5
The Book of Revelation
The problem is less that of comprehending a section of the book than the movement which effects passage from one section to another . . . the Apocalypse is not an immobile and definitive architectural whole, but it is in itself movement, which goes from a beginning to an end.84
. . . the whole Apocalypse is an allegory of God and of his work; nothing more!85
This chapter examines one of Ellul’s biblical studies. His 1975 book Apocalypse: Architecture en movement (literally “Apocalypse: Architecture in Movement,” translated in 1977 as Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation) is a creative study of the final book in the biblical canon, the book of Revelation (titled Apocalypse in French). Apocalypse is not easy to read, just as the book of Revelation is not particularly easy to interpret. But readers willing to wrestle with Ellul’s complex interpretation of the book’s symbolism and message will find it a hopeful declaration in a society whose future looks grim. Theologically, it is also a turning point for Ellul; it is his most brazen proclamation of the doctrine of universal divine salvation from judgment, which marks a change in his theology.
Apocalypse, Prophecy, and History
Apocalypse is clearly linked to a handful of Ellul’s other books. Like The Meaning of the City, it explores the meaning of the language of the new Jerusalem at the end of the book of Revelation. Like Ellul’s commentary on 2 Kings, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man, it is interested in the relationship between the eternal and the temporal: both books see Ellul discussing the relationship between Divine action and human history. And like Hope in Time of Abandonment, Apocalypse answers contemporary hopelessness with a powerful declaration of hope in God’s love. Like all Ellul’s biblical studies, Apocalypse treats the Bible as a unified whole, comparing themes or symbols in one biblical book with the same theme or symbol in another book. And finally, like in all his biblical studies, Ellul’s reading of the Apocalypse is decidedly christocentric: he sees Jesus Christ as the meaning and center of biblical proclamation.
Like many of his other works, Ellul’s Apocalypse is in dialogue with major issues in French intellectual life at the time. Two of these are especially noteworthy. The first is the interdisciplinary intellectual movement of structuralism. In the 1960s and ‘70s, intellectuals and the educated public frequently discussed “structures” in one way or another: economic structures (often drawing on the writings of Karl Marx), psychological structures (often drawing on the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud), and linguistic structures (often drawing on the essays of Friedrich Nietzsche). In Apocalypse, Ellul says that he partially applies structuralist method.
Usually, structuralist readings of a given text would separate the text from its author. They would not look to the author for one intended meaning of the text but would emphasize the multiple possible interpretations based on what they could find only in the text itself.
In Apocalypse, the French subtitle—“Architecture in Movement”—offers us an indispensable key to understanding Ellul’s reading of the book of Revelation. We will explore this key shortly, but for now, when Ellul says “architecture,” it is worth comparing to “structure.” Ellul is looking for the connections present within the text, emphasizing how the entire project fits together. However, Ellul does not fully adopt structuralist methods; he is still looking for an intended, purposeful meaning that the text was designed to communicate.
A second important theme in French society at the time was history. At the beginning of the 1970s, many writers in a movement called la nouvelle histoire (“the new history”) were looking for the hidden meaning of historical events. So, when Ellul sees the book of Revelation as revealing the hidden meaning of all of human history, he is giving a theological response to an important question being asked in his day. As we look into what Ellul sees as the architecture and the movement, our guiding question will be: what relationship does Ellul see between the biblical Apocalypse and history?
Ellul notes that the biblical Apocalypse is similar to numerous other writings from the same time period; taken together, these writings can be seen as forming an apocalyptic genre. This matters because it keeps us from reading the text as a historical text, for example. Thus, we should not expect to see Ellul trying to predict if a contemporary political leader is the antichrist or anything along those lines; that is not the kind of communication he envisages finding here. Likewise, some commentators see the biblical Apocalypse as closely linked to its historical context. For example, the number 666 in Rev 13:18 is often read as designating the emperor Nero; Ellul rejects this as well. Instead, he thinks the text uses the historical occasion to communicate something fundamentally true for Christians.86 What matters is not just its similarity to other apocalypses, but also the specificity of this apocalypse. The biblical Apocalypse, for Ellul, takes a similar form to others, but says something entirely unique. It describes another kind of history, one that integrates and “recapitulates” human history. He sees Revelation as disclosing a certain relationship between “truth” and “reality.”87 And he reads the biblical Apocalypse as inextricably related to the person of Jesus Christ—it proclaims that Jesus is the Lord of history. (We will come back to these themes below.)
