Wreaking Weakness: A Cultural Studies Reading of the Lamb in the Apocalpyse

by BRIAN K. BLOUNT

Brian K. Blount is the Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament Interpretation. His forthcoming book is titled Can I Get A Witness?: Reading Revelation Through an African American Lens. He delivered this inaugural lecture in Miller Chapel on October 13, 2004.

But it is just here, at the point where he should be his most clear, that the seer starts seeing inconceivable things. From chapter 4 on, he ushers us into the heavens and reveals a barrage of otherworldly images that are supposed to have a decidedly this-worldly instructional impact. Impact to precisely what end, it is difficult to say. Stunned by the visual onslaught, centuries of interpreters have squinted through John's dark looking glass in an often futile effort to determine exactly what revelation this Apocalypse really reveals. Instead of clarifying, this Revelation obscures.

Fortunately for us, culture reveals. By enveloping an object of interpretation the way a carefully selected frame surrounds and thereby shapes the reading of the portrait it holds, culture contributes to meaning even as, and precisely because, it supplies context.¹ The revelation here is that the cultural context ofthe interpreter plays a powerful role in shaping the meaning that interpreter builds from his or her interaction with a text like John's Apocalypse.

Language is the foundation of every text. Language is potential. Language creates choice. It provides both the persons who draft it and those who subsequently encounter it with the opportunity to decode its audible sounds and visible markers. Words, for example, do not convey meaning; they convey meaning potential. That potential, that opportunity for choice, becomes meaningful only when it is performed and accessed in a certain context. One might consider the example “head.” Clearly polyvalent, it could refer as easily to the leader of some organization or group as to the body part occupying the space between your shoulders. In some colloquial settings it could even be paired synonymously with as unlikely a partner as “bean” or “noggin.” A sailor in search of a particular kind of relief might access it in a totally different manner still. In such a way, the single word attracts many different, but still “correct” decoding choices. The “meaningful” choice depends on the context.

If words are by themselves this polyvalent, one can imagine that the potential for meaning will increase exponentially as we collect words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into entire texts. The boundaries of choice widen even further in poetic texts where an author intends that his or her words accommodate a high degree of symbolic elasticity. The language of apocalyptic, John's language in Revelation, is consciously poetic. Symbolic to the core, it invites choice at almost every linguistic turn.² The cultural space one occupies will therefore be a critical factor in determining how and what that language means.

No doubt this is why critical interpreters have routinely anchored their readings of the Apocalypse in the presumed first-century cultural context of John and his first hearers/readers. The presumption is clear: John's writing context will clarify John's writing intent. There are two problems. First, scholars do not discover John's culture. They reconstruct it. That reconstruction operates from historical and literary clues. John has embedded some of the most important of those clues in his writing. For example, he locates his churches in Asia Minor at a time when believers in the Lordship of Jesus Christ are subject to varying forms of social and political hostility from those who represent the power, lordship, and influence of Rome. Such clues, however, are suggestive, not determinative. It is no wonder then that there has been considerable debate over John's actual historical circumstance. Was there a widespread pogrom against Christians, or was the hostility, while often deadly, sporadic and specifically targeted? Was Domitian the emperor of record? Or was John's Babylonian beast steered by some other shepherd? When even answers to such elementary questions are open to debate, it is clear that while the historical and literary clues offer meaning potential, they do not provide meaning, in the form of objective, historical fact. Historians and exegetes use that potential in their reconstructive efforts. They access that potential through the lens of their own historical, social, political, and religious cultural contexts. The end result? The context into which researchers situate and thereby shape their interpretation of John's Revelation is rigged as much by the presumptions of their own cultural locations as by any alleged historical facts.

The second problem derives from the first. Historical critical researchers presumed that the past meaning they divined from a careful consideration of John's Revelation in light of John's historical context would be the one objective meaning that was stable and therefore meaningful for every reader in every place and time. Ironically, this quest for the past meaning obscured the fact that different interpreters from different contemporary contexts were reading the literary and contextual signals differently. Even when historical critical interpreters were fortunate enough to come to some consensus about John's historical context, they still found different and often opposing objective meanings.³ Why? Culture. Not John's culture. The culture of the Johannine interpreter.

