For all the changes taking place in our media, technology and entertainment, there is an inevitable power in the release of a good story.
Yuval Noah Harari, the immensely popular atheist historian of books like Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, for all his scientism looks back at the dawning of homo sapiens and suggests the only genius he can find to explain how we came to be distinct as a species was that somehow we mastered the art of telling stories.
I think this is telling.
Stories move us. They connect us. I mean who doesn’t love to experience the rush of being in on a binge worthy tv show that’s really picking up steam, or having gone to see the latest big release that every one seems to be talking about.
Yet there is something deeper going on here. Stories shape us. They are essential to the binding glue of what draws us together and keeps us connected. They are intended to be the structure that we grow around. Like the trellis to a vine, stories shape how we understand who we are in the world and how we are meant to live and move and have our being.
There has been a slow simmering recovery for a while now in biblical studies circles that the church needs to recover the power of the Bible’s story. I’m fully on board with this call to action.
Yet what’s so striking about Revelation is that the sweep of its apocalyptic imagery does not just speak straight at us in prose or narrative, much as the gospels or other moving portions of the Biblical narrative do. Instead the signs and symbols of Revelation “tell the truth, but tell it slant” as Emily Dickinson once noted.
Revelation picks up the epic signs and symbols of our greatest fantasy imaginings. There are dragons and battles. Near deaths and near escapes. Gated cities and horrific scenes like rivers of blood. Trumpets and bowls. Judgements and salvation.
In this episode, I try to hold room for the mystery. We are at our worst when our literalism tries to parse the “signs” for concrete events (though our day and age is certainly not alone in believing our task is to make sense of it all).
But what if we’re meant to hold this book like our greatest stories? Not as “un-truth” but a deeper kind of truth - a story that is meant to structure our navigation of reality?
The more I’ve pondered it, the more I’ve come to believe that if we didn’t have Revelation, we would be missing part of the epic scope and grandeur of what everyone needs: a story so much bigger than the ordinary and every day problems we find ourselves in.
I won’t pretend in this episode to understand all of it. But I am thankful it is there to spark what all great stories do - a sense of wonder.
And maybe, just maybe, a spark of hope.
With hope,
John
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