Ellul also sees the genre of apocalyptic literature as fundamentally different from the genre of prophecy. He notes that prophecy is always linked to past, present, and future history. Apocalypses, however, deal with a dimension different from purely historical time. He notes other variances as well. For example, in prophecy the readers (or actually, listeners) are hearers, while in an apocalypse, the writer is a seer; prophecy is for believers, while an apocalypse is more universal (even if more difficult to decipher); prophecy relates to concrete historical events while an apocalypse is more abstract, more eternal. However, it still is not totally correct to call the apocalypse ahistorical; Ellul thinks that prophecies and apocalypses are still linked.88 It seems we have not quite answered our question about the relation between apocalypse and history. Let us look at what Ellul sees as the architecture of the biblical Apocalypse for further clues.
Sketching the “Architecture”
Ellul sees the symbolic imagery in the book as united into a carefully constructed whole. This means that understanding any one symbol on its own cannot give us the big picture; we need to understand how all the symbols fit together. But this architecture is in movement; the big picture itself is more like a film, in the sense that the architecture unfolds in a certain order. This movement is also a crucial part of the meaning of the book of Revelation. What is the “architecture” of this big picture?
Ellul sees the book as composed of five parts, with an introduction (1) and a conclusion (22:6–21). He divides the book as follows: part 1, which he calls “The Church and Her Lord” (2–4); part 2, “The Revelation of History” (5–7); part 3, “The Keystone” (8:1—14:5); part 4, “The Judgement” (14:6—20:15); and part 5, “The New Creation” (21:1—22:5). Note that part 3 is called “The Keystone,” and the keystone is the highest and most structurally important stone in an arch; without the keystone, the rest cannot bear weight. Part 3 is the center, the crucial component connecting the two sides. Ellul even calls part 3 an axis around which the other four parts turn. In this turning, Ellul sees a symmetry in the construction between the parts: parts 1 and 5 correspond to each other, as do parts 2 and 4, with part 3 in the center. Each of these five sections has an identical structure.
According to Ellul’s structure, each of the five parts is a septenary, having seven parts separately (e.g., seven letters, seals, trumpets, bowls, and visions). Also, each has its own introduction (which includes a vision), its own main body, and its own concluding doxology (“an action of thanksgiving and praise”).89 For example, let us examine part 1 (chapters 2–4). It has an introduction (Rev 1:9–20 serves as an introduction for this section); it has a body, composed of a septenary (the seven letters to the seven churches); and it has a doxology (the songs of the four creatures and the elders, 4:6–11).
However, the movement of this book has to do with how these five septenaries are related to one another. They are linked, inserted in one another. For example, the seven trumpets cannot be heard until the seventh seal is opened. What do these five septenaries communicate? Ellul notes that part 1 is clearly an address from Christ to the historical church, while part 5 clearly addresses the new creation. Remember that Ellul sees parts 1 and 5 as linked. Part 1 presents this church in her present incompleteness, while the new creation of part 5 is this future church as a transformed community, made whole, and living in the presence of God. Part 2 “includes the four horses, the prayers of the martyrs, the development of the temporal plagues, and the existence of the Church,” which Ellul takes to represent the history of humanity upon earth.90 It is linked to part 4, which Ellul sees as clearly indicating a final judgment—thus, the end of history. How to summarize this structure? “In other words, the first and second parts are found in temporality . . . the fourth and fifth outside that temporality.”91 The “axis” that links these two is part 3. But what is part 3? Ellul reads part 3 as a string of veiled references to the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Since Jesus is both man and God, it makes perfect sense, Ellul thinks, that the primary theme of all Christian proclamation (the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ) should be precisely the axis of all history, of all creation, and the link between the temporal and the eternal.