Culture reveals. Revelation seen (the Revelation we see) is always Revelation read (the Revelation we read) through a particular cultural lens. It is therefore the Revelation of and for a particular, present culture. If that is indeed the case, if, whether we want it to or not, culture plays a key role in the revelatory process, why not do a cultural studies reading of Revelation? Instead of clinging to a fruitless search for a universal, objective interpretation whose one counsel pretends to fit everyone in every conceivable context, why not deploy a cultural studies model that can clarify Revelation's meaning for us?⁴

No matter what legion of investigative methods are deployed, in the end a clear Revelation is always our Revelation. When we try to make someone else's Revelation our Revelation, that effort obscures and mystifies; it speaks to and for their culture, not ours. No wonder, then, that it so often ends up sounding like so much mythological mumbo jumbo. This is precisely why the historical critical, literary critical, or any critical attempt to locate the Apocalypse in its first-century context and then to divine the universal, objective meaning for the book out of that context is an abortive enterprise from the start. Even if an interpreter is so fortunate as to reconstruct John's first-century context with sharp historical accuracy, and is subsequently skilled enough to use some methodological apparatus to inoculate himself from his own cultural predispositions and influences, his objective, accurate reading of Revelation will still be obscure. It would not make sense to a twenty-first-century reader precisely because its sense would be permanently lodged in the cultural confines of the last decade of the first century (or whatever decade and century that proficient interpreter finally determined was the work's accurate date). That fortunate interpreter would find himself in possession of an interpretive fossil from some dead community in the past, not an instructive meaning for some particular living community in the present.

But that is, dare I say it, good news. A cultural studies approach to Revelation clarifies what is otherwise obscure and makes what is otherwise incomprehensible meaningful because it operates with a conscious degree of particularity. Culture reveals, specifically. A cultural reading reveals the meaning of Revelation for those who share its contextual dynamics. In other words, a cultural reading reveals what Revelation means for us. That does not mean that readers in other cultural contexts cannot find our conclusions helpful. A cultural reading of the Apocalypse not only brings new light to our understanding of Revelation; it does so in a way that appreciates how different communal groups draw their own culturally derived meanings and conclusions. It subsequently fosters communication between us and them.

Readers learn more about Revelation when they listen to what people from other cultures have to say about the way Revelation reveals itself through the lens of their cultural encounter with it. This is the paradox: global comprehension of the book occurs only when readers surrender the quixotic quest for the one objective meaning that overrides all cultural limitations. Instead of immediately rejecting another culture's reading of the book as a corrupted, self-interested, and therefore biased eisegesis, the cultural reader recognizes that the only way to expand meaning is to value the fact that readers in different cultures will access meaning potential in ways that, while different, may well be no less worthy, no less meaningful.

This is how culture reveals. It is also why I want to pursue a cultural studies reading of Revelation. Given what I have just said, I obviously cannot do that by myself. I can only participate in what is by definition a communal process. I start by reading Revelation from my own cultural location. The meaning I create, I will subsequently share and revise through my collaboration with cultural Others. My research, then, does not intend to deliver the interpretive answer about any particular meaning facet of Revelation; it expects instead to initiate and benefit from an intercultural conversation.

By way of example, for my part in that conversation, I propose to use the cultural studies model to study Revelation's Lamb imagery through the lens of African American culture. I intend that reading to be another point of access into the meaning potential of the Apocalypse. I entitle that reading:

Wreaking Weakness: The Way of the Lamb

John's visionary thesis is that God shot Satan out of the sky and even now tracks him across the human, historical landscape in the crosshairs of the ultimate weapon, the slaughtered remains of his own son. Seeking refuge behind the impersonation of a bestial Roman empire, the draconian devil believes it has found a way to return fire against God by establishing on earth the lordship it could not claim in heaven. The power of countless legions at its back, the partnership of all the kings of the earth by its side, the wealth of the world's economy in its pocket, the rearmed adversary has ignited a conflict it is certain it has all the necessary strength to win.

