can grasp “the things which are above.” Those who do not like apocalyptic dismiss it as a pile of hooey, nothing but dreamlike poppycock that is completely separated from the events of history and the realities of human experience.

When Jesus said, “my kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36, KJV), he made a revolutionary, apocalyptic statement that has had political repercussions down through the centuries. The early Christians caught its meaning in their first and simplest confession, “Jesus is Lord.” This confession prompted Martin Niemoeller to preach in Berlin, in the face of the Nazis, that only Jesus is our Führer, and no one else—a subversive political statement that got him thrown into jail.

We need to recover apocalyptic understanding to strengthen our backbone and to stiffen our Christian resistance movement, to face up to the rapid rate of moral decline and cultural decay that our society is undergoing. While our schools are not safe, our streets are not safe, our homes look like jails, and our marriages and families are disintegrating, many churches have exchanged Word-and-Sacrament ministry for “bread and circuses.”

The apocalyptic perspective does not encourage a wishy-washy attitude on the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, truth and lies, and fact and fiction. Under the influence of apocalyptic, we would put back into our speech and outlook concepts like total change, the demonic, signs of the times, conversion, absolute and unconditional love to God and neighbor, the reversal of roles, birth pangs of the future.

We must learn to go back and forth between the inspired language, concepts, and worldview of the Bible, on the one hand, and the ordinary language of our secular world, on the other hand. We know that we possess a highly developed, secular vocabulary for speaking about crushing evils and about how to deal with threatening catastrophes of our day—racism, oppression, violence, terrorism, hunger, homelessness, nuclear annihilation, global warming, overpopulation, environmental poisoning, and others. In contrast, biblical apocalyptic speaks about Satan, demons, angels good and bad, powers, principalities, dominions, thrones, elemental spirits of the universe, and the Dragon and the Beast. Its fundamental story line is the cosmic struggle between the Lord and Creator Spirit of life and “the prince of demons,” “the ruler of this world” of death, darkness, decadence, and destructiveness.

In the worldview of the Bible, when the works of the Devil are set aside, the works of God are diminished. That is, apart from the Devil, there is no need of divine redemption, no need of Christ. Nullus diabolus, nullus redemptor. Without the Devil and his dominion, the biblical story becomes flattened out and one-dimensional, leaving us with “I’m O.K., you’re O.K.,” and other gooey sayings and sentiments. Without the Devil and his dominion, God the Redeemer loses much of his identity through the abolition of his opposition, his satanic antithesis.

The modern mind has tried to do away with the dualistic features of the biblical understanding of the universe. The modern mind simply assumes that angels, spirits, principalities, powers, demons, and the like do not exist. Or, if we somehow feel bound to concede their existence out of pious deference to the combined weight of Scripture and tradition, we tend to think of them as weightless entities that flit about in the air, and occasionally invade human space from the outside.

Not so in the world of apocalyptic thinking. J. Louis Martyn says: “The dicta most basic to the apocalyptic thinker are these: God created both heaven and earth. There are dramas taking place both on the heavenly stage and on the earthly stage. Yet these dramas are not really two, but rather one drama….The developments in the drama on its heavenly stage determine the developments on the earthly stage…. Events seen on the earthly stage are entirely enigmatic to one who sees only the earthly stage.” In other words, what is really going on is happening on two levels, and the heavenly and the earthly levels of reality are interconnected. In the biblical drama of salvation, the spiritual and material realms are entwined in the biblical drama, and the drama reaches its climax in the story of Jesus and his redemptive victory over sin, death, and the Devil.

Modern biblical scholarship has grudgingly conceded the role and significance of apocalypticism in early Christian theology. Grudgingly, I say, because, at the same time, modern scholarship has devised various demythologizing schemes to neutralize whatever scandalizes the modern mind. Therefore, according to modern scholarship, belief in miracles and the reality of demons (in this most demonic of centuries) are bracketed and critiqued.

Theologians have been reluctant to accept the full weight of Albert Schweitzer’s discovery of the apocalyptic structure and content of Jesus’ eschatology because that would make Jesus all the more a stranger to modern culture, which of course is just the point we should want to emphasize. Henry Cadbury long ago wrote a book entitled The Peril of Modernizing Jesus. All this apocalyptic stuff that does not fit our so-called scientific picture of the world is simply dismissed as so much mythological husk that can be swept away. So we cradle Jesus and his message in the categories of our favorite psychological and sociological theories, as do the scholars of the Jesus Seminar.