Bringing Marx and Kierkegaard Together: The Powers and Principalities
This language of the temporal and the eternal does not appear in a vacuum. It reflects a specific way of thinking about time, one that Ellul inherited from Søren Kierkegaard (and that ultimately derives from Plato). In this approach to time, there is a qualitative difference between what humans know as time, on the one hand, and eternity on the other. In Plato’s philosophy, eternity described a world of perfect forms, ideas. Our world, by contrast, is made up of copies and lesser images. While Kierkegaard did not necessarily accept all of Plato’s thinking, he did accept and adopt the time/eternity component, which became essential for him.
When Christianity is expressed in these Platonic terms, Christ can be understood as the eternal entering into time. Because Christ is eternal, Kierkegaard thought that every believer can be “contemporaneous” with Christ. This means that even if two thousand years have passed since Jesus’s time on earth, Kierkegaard thought that Christ is just as present today. Thus, a major goal of Kierkegaard’s work was to discern the eternal in the temporal—or the present work of Jesus, in the here and now.
If we pay attention to the language Ellul is using, we can see that in this respect, Apocalypse is a very Kierke-gaardian reading of the book of Revelation. Ellul writes: “The Apocalypse does not describe a moment of history but reveals for us the permanent depth of the historical: it is then, one could say, a discernment of the Eternal in Time.”92 Thus, to understand the biblical Apocalypse, Ellul borrows from Kierkegaard’s philosophical understanding of time.
But Ellul does not take only from Kierkegaard; he also borrows from Karl Marx. Marx saw society and history as evolving through a play of different forces in tension. These forces might be political, economic, or otherwise. The goal of Marx’s thought was to analyze the big picture of society, to try to understand which forces were dominant, determining this evolution.
Ellul was inspired by Marx’s thinking but thought that Marx’s analysis was outdated. If economics was the driving force in the nineteenth century, Ellul and his friend Bernard Charbonneau thought that technique, propaganda, and the state were the most substantial forces in the twentieth century. In Ellul’s sociology, we will see that these three major targets occupied him most of his life.
What is interesting is that Ellul examines these same sociological forces theologically. He asks: How does something like money or the state or entertainment come to occupy a role in individual and collective life? If these really are driving forces of necessity, are we free? And if we see them this way, aren’t they more like what the ancients would have seen as gods, or even demons? Ellul uses the New Testament language of the exousiai, often translated “principalities and powers,” to describe these elements theologically. For example, his book Money and Power analyzes the idolatrous role that money takes in our lives, looks at Jesus’s response to it, and proposes an ethics to combat this idolatry. He does not say that money is worthless or immoral. He wants it to be stripped of the divinization, the power we attribute it, so that it can play a humble role as a servant of human society.
This theological reading of sociological forces reaches its height in Apocalypse. The text combines these two influences, putting Kierkegaard’s time/eternity distinction together with these sociological forces seen as spiritual powers. As we have seen above, Ellul reads some of the book of Revelation as happening outside of time, in the eternal. When Revelation talks about blasphemous beasts, Ellul reads these beasts as the eternal powers and principalities that temporally manifest themselves as political power and propaganda in a given historical moment.
We can thus see that Kierkegaard and Marx help Ellul answer his questions about the hidden meaning of history. When he looks at a sociological event like the growth of the modern state, he discerns a theological reality behind this historical occurrence. This means that when he characterizes our age as defined by technique, he later reads this sociological generalization as a theological reality. This background has helped us understand the architecture of the book of Revelation; but to finish our brief look at Ellul’s commentary Apocalypse, we must return to Revelation’s movement.
Christ as Lord of History
We have seen that Ellul reads Revelation as proclaiming that Jesus Christ is the Lord of history. We have likewise understood that Ellul believes our age is characterized by the dominance of spiritual powers that express themselves in our society through technique, propaganda, and the modern state. How do these two statements go together? The answer has to do with time.
