Abstract
Given the task of composing the biography of a classic religious book, introducing both its origins and then transformations over time in its interpretation, significance, rejection, or acceptance, each volume in this series presents highlights in chronological order. As he dips in and out of the timeline, Timothy Beal challenges the category “book” when considering the many worlds generated by the visions of Revelation. On his view, its textual history, acceptance (yes, no, or maybe) in the Christian canon, and its evocative uses of Old Testament echoes together with mythic tropes from the ancient world, all suggests rather anarchic origins. There may be a “book” somewhere in the midst of the debris field, but nothing constrains the subsequent reuses of its fragments.
Though he dips in and out of his evangelical teens with the fixation on 666, the end of days, the rapture, and Christian rock, B.’s approach to Revelation is that of a cultural historian, rather than an exegete or theologian. As such, he repeatedly compares Revelation to Frankenstein: what people know about the pieces that have been stitched together and given life has little or no relationship to the written text. Accordingly, the two chapters dedicated to situating the origins of Revelation are a collection of reading notes that are literary observations to persuade readers of the “generative incomprehensibility” of the book, followed by a context for its war and persecution elements. Dark shadows of empire are more prominent in this tour than the bright visions of saints in heaven, angelic hosts, Mary clothed with sun, and the new heaven and earth that populate the Catholic imagination.
The stops on B.’s transit line are what one would expect for a Middle Ages to Reformation line: a chapter each on St. Augustine’s City of God, Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias, Joachim of Fiore’s Book of Figures, followed by a treatment of Cranach’s twenty-one Dhrer-inspired illustrations for Revelation in Luther’s Bible. At this point B.’s readers will not be surprised that wearing the “literary critic” hat leads him to consider those adaptations a superior rendering of the weird and diabolical imaginary world of Revelation. Most students of the Reformation have also seen the variations on the Pope as Anti-Christ or Whore of Babylon with papal tiaras that migrated into English-speaking Protestantism via the Geneva Bible. B. bypasses Catholic artistic representations of heaven and hell, Dante, and on the Protestant side hymnody, Fox’s Protestant martyrs, and even the political turmoil of the Peasant’s War.
B. concludes his chapter on Joachim of Fiore with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestant diagrams that found in Revelation the key to the eight dispensations of divine grace. Instead of fundamentalism as the first stop on the twentieth-century line, the exploding fragmentation leads to multimedia, Hitler’s propaganda for the Third Reich, and representations of other gods by figures ranging from colonial missionaries in India to evangelical preachers warning against Yoga, Buddhist meditation, and Chinese medicine. The next chapter presents a little-known African American artist from the mid-twentieth century, James Hampton, who had created in a rented storage locker his own immersive model of the throne room from Rev 4:1–4. Discovered after the artist’s death along with his manuscript on the seven dispensations, the work is preserved in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. For B., Hampton represents the ongoing possibilities for idiosyncratic renderings of Revelation.
Returning to the evangelical culture of his youth, B.’s final tour stop takes readers to the cinema. After introducing the theory of the rapture as it emerged in nineteenth-century dispensationalism and was disseminated via the Schofield Bible, he runs through a catalogue of Rapture movies. The genre mutates from Rapture warning to evangelical horror films. Then it shifts to adventure films and the hugely popular “Left Behind” series, including the 2014 film by that name with actor Nicholas Cage. There are, moreover, apparently more on the horizon that hope to capitalize on the zombie apocalypse genre. B. concludes this chapter with the assertion that it is the horror in the middle of Revelation that is the key to its continued life, not the culminating vision of a new heaven and new earth. A postscript points to the many fragments of apocalypse and dominion scripts being played out in our time—in an age of biblical illiteracy, by actors ignorant of their source. For Catholic readers, the modern figure in this biography made of constantly shifting puzzle pieces no longer resembles the Revelation of theology, art, or liturgy.