But it was Ernst Käsemann, New Testament theologian of Tübingen, who pronounced in the face of modern demythologizing and existentialist interpretation: “Apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian theology.” Käsemann realized that he was taking up one of the forbidden topics in the theology of the academic establishment. He wrote: “Primitive Christian apocalyptic is generally regarded by theological scholars as not being a suitable topic for our day.”

Literary Illustrations

Only the recovery of the apocalyptic elements of the biblical story of salvation will mobilize the churches to meet head-on the critical issues revolving around the beginning and ending of human life and the entire span in between. Political engagement alone will not suffice, for politics is the art of compromise. And on some life-and-death matters, there is no room for negotiated settlements.

Twentieth-century literature offers some splendid examples of apocalyptic retrieval. C. S. Lewis is most true to the biblical tradition. Not only in The Screwtape Letters but also in Perelandra, the Oxford don shows that there is a war between good and evil linked to all our individual choices, which have cosmic implications. The material world we see is not the only world there is; hidden within it is a real world of ultimate truths and values that cannot be seen with ordinary eyes, or by reason alone, but only with that sixth sense of spiritual discernment, by faith alone. God and the Devil are both real; it is a materialist delusion to think they do not exist.

Another literary giant is Georges Bernanos, who was part of the Catholic Renaissance in France, along with people like Paul Claudel, Francois Mauriac, and Antoine Peguy. For Bernanos, as for Lewis, the struggle between good and evil in the individual soul is the microcosm of the cosmic contest between God and the Devil. There is a void in all of humanity, like unto nothingness, “exuding hatred of God and love of death. Deadly sin lies in associating ourselves with this nothingness, with a conscious complicity in Satan’s ruses, a lucid acceptance of his power to corrupt, and a willingness to come to terms with him.” The novels of Bernanos picture Satan as the personality at the heart of evil and Christ as the personality at the heart of good. “Without belief in Satan,” he argued, “one cannot fully believe in God. The world is riddled with evil, and deliberate blindness to that fact obscures the truth about the world and therefore the truth about God. The scale of evil in the world far transcends what humanity could cause itself, and all efforts to improve the world without understanding this transcendence are doomed to failure.”

The Apocalyptic Jesus

The source of the literary imagination of C. S. Lewis and Georges Bernanos is the world of biblical apocalypticism. It all began with the Jews during the period between the Testaments. There we find that the main focus is on the future, on what God will do to redeem Israel through the coming of the Messiah. In the ministry and message of Jesus, the focus on the future is curved back upon the present, upon Jesus himself. Jesus not only preaches a future messianic kingdom to come; rather, in him, the kingdom has already arrived. He is the autobasileia—the messianic kingdom itself. Jesus does not merely point to the future in the present; instead, he makes present the reality of God’s future in a concentrated, personal way. The attitude that a person now takes to Jesus determines his own personal meaning and destiny—salvation, if you please.

This motif is very important to those of us caught up in a struggle in which we seemingly have been losing ground. We are to struggle with all our might and mane for the coming of the kingdom of life over the reign of death, but we cannot make it come. The conditions of its coming are not subject to our power or efforts. We are not asked to save the world; only God can do that. Meanwhile, the only way to live as Christian disciples is to resist death and the Devil in whatever earthly forms they appear. And we can do so with hope and confidence because, paradoxically, we can already celebrate the victory of God over the Enemy—the unholy trinity of sin, death, and the Devil. In Christ the decisive battle has already been won. Although we are called to continue the struggle for the dignity of life against the defilement of death, the outcome is no longer in doubt. We shall overcome! We are more than conquerors! This is the ground on which we stand, in light of the apocalyptic vision of the triumph of God over evil in this world.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune (August 29, 1998) featured a story about the letters W.W.J.D.— “What Would Jesus Do?”—the latest, multimillion-dollar bonanza for companies marketing bracelets, T-Shirts, pens, key chains, books, calendars, stuffed animals, and tote bags, all of which sells not only in Christian boutiques but in mainstream stores like K-Mart. “What would Jesus do?” Sounds like the right question. Right? Wrong! It is the wrong question because it lets us off the hook; it puts us in charge of the answer. The right question is “What did Jesus do?” or “What will Jesus do?” And how does W.W.J.D. tell us who he is?