God comes forward weakly. A dedicated child whom God had apparently sacrificed to God's war effort and has ghoulishly revived in the form of a defenseless, mangled Lamb goes out before his father on the point. A brood of unarmed, inexplicably impudent humans trails them from behind. When the battle engages, the satanic master of misdirection wheels around to the rear flank and goes after God's flock instead. If it can destroy them, it can destroy God's presence and God's dominance on earth. First, it has to draw them out. It dares God's people to declare their allegiance to God's son. When they do, it unleashes a deadly barrage of property theft, destruction of social standing, economic exploitation, and even execution. God fights back by exposing God's people in the same way that God had once exposed God's son. On the cross. Naked and defenseless. Like a Lamb led to the slaughter. And yet, unbelievably, God apparently believes this strategy will win the eternal day and transform human history into a reality where the dragon is dead and God dwells directly and securely with God's people. According to John, God's victorious way is the slaughtered way; it not only describes the path God's son took, it prescribes the path God's people will take on their way to the new heaven and new earth their combative effort will help God create. They, too, are a vital part of God's arsenal; God will use their weakness the way the child David used a single one of his five smooth stones. To put the monster down.

I realize that all this battle imagery sounds a bit disconcerting. It is, however, John's imagery. For John, weakness is the silver bullet that God fires out like a dead-eye marksman against the scarcely exposed heart of cosmic and human evil. For John, weakness is a weapon. Jesus deployed it on the cross; Jesus' followers must now trigger it their lives. Notice how John draws the connections. First, especially early on when he is introducing the figure, John provocatively pairs “Lamb” with the adjective “slaughtered.”⁵ The imagery brings to mind the Tamid, the ritual sacrifice that opened and ended the cultic day at the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus' death on the cross is likened through the use of this imagery to the Tamid lamb, its throat cut, its blood drained out, its carcass hung on a hook. One can not get much weaker than that.

But this is precisely when John makes an even more daring move. He aligns this startling snapshot of perennial shortcoming, the slaughtered Lamb, with what might well be the most complete symbol of utmost power, the heavenly throne. Of the eighteen combat-oriented circumstances where John uses lamb, nine (fifty percent) of them occur either with or in direct proximity to God's throne.⁶ For John, literarily speaking at least, “slaughtered” equals power.⁷ The complete formulation, “slaughtered lamb,” operates for John the way parables operated for Jesus. It takes on qualities people expect, then it overturns them. All of a sudden, Jesus' status as victim morphs into that of victor. It is as if the Lamb, acting exactly the way one expects a Lamb to act, or, in this case, be acted upon, produces like a lion.

The Lamb as Suffering Sacrifice

In the typical Christian view, the slaughtered lamb is lit up like a blinking, neon sign that marks God's strategy as one of redemptive suffering and sacrifice. Jesus is, in other words, the quintessential martyr, the man who surrenders his innocent life so that others, even the guilty, may go free. In this atonement-oriented reading of John's Apocalypse (cf. 1:5), Satan was owed his due for crimes God's people had committed against God and each other. Cosmic law was exact and unyielding; human sin warranted capital punishment. Someone had to pay: humankind or someone standing in its place. To save humanity, God chose the latter option. God paid the price by giving up God's son to Satan's legalistic demands, thereby breaking Satan's hold over humanity and setting it free. Jesus' death on the cross, mythically described by John at 12:5 as the snatching of a messianic son to the throne of heaven, erased the debt. That “snatching,” though, is precisely the problem. In the end, God cheats death by reclaiming the son's life. Satan therefore loses both its claim over humanity and its divine kill. No longer able to accuse a graciously exonerated humankind of sinfulness, the adversary even loses its heavenly position. Thrown down, it is thrown out of cosmic power.