An important part of the movement that Ellul sees in the five-part architecture of Revelation is the defeat, judgment, and destruction of these powers. We must note that this interpretation of the judgment is in direct protest against the way Revelation is often read—as a book of God’s judgment on humanity. We might think of the sculpture above the doors of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris: it presents an angel and a devil with scales, weighing humans and separating them into good and bad. The bad are led away by smiling demons into judgment. Ellul completely rejects this reading. Instead, Ellul thinks that the book of Revelation is a proclamation of hope for all humanity, proclaiming that God’s work in Jesus will ultimately liberate humans from their idolatrous worship of these powers; it is thus the smiling demons who are judged and punished. “That which is judged is only what corrupted the earth.”93
If the powers manifest themselves in things such as technique, the state, and propaganda, this means that Ellul sees these as temporary realities. He reads Revelation as announcing that with Jesus Christ, the transition and defeat of these powers has already begun; the expected return of Christ means the complete annihilation and dethroning of these powers. Thus, the alienation and slavery wrought by technique, propaganda, and the modern state will be addressed, and these realities will be destroyed. In Ellul’s reading, humans themselves will survive the judgment, but their works will be judged. To the extent that their works participate in these evil powers, these works must also be destroyed. “It is the hour . . . either to receive the eternal Gospel and be associated with it, including all that that calls for, or to enter into communion with Babylon.”94 Any works expressing domination and servitude of others will be destroyed; works of love will be preserved.
Indeed, Ellul carries this even further: not just the modern state, but political authority altogether will be vanquished. He interprets Revelation as saying that in the coming age, there will be no more hierarchy, no more rulers, but all will live together in the presence of God. Furthermore, he reads the metaphor of the marriage of Christ and his church as substituting for the metaphor of Christ as a political ruler over the church. From this point on, all political power is ultimately doomed to destruction. Love calls us not only to nonviolence but to forsaking any relations of authority or hierarchy. (From this juncture, we can see the theological origin of Ellul’s later book Anarchy and Christianity.)
Theologically, this is a significant turning point for Ellul. He had always leaned toward a belief in universal salvation but was previously more reserved. In Apocalypse, this proclamation of hope in God’s love, and of salvation for all from oppressing powers, is brazen and no longer hesitant. Theologically, this means that he rejects the double predestination maintained by John Calvin, in which God elects some to be saved and others to be condemned.95 Instead, Ellul emphasizes that this God is love. He thinks that it is impossible that God would damn his creatures. Therefore, his reading of the Apocalypse is ultimately a proclamation of hope that the God who is love will save humanity from the idolatrous and dominating powers that pervert their works and enslave them.
Summary
In Apocalypse, Ellul interprets the biblical book of Revelation as one of hopeful proclamation of God’s salvation for all humanity. In dialogue with popular intellectual movements in France in the 1970s, such as structuralism and new history, Ellul understands the book as an architecture in movement. He sees it as built with a five-part symmetry that turns on part 3—the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Borrowing from Kierkegaard’s philosophy of time, Ellul reads the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the link between the temporal and the eternal. For Ellul, language about blasphemous beasts (see Rev 13–20) represents the spiritual powers and principalities—which he sees manifesting themselves in contemporary society as sociological forces such as technique, propaganda, and the state.
Ellul also contends that the movement in Revelation proclaims the defeat of these powers by Jesus Christ, the gentle Lamb who was slain. While their works will be judged, Ellul understands the hopeful vision of the new Jerusalem as teaching that humans will be saved from judgment and will live in unbroken community with God. His clear emphasis on universal salvation is an important theological turning point for Ellul.
84. Ellul, Apocalypse, 12.
85. Ellul, Apocalypse, 32.
86. See Ellul, Apocalypse, 17.
87. For more on these terms, see chapter 12, below.
88. Ellul, Apocalypse, 26.
89. Ellul, Apocalypse, 43.
90. Ellul, Apocalypse, 45.
91. Ellul, Apocalypse, 46.
92. Ellul, Apocalypse, 24.
93. Ellul, Apocalypse, 250.
94. Ellul, Apocalypse, 176.
95. See Ellul, Apocalypse, 212, note 13.