Christians have always looked to the real Jesus—the living Christ—of the Gospels in search of a word, a model, a promise, or a sign, to challenge us, to direct us, to clue us in as to where to stand, when to march, how to act. After all the revolutions in recorded history have come and gone, there remains the revolutionary, recorded message and ministry of Jesus that outlasts and transcends them all.

Jesus of Nazareth read his first manifesto in the synagogue, taken from the prophet Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed… . (Lk 4:18)

He came to the defense of the defenseless. He took sides in the struggle of life for the poorest of the poor, forgotten people locked up in jails, the blind, all the victims of oppression. It does not stretch the imagination too much to include the most helpless of all—abused children and the millions of unborn little ones, treated like garbage often for the sake of personal convenience.

Jesus never talked about gradual measures, minor improvements, piecemeal changes, or just a little bit of progress. He had an all-or-nothing way of speaking. He was not for reform but repentance. He was not for accommodation but conversion. He did not talk about the happy medium, the middle way. It was the mark of his apocalyptic mind-set to speak in absolutes, in total terms, and in complete transvaluations (which involve a reversal of signs so that plus becomes minus and minus becomes plus). No wonder the apocalyptic Jesus has become a stranger to our times.

The call of the kingdom is not to become a little better, but to turn away radically from the old ways to a new life. In this new life there are deeds to be done. Discipleship calls for discipline, moral clarity, and behavioral consistency. When Jesus brings the rule of God into our lives, he brings the love of God first of all, forgiveness for the wretched sinners we are. But he was never heard preaching an unconditional love and acceptance that leaves people in their sins; that kind of popular, mushy sentimentality blinds us to the sins marked out for condemnation by the commandments of God.

When the kingdom of God, the rule of God’s love, claims a person, one must be prepared to sacrifice whatever gets in the way of our love and loyalty to God. It may be parents, possessions, profession, or patriotism. Extreme measures are called for; an offending eye must be plucked out, and an evil-doing hand cut off, so to speak. One must be prepared to be despised, ridiculed, and ostracized by old friends and esteemed colleagues. A clean-cut choice has to be made. God and mammon cannot both be served; either you carry the cross of the kingdom or you seek the security of the system. I know some young, aspiring scholars afraid to speak or write on certain, forbidden topics, or even to be closely associated with those who do, lest they should jeopardize their chances of climbing the academic ladder. “[W]hoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). This unconditional surrender of all your heart, soul, mind, and body to the rule of God’s love means this: giving your whole life away is the only way really to get a life.

And who knows what can happen when such an apocalyptic reversal of ordinary religion and everyday morality takes place. Who knows what new dreams, new thrusts, and new directions may lead to a more just, wholesome, and peaceful society. This gets down to the nitty-gritty of social morality, economic systems, political structures, and juridical procedures. What the Bible calls “principalities and powers,” from whose systems of domination Christ has set us free, are the driving determinants behind many of the cultural institutions of our day. These “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” are not floating in the air beyond distant clouds; they are rather the spiritual heart and soul of earthly institutions that conspire against life and the Giver of life. Remember: these are the same public institutions that joined forces to pronounce the death penalty and execute the Lord of life on a criminal’s cross.

Jesus died a public death in a public place at the hands of public forces. Organized religion put Jesus to death. The economy got involved—graft, greed, and bribery in the hands of the moneychangers. Blood money put Jesus to death. The judicial process swung into action—a kangaroo court, a flunky judge, false witnesses, concocted charges. A corrupt juridical system put Jesus to death. Chanting idiot slogans to heat up the blood in their veins, the mob fell in line with the ruling class. The masses had been programmed to thrive on violence, to sink into sadism; so they switched from the hosanna chants of one weekend to the cries, “Crucify him,” on the next. The polls and public opinion, voices from the conservative cliques, the radical reformers, and the middle-class all had a hand in putting Jesus to death. And then there was the military. Soldiers were there to carry out the will of the ruling oligarchy. They stripped him, beat him, and pressed thorns into his scalp. They only did what they were ordered to do, trained as they were to do the bidding of Rome. And so they drove the spikes through his hands and feet. They gambled for his clothes. And Jesus was dead, literally dead.