Infuriated, dragon-like in its form and method of operation, Satan now roams the earth directly engaging the humans it could only attack from a heavenly distance before. This time God enlists those who trust in the sacrifice of God's son to counterattack. God commands them to fight the way the son fought; his way will be their way. This is why it is crucial to determine precisely what that way is. If Jesus did accomplish his task by suffering and dying redemptively for others, his followers must suffer and die redemptively as well.⁸ The way of sacrificial slaughter will be their way of discipleship.

At first sight, there appears to be a happy correspondence between this traditional way of viewing Jesus as a slaughtered, sacrificed lamb and the suffering circumstance that surrounds the black church tradition in the United States. The appearance is deceptive. As JoAnne Marie Terrell points out, in introducing African slaves to Christianity American evangelicalism imposed a standard of piety that “urged slaves to imitate Christ substantively, through personal sacrifice as their bounden duty.”⁹ Anthony Pinn agrees: In their “Christian” examination of the problem of suffering and evil, black slaves reached two primary conclusions. One: unmerited suffering is evil. However, it can have redemptive consequences. Two: God and humans are coworkers in the struggle to remove evil.¹⁰ The problem is that slaves came to believe through white teaching and their own internalization of white spirituality that their unmerited suffering was God's chosen tactic for effecting that removal. The end result was a spiritualization of Jesus' suffering and death which mandated that slaves similarly surrender their own lives for others. The role of the “others” was too often wickedly played by slave owners. The end result was a hermeneutic of sacrifice. It ignored the injustice of the slave condition; it praised instead the slave who, because of his or her love for the Lord, forfeited his or her entire life and work effort to the demands the slave condition imposed.¹¹

Terrell argues that this hermeneutic of sacrifice led to the de-radicalization of the black church in the period following Reconstruction and on into the Jim Crow era. The church was so desperately focused on spiritual salvation and the identification of its own struggles with the redemptive crucifixion of Christ that it either dismissed or accommodated itself and its communicants to the savageries of racist separatism and hate.¹² Properly understood, suffering was rehabilitative and redemptive; it shored up one's faith while it solicited God's salvific intervention. One ought therefore to endure it heroically, even thankfully. Pinn believes that the effect of this hermeneutic still drives the church today. How else to interpret the constant prayer refrains of suffering sisters and mothers in the AME churches that were foundational to him? “The words of Sunday morning prayers have stayed with me: 'Lord, you never said it would be easy … and so, if I'm going to wear a crown, I must bear my cross.'…”¹³

The only problem, Pinn cautions, is that “bearing one's cross” never brings about the liberative transformation it promises. He writes: “I argue that the history of Black religious thought on suffering—Black 'theodicy'—makes clear the dominance and unacceptability of redemptive suffering arguments. These arguments are unacceptable because they counteract efforts at liberation by finding something of value in Black suffering. In essence such arguments go against social transformation activity. Redemptive suffering and liberation are diametrically opposed ideas; they suggest ways of being in the world that, in effect, nullify each other.”¹⁴

What, then, does an African American Christian do with the slaughtered Lamb of the Apocalypse? Revelation intends social, political, and historical transformation; the oracle of the new heaven and a new earth testifies to that. Revelation also intends that human disciples in some way participate in the construction of this realization (12:11). But if suffering is always evil and ultimately self-defeating, can the slaughtered Lamb remain a positive role-model image? Can a more sophisticated constituency of black church believers, who recognize a call to suffer for the deceptive and evil ruse that it is, find transformative hope in John's shockingly traumatic Christ symbol? What can a slaughtered lamb do for a perennially suffering people?

