Apocalypse Against Empire

Apocalypse Against Empire January 20, 2016

Catherine Keller argues (God and Power) that apocalyptic vision turned “a local, territorializing Israelite faith” into a global one. Apocalyptic “formed first as a response to the imperial aggression of Babylon, which had traumatically deterritorialized Israel; then the Babylon of Isaianic apocalyptic became code for Rome.” In Christian hands, the territorial homeland of Jerusalem “morphed into the transcendent Christian (non)space,” which “deterritorialized Jerusalem” and then reterritorialized it with settlement by Crusaders (41). The apocalyptic thus inspired an imperial form of Christianity.

Imperialist, and masculinist. The Apocalypse, she says, trades in anti-feminist, anti-feminine gender dualisms: “John of Patmos’s hysterical denunciation of his female competitor as ‘Jezebel’ was harmless enough in its context. But due to the success of his letter to the churches, its sexist rhetoric has provided an indelible template for his fans. They have practices such various readings as the polygamous and gynocidal terror of Jan Bockelson’s sixteenth-century ‘New Jerusalem’ community, fundamentalism’s founding inscription of the nineteenth-century New Woman as ‘silly women of the last days,’ and David Koresh’s harem. One is struct by the utility of sexism as an engine of empowerment for socially marginalized male believers. Apocalyptic has promoted an ascetic, heroic, and dominating masculinity that energizes resistance to a perceived (and often real) oppression and that fuels revolutionary flames. It can declare the New Woman, or feminism, or for that matter any opponent . . . the Whore of Babylon, and it can do so with a purity of rage unavailable to the compromised Christian mainstream” (59).

At base, though, Keller thinks that Revelation runs counter to both of these trajectories. It’s an anti-imperial book: “The biblical Messiah comes to beat the empire, not to join it! The empire in the Book of Revelation is the evil” (ix). And the very nature of “apocalypse” “runs counter to the idolatry of invulnerable hypermasculinity. Both the Lamb and the Beast display their gynomorphic openings, their wounds. They expose an inevitable mutuality of wounding. In their mimickry they nearly sabotage the dream of superpower, the dream of impassionability. Almost they cry for compassion. . . . Apocalypto: to reveal, to disclose, to open – it opens up its bodies, even the divine body, in the hope of a world without violence. It displays the unmaking of the world – and its remaking. But its remaking takes place through unmaking, its redemption through destruction” (49). 

Keller is definitely onto something, both in her view of the ways in which Revelation has been used and in the ways it resists some of those uses. In the end, though, she thinks that the Apocalypse is at war with itself. She doesn’t think that John finally has the courage of his convictions. “There will be no more death” announces “terminating all mourning, all indeterminacy, all vulnerability,” and thus reintroduces the “dream of absolute omnipotence” (49). That “dream” is pretty integral to the Apocalypse, as is the dream of deliverance from pain and death. That does not mean the victory of “hypermasculinity” or “empire” (on which Keller’s views are naive). It does not mean the supercession of femininity. It means rather the glorification of the Lamb in the glorification of the Bride.


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