All of that you could see with your eyes, if you had been there. It was a public affair. But the New Testament looks into the spiritual depths of the cross. It was not just a bad mix-up at city hall, resulting in an unfortunate death of an innocent man. “On that cross he [God] discarded the cosmic powers and authorities like a garment; he made a public spectacle of them and led them as captives in his triumphal procession” (Colossians 2:15, NEB). Luther had a similar knack of seeing what lies beneath the surface plane—what I have called apocalyptic imagination. The cross was a trap God set for the Devil. “The Devil saw Jesus as his prize, snapped at the bait, and was pulled out of the water for all to see.” Sin, death, and the Devil were the real but hidden powers at play in the passion of our Lord. That is why the victory of the cross is so great and unique; it deals with the profoundest dimensions of human bondage. Jesus “gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father” (Galatians 1:4). Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). “[W]e impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God,” Paul writes, “which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7-8). It took a good dose of spiritual discernment, or apocalyptic imagination, for Paul to view Christ’s death as salvation from the wrath of God (Romans 5:9), or to see Christ as a paschal lamb sacrificed on our behalf.

So what is the Spirit of God saying to the churches of our nation? “If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world?” We are talking about the meaning of baptism, the time when we renounced the Devil and all his works and ways. Paul is keen to associate our freedom with baptism, our living through dying with Christ. “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life…We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin” (Romans 6:4 and 6). Baptism is our entrance into a countercultural community that, instead of cozying up to the powers that be, has the courage to tangle with the demons of our day, to engage the structures of destruction, the rulers and powers in high places. Those of us in the countercultural community called the Church know that these rulers and powers even have the votes and the vetoes on their side, with power to decide the fate of unborn humans whose little bodies, with divinely endowed souls, can be denied a future of earthly life in the community of the beloved.

The Seer of the Apocalypse writes: “If anyone has an ear, let him hear: If any one is to be taken captive, / to captivity he goes; / if any one slays with the sword, / with the sword must he be slain. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints” (Revelation 13:10). We must not, for the sake of the kingdom of God, fight violence with violence. Jesus spoke in negatives as though to warn us against trying to bring in the kingdom in worldly ways. He spoke as though he did not expect many of us would have the guts to do it his way—the way of suffering and the cross. Perhaps he was expecting, at most, a tiny cadre of followers, of faithful disciples. So he said in effect: “My little band of followers must be different.” Therefore, you must not get angry or swear; you must not be a hypocrite; you must not see the splinter in your brother’s eye; do not brag about your good deeds; and do not put a lot of money in the bank. Do not worry about tomorrow; it takes the joy and humor out of today. Do not be greedy and full of spite. If you lose, do not get mad at the guy who beats you. Say, “Nice going, good shot,” not out of pretense and good manners, but from the heart. When you pray, do not show off, using nice religious words and the meaningless repetition of ritualistic phrases.

Who cares to join the movement headed up by Jesus? He does not make it easy for us. Do not just love your family and friends; love your enemies. It is easy to pray for those who love you back. Try praying for those you oppose, whose deeds you condemn, the people on the other side. And do not seek revenge, but get the hate out of your heart. If someone enjoys hitting you on the cheek or below the belt, let him do it again and again. Give, and expect nothing in return.

Who can handle all of that? The apocalyptic word and model that came to expression in Jesus is paradoxically the good news. Yet, it is the good news for us living in precarious times. We are living in apocalyptic times, and yet we are trying to get along without an apocalyptic faith and theology. We are trying to use a theology of the establishment, written by academics in comfortable, temperature-controlled rooms and written for establishment types who grapple at a distance with the life-and-death issues. We academics have heard about these issues through television, newspapers, histories, and studies, but are we prepared to deal with the actions of the Beast and the Dragon of the Apocalypse entwined with them? Remember, we are not fighting against flesh and blood. It is not merely a case of bad politicians who could be replaced by good politicians. We are dealing with structures of world-wide destruction of cosmic proportions, with principalities and powers, with the Dragon and the Beast.

The Apocalypse of John was written at a time when Christians were in grave danger. Rome was beginning to enforce the cult of emperor worship. Some in the church were advocating a policy of compromise. John had a vision and then wrote it down to encourage the faithful to stand fast, to resist the demands of emperor worship, even unto death. Again and again in our century, at times of severe peril and persecution, this book has come back into play. It is amazing to remember that at one time the Book of Revelation barely made it into the canon of Scripture, and would have been thrown out if some theologians had had their way.