It is at this point that the work of New Testament interpreter, Loren Johns, becomes particularly helpful. Johns focuses exclusively on what he calls the rhetorical force of the Lamb symbolism in the Apocalypse. He asks a pertinent question: how, in their particular social-historical setting, will John's readers appropriate his Lamb language? After an exhaustive survey of lamb imagery in Early Judaism, he reaches the conclusion that “there is no evidence at this point to establish the existence of anything like a recognizable redeemer-lamb figure in [its] apocalyptic traditions.”¹⁵ John would therefore not have expected his readers to connect his lamb's suffering/slaughter to their own redemption. That positive value for suffering is thus removed. A survey of the Hebrew Bible affords no better warrant. In a study that offers the most relevance for my particular concern about the redemptive efficacy of the Lamb's slaughter, Johns explicitly rules out a transformative suffering agenda. After comparing texts that discussed lambs used for sin atonement with the lamb language in Revelation, he concludes that “the terminology used in the Apocalypse does not fit well with the lambs of the sacrificial system.”¹⁶ In fact, he points out appropriately that John does not even restrict slaughter language to the lamb (cf. 6:4, 9; 13:3; 18:24). His conclusion: “In none of these other cases is the 'slaughter' considered expiatory, reducing the possibility that the rhetorical force of the 'slaughter' of the Lamb in 5:6 is primarily expiatory.”¹⁷ He then broadens his conclusion even further. He argues that “there is little in the Apocalypse of John to support this understanding of Jesus' death as Atonement.”¹⁸ It is the Atonement that gives Jesus' suffering its positive value. According to Johns, in Revelation, no such positive connection between the Lamb and suffering is made.

John's resistant Lamb, though vulnerable, is hardly a sacrificial victim. Indeed, this presentation of the Lamb is exactly how it should be. According to Johns, “vulnerability without victimization seems precisely to be the sign of the eschaton: the passages that treat lambs as symbols in the visions of eschatological peace portray vulnerable lambs as safe in the presence of their traditional predators.”¹⁹ This Lamb is a conquering lion (5:5), armed with the fullness of God's power (symbolized by the seven horns, 5:6), who deposes the dragon Satan (12:11), and, having taken up the sword of God's word, rides out to meet Satan's forces on the field of apocalyptic battle (2:16; 19:11-16). How is one to hold these opposite dramatizations of vulnerability and conquest together in a believable narrative tension? To help answer that question, I turn to the work of an interpreter of the black church tradition, Theophus Smith.

The Lamb as Homeopathic Cure

Smith broadens the horizons of the black church tradition. He includes within its theoretical compass the phenomenon of African conjure that crossed the Atlantic with the slaves and syncretistically embedded itself within the traditions of African American Christianity. He is particularly intrigued by the conjure concept of the homeopathic cure. In effecting a “cure,” the conjuror takes an obvious negative and reconstitutes it into something positive and efficacious.²⁰

The conjuror creates an effective antidote by capturing a small dose of the disease, reprogramming it, and then turning it back on itself. In Smith's words, “a mimetic form of a disease is prescribed to cure that disease.”²¹ Or, to work within the dragon characterization that John so ably employs, homeopathic cure is like stirring the milked venom of a poisonous snake into the bowl of ingredients that, when fully cooked, will neutralize the toxin injected by the serpent's fangs. To use yet another of Smith's illustrations, “In the signal case of immunization, the intention is to mimic the disease in a manner that skillfully engages the body's natural defenses without allowing the disease a full range of operation.”²² African Americans have been as skilled at applying this homeopathic principle to their social situation as physicians have been at applying it to their battles with biological dis-ease. Smith points to black music as a notable case in point: “the blues mode of transformation, in which one counteracts a melancholy mood by means of a melancholy tune, is homologous, or similar in function, to 'conjurational' practices which are homeopathic in nature.”²³

In the Book of Revelation, John captures a dose of violence, the slaughter of the Lamb, and homeopathically reconfigures it into the one weapon capable of tearing violence apart. To be sure, it is a theological high-wire act of the trickiest sort. Using violence to conquer violence is an age-old, centuries-tested, recipe for failure. Violence, in no matter how small or how carefully apportioned a dosage, tends more toward replication than cure. Depending heavily upon the work of René Girard, Smith analyzes how some societies have attempted to solve this conundrum.²⁴ Leaders on opposing sides of a hostility attempt to contain an outbreak of all-out violence, where huge segments of a population or different populations square off against each other, by directing necessary blame for the conflict at a single individual or group of individuals. The scapegoat. Each side holds this scapegoat responsible for the outbreak of hostility. Because the scapegoat takes the blame, it must also pay the price. Theoretically, the violence unleashed against the scapegoat should appease the will to violence by either embattled side. This is how sacrifice works; it is a homeopathic attempt to use a small dose of violence, directed against some sacrificial victim, some scapegoat, either to preempt or conclude an episode of divine or human fury. It is how many Christians read the slaughtered, “sacrificial” Lamb of Revelation. The lamb was violently sacrificed upon the cross in order to appease Satan's desire for humanity's destruction and God's need for humanity's judgment. The lamb becomes the scapegoat. In this way of thinking, John calls upon the slaughtered lamb as a way of reminding his hearers and readers how God contained the destructive violence they deserved and then graciously accepted them. They were refined because somebody else, the Lamb, voluntarily went into their fire. Now, though, it is their turn. In order to complete the transformation, they must now become the sacrificial scapegoat; they must mimic their model. When sufficient violence had been brought against them (cf. 6:11), God would initiate the judgment that would destroy their enemies and transform their violent history into a tranquil new heaven and a peaceful new earth.

The problem with this very traditional reading of the Lamb and his followers is that, as Johns's work has pointed out, Revelation's language does not support a sacrificial, scapegoat interpretation of the slaughtered Lamb.²⁵ If the Lamb is not a sacrificial scapegoat, then surely neither are the hearers and readers whom John asks to be witnesses and followers of the Lamb. What, then, is the slaughtered Lamb? He is a dosage of violence that is not only quantitatively reconfigured into a lesser amount; he is also qualitatively transfigured into a different substance. In his characterization as slaughtered, nonviolence is extracted from violence and then set out as an antidote against it.

The starting point is Jesus' ministry. In presenting Jesus as the ultimate martys, i.e., witness, John refers back to Jesus' ministry. Jesus engaged the rulers of his day; but he did so with his word. He did so nonviolently. Smith puts the Gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry into his own therapeutic language: “Over against a cure of violence which generates culture by-means-of-violence, the gospels aim to regenerate culture on the basis of a salvific will—the will to save or 'make well.'…”²⁶ But is that the real background and foreground of the Apocalypse? Johns seems to think so: “The lamb is strong, but the exhibition of its strength is unconventional: its strength lies in its consistent, nonviolent resistance to evil—a resistance that led to its execution.”²⁷ John himself mimics the Lamb's activity by also witnessing in a costly, but yet nonviolent way.

“Nonviolent?” some critics mutter. What about all the bloodletting that takes place throughout the book? It does not take much more than a surface reading to recognize that the Lamb is indeed noted for being slaughtered, not for slaughtering others. Even at 19:11-16, when John says that he judges and makes war, and thus rides out onto the battlefield in a robe dipped in blood, the Lamb never actually fights. Battle is never engaged. The blood on his robe is his own; he does, after all, still bear the residue of slaughter. His offensive weapon is a sharp sword, but it is clearly tied to his identity as the Word of God. He issues it sharply from his mouth (cf. 1:16; 2:16; 19:15); when it cuts, it does so cleanly against the contrary witness that Rome and Caesar are Lord. The sure implication is that the sword of Jesus' mouth is his cutting testimony of his own true Lordship. It represents oppositional witness, not violent combat.

It is because of this witness that the Lamb is slaughtered. And yet, in John's conjured, symbolic universe, that slaughter does not make him a sacrificial victim. There are several reasons why not. First, by presenting the slaughtered Lamb as still standing, John even conjures death. As Johns puts it, “Essential to a proper understanding of the book's rhetoric is the recognition that the lamb has triumphed in his death and resurrection.”²⁸ In the combat mythology of chapter 12, it is at the legendary point of presumable death on the cross that the Lamb is snatched away from the dragon's grip and installed at the seat of God's heavenly power. John seizes a small dosage of fatality and with it converts death into eternal, omnipotent life.