Ernst Käsemann—and I come back to him from time to time—specified: “For the first time in remembered history, the tide is running against us; and for the first time since the early days of Christianity, it is possible seriously to imagine that the vision of the Book of Revelation is literally being fulfilled: that the Antichrist is enthroned visibly and universally on the graves of the saints and only in the desert is there room for the people of God.”

There are many—perhaps some hardheaded thinkers here—who would question the wisdom of reviving the polarizing, antagonistic rhetoric of apocalyptic: God and Satan, angels and demons, good and evil, heaven and hell, life and death, cross and resurrection. These are not the sorts of things we learn about in the core curriculum of our most highly rated colleges, universities, and seminaries. Moreover, the symbols of the apocalypse have often been made into speculative playthings of eschatological sharpshooters, who gaze into the remote future and concoct unreal agendas of “last things.” The point is rather to reappropriate language and images that match the realities of our present.

Apocalyptic symbols help us to see things as they really are, to see the many rivals at war. There is no Christ alone; his identity is established in relation to the Antichrist. There is no Gospel as such; it can be known best in contrast to the law. The sense of the holy becomes sharp in relation to what is profane. In the Gospels it is the demon-possessed who are able to recognize the Christ. The identity and meaning of Christ go hand in hand with the works of the Antichrist. If Christ means freedom and liberation, then the Antichrist means domination, oppression, and slavery. The work of Christ exists in direct opposition to the principalities and powers, the world rulers of this present darkness, and the spiritual hosts of wickedness (Ephesians 6:12).

Reasonable people are invoking apocalyptic categories to frame the culture wars being waged in the media, in education, in religion, in politics, and in law. Peter Kreeft calls for an “ecumenical jihad” to stand up against the culture wars that are fast eroding the fundamentals of religion, morality, and law on which society is based. When abortion and homosexual behavior become commonplace in the society and in the churches, and merely matters of personal choice and lifestyle preference, we find ourselves up to our noses in the sludge of social decay and decadence. It boggles the mind. Politicians, or the majority of them, vote for such things in the name of tolerance and enlightenment. Educators en masse endorse them. The media celebrate them. Meanwhile, churches are divided by them. And theologians, or at least many of the best of them, have long since slid down the slippery slope of relativism and pluralism. We are in for a very long haul.

The Apocalypse of John pictures imperial Rome in terms of the Dragon and the Beast. Can that picture be superimposed on the American Empire? Are we now dealing with the Dragon and the Beast? I do not know, but if the shoe fits, we should at least wear it for a while. So let us listen to how the Apocalypse depicts the Dragon and the Beast.

The Dragon has given colossal power to the Beast, and the Beast sits on the throne and exercises great authority. People fear, love, and trust the Beast’s authority above all things. John was worried that even Christians are willing to bend their knees. They say the authority is to be trusted because the authority knows best. They say there is no one like the Beast. It is the proudest power, the greatest nation, in the history of the world. It cannot be wrong. It cannot be defeated. Honor and pride belong to the Beast. Who can stand up against it? The mouth of the Beast utters haughty and blasphemous words. The Beast is blaspheming the name of God, because it makes war on the saints. The Beast is a world imperialist. It exercises authority over every tribe, people, tongue, and nation. It dominates the world’s markets. It exports instruments of violence and vice. It sneers at the ways and customs of other people. It succeeds in making its language the lingua franca of all nations and continents. And it forces all the little people of the world to live off the crumbs that fall from the table, that trickle down to them from the top. John says, if you want to know what is going on, you must know about the Dragon and the Beast, and the deeper realities hidden behind the apparent causes and daily headlines. What John found most lamentable was that Christians were confused about what was going on. Someone has said that the Church, which is supposed to be the searchlight, is more often the taillight of every new movement in the world. There were Christians, John saw, who were willing to live a hyphenated existence with the Beast. Not satisfied with an exclusively Christian identity, they were willing to compromise, to accommodate a worldly political affiliation. John feared that Christianity would become merely an adjective, in effect, offering legitimation and support to the operations of the Beast in the world. Watch out, you who have been signed with the cross, lest you too bear the mark of the Beast! Christianity becomes an adjective when Christ is not the soul and substance of the Church, the sole head of the body. Kierkegaard warned from allegedly Christian Denmark: “Little by little and now at last, Christianity has become exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament.” Of course, they said Kierkegaard was known to be given to occasional exaggerations.