Second, this lamb is no innocent; he earns the slaughter that comes his way. To be sure, this is an odd thing to say. And yet it is an accurate representation of both John's Apocalypse and some of the key transformative moments in the history of the black church tradition. Smith offers the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., as a primary example. “This new feature of the King phenomenon was the crafting of homeopathic performances in which a sufficiently small instance of a social disorder is rendered efficacious for exposing and (thereby) countering that disorder.”²⁹ By deploying a small amount of nonviolent resistance, King drew out the reactionary violence of racial injustice and transformed it. When a shocked United States and world population witnessed the horrible violence unleashed against the nonviolent protesters, the very Lamb-like wrath of their outrage rained down in the form of executive, legislative, judicial, and martial intervention and reform. One can say that the civil rights protesters who were beaten, water-hosed, bombed, threatened, tortured, and even killed were, like the lamb, slaughtered. But one would not properly call them victims, even if their victory did come at what were often tragic costs. At the very moment their oppressors executed their violence against them, the moment of their symbolic “slaughter,” their battle was won.

King and the civil rights activists who followed him were witnesses to the equality of African Americans. In a hostile Jim Crow environment where segregation was backed up by the force of municipal and state law, they stood up and witnessed to a contrary truth. In that sense, they “earned” the retaliatory, reactionary response they received. Someone sitting in at a segregated lunch counter or defiantly plopping herself down in the front of a bus when she had been legally consigned to the back will “earn” the abuse she receives. Just as John “earned” his exile. Just as Antipas “earned” his death (2:14). Just as the Lamb “earned” his slaughter. Just as the followers of the Lamb who dare to stand up and witness to a truth that contradicts the declared truth of municipal, state, and imperial power will “earn” theirs. These are not sacrificial victims; these are fully engaged, nonviolent, activist witnesses.

Consider King's thoughts about his own suffering: “As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force… . Recognizing the necessity for suffering I have tried to make of it a virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation which now obtains.”³⁰ Clearly King attempts here to conjure suffering into a therapeutic cure. Recognizing the necessity of suffering, though, is not necessarily the same thing as valorizing it. What is the necessity of suffering for King? Really, there is none. Had he retreated from the cause, “just gone somewhere and sat down,” the suffering he endured would not only have been unnecessary, it would have disappeared. The suffering the civil rights activists endured was not necessary in the sense that it was divinely ordained; it was necessary in the sense that many powerful people and forces in the South so wanted to maintain segregation that they could be counted upon to use force against anyone acting to disrupt it. Suffering was not King's goal in any case. He clarifies: “Suffering in itself is not redemptive nor is it ordained by God; rather, it is contrary to Christian principles of unity and proper behavior.”³¹ His goal was the transformation of an oppressive social situation. He was, however, willing to endure the suffering his activist behavior “earned,” in order to bring that transformation about. Undeserved, suffering is often well “earned.” Not in a sacrificial or redemptive sense, but in a transforming, conjuring one.

The third reason that John's slaughtered Lamb is not a sacrificial victim is that his homeopathic cure is an intentional display of aggressive, one might even say, predatory power. Smith makes his point again using the civil rights ministry of King; the homeopathy of nonviolence is still a will-to-power. In fact, this is why he studies King. “I investigate King's religious heritage for its power simultaneously to overturn ethnic victimization and to transform the victimizer—for its power to realize what he called 'the beloved community.'…”³² Pinn agrees. He recognizes how, particularly in King's later years (a point James Cone makes in more detail in Martin and Malcolm and America), King recognizes the importance of power in any transformational dynamic. “In later years (1962-68), King recognized that the inhumanity of white Americans toward Black Americans was more systemic than he initially realized. As a result, King shifted his emphasis away from love (and moral persuasion) as the counterbalance of dwarfed moral conscience to justice (and 'nonviolent coercion') as the demand of love. Hence, love had to be combined with acquired power and full participation in a reformed love.”³³ King himself was quite specific: “power without love is reckless and abusive and … love without power is sentimental and anemic.”³⁴