Conclusion

So what are the churches to do? How can you fight the Beast if, when you get rid of one, the Dragon will dispatch another? The first thing, John said, is to remain faithful; and the second is to remember you are in the struggle for the long haul, until the day Christ returns in all his glory. So what are we to do in the meantime? What are people of the endtime to do in the meantime? What does it mean to remain faithful?

We are followers of the Lamb that was slain. Brawls in the alleys will not do. “If anyone slays with the sword, with the sword must he be slain” (Revelation 13:10). The Lamb was slain so that we will slay no more. We are free to die on a cross, but not to place another person’s body on the rack. We know there will be violence, for it is sheer stupidity to think that the Beast will be a silent spectator of its own demise and destruction. And here is the good news of the Apocalypse. The Gospel tells us that the Dragon has received a mortal wound. We can hardly keep from laughing in the face of the Beast, because we know that the entire imperial network of powers under the authority of the Dragon has more than met its match. There is no longer any reason for gloom and despair. We can sing the songs of victory even now in the midst of the struggle. One of the verses proclaims: “[T]he devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!” (Revelation 12:12). Worship is the most potent political weapon we have, which is why John had to condemn every form of emperor worship, because it resulted in giving away what is most precious—the gift of freedom to worship God and God alone in purity and in truth. Idolatry is the greatest sin, and blasphemy its next of kin.

In the meantime, eschatologically speaking, the Church will always be a resistance movement in the world, resisting evil and the agents of death, all the wiles and ways of the Dragon and the Beast. The struggle will never end, and will always have a specific target. But let it not be said that we are down in the mouth, for we are born anew to celebrate the victory of God in the midst of apparent setbacks. In the very midst of strife and suffering, we can always sing a hymn, say a prayer, and know that God is with us.

Those who engage in struggles for life against death, and who lack the resources of faith and worship, are often people of courage and virtue, but they cannot be trusted to hang in there for the long haul. And that is because Christian ethics does not stand on its own feet; its resource lies in the depths of the faith that reaches into the heart of God. Many partners in the struggle look for social change based on humanistic moral guidelines, but they depart when the going gets rough. They are likely to respond to political setbacks in moods of resignation and despair. They lack the eschatological perspective embedded in the liturgical celebrations of the Church. For liturgy is basically eschatology, the sacramental communication of God’s future in Christ under the conditions of these troubled times. In the liturgy we are reminded that even when we lose a battle or two, we are still assured of the outcome.

Here again the Apocalypse can help us. It was Michael and his angels who fought against the Dragon. This is good news! We are not in it alone. What defeated the Dragon, “that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Revelation 12:9)? Not the number and power of the saints who took him on in hand-to-hand combat. Rather, “they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death” (Revelation 12:11). Satan is cast down, stripped of his power, and it is only a question of time before he will be thrown into the lake of fire. His eternal fate is sealed; his days in time are numbered.

To see all of this requires apocalyptic imagination. Only those who have eyes to see can see what the Seer has seen in his vision. Because of this, when repression is visited upon the saints, their numbers grow. The blood of the martyrs is indeed the seed of the Church. Christians have no right to expect a better hand than the system dealt to their commander in chief, the way of suffering and the cross, which is a mark of the true and faithful Church!

Jesus, the one who was slain by the Dragon and the Beast, who has been exalted to heaven, who now sits at the right hand of the Father, holds the whole world in his hands. This is the victory that supports our faith. The rule of God has already begun. The authority of Christ is not pie in the sky bye and bye. His will is being done already, now!, on earth as it is in heaven. We may exercise the power of prayer to pray for our enemies; we have been given the gift to make peace in the throes of violence; we have the uncanny ability to love those we otherwise would hate; and we face the prospect of death in the joy of life.

With apocalyptic imagination we hold, contrary to all appearances, and therefore paradoxically, that the Lordship of Christ is already fully established. Our faith in the power of the Spirit is invincible; it cannot deceive us. What we hold in our imagination we declare already as fact on account of Christ.

“Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever’” (Revelation 11:15).

This address first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Jul/Aug 2000).