Could it be that this emphasis on the necessity of power is the reason why John finds it necessary, before he introduces Christ as the slaughtered Lamb, to announce him as a mighty Lion (5:5)? I think so. There is every narrative indication that John thinks the two titles belong together. In the end, neither subverts the other. The Lion reveals a Lamb; the Lamb remains a Lion. Patricia McDonald advises that John hints at his intention by the way he uses his language: “There is, on the whole, a distinction between what John sees and what he hears. As Sweet and others have noticed, hearing tends to give the inner reality of what is seen.”³⁵ Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that John hears the moniker “lion,” but sees a Lamb. Whenever the hearer or reader sees the Lamb in the remainder of the narrative, the staging of this character profile in chapter 5 suggests that he or she hears the footsteps of a lurking lion. Robert Mounce, after observing that John has retrofit this particular Lamb with the symbolism of perfect power (seven horns) and complete wisdom (seven eyes) agrees: “The arnion of Revelation is not a dramatic contrast to the figure of the Lion but an extension of the same powerful figure.”³⁶ The slaughtered Lamb is a powerful conqueror (5:5, 6; 12:11; 17:14). And yet, there is something unique about this Lion/ Lamb's modus operandi. McDonald notes: “Although [John's] lion of Judah 'conquers' … it does so not in a lion-like way, by tearing its prey to pieces and devouring it, nor even in the military way that the imagery surely implies.”³⁷ It conquers through predatory weakness.

Does this kind of description hold? It did for King. An observer of his nonviolent, active, engaged, and acerbic resistance would not have been wrong to describe him as a “Lion” for justice and equality. Neither would be an observer of John's slaughtered Lamb. Perhaps this is precisely why, after his initial introduction in chapter 5, John no longer feels it necessary to continue the lion language. The hearer or reader no longer needs it; he or she has the slaughtered Lamb, which is the appropriate narrative interpretation of the Lion. The slaughtered Lamb is how the lion manifests itself in the world. In other words, the predatory way of the lion is the slaughtered lamb. “Slaughtered Lamb,” then, is not so much a descriptive, static noun as it is a paradoxical, action verb. Though John's lion is a powerful conqueror, it would not be right to say that this lion “hunts its prey.” The more appropriate language would be something like, “this lion slaughtered Lambs (sLambs) its prey.” This lion slaughtered Lambs (sLambs) the dragon and the beasts that historically represent it.³⁸ The weak lamb, then, does not subvert the powerful lion; the lamb's weakness, its slaughter, is precisely the way the lion works out its power. The lion sLambs God's opposition.

It does so on its own active, preemptive terms. Johns's survey of the social historical situation of the Apocalypse reveals a tantalizing interpretative clue. In a reconstruction that represents today's prevailing scholastic thinking, he argues that there was no wholesale persecution of Christians during the time when John was most likely writing, the time of Domitian's reign (81-96 CE). The evidence suggests that John was writing more about the “expectation of persecution rather than the present experience of persecution.”³⁹ The problem lay with the imminent conflict he knew would erupt if his hearers and readers lived out the kind of non-accommodating Christianity that he himself professed. He was concerned primarily about the claims of Lordship declared by Rome and Caesar and the witness to those claims made in the local municipalities where his churches were located. Johns paints a historical picture of local leaders pitched in feverish competition to land the rights to build temples praising the divinity of the emperor and the lordship of Rome. In order to fit socially, politically, economically, and religiously in these communities, John's followers would have to accommodate themselves to the demands of these localized cultic affections. Resisting those demands would invite trouble.

Trouble, however, had apparently not yet arisen. That might well mean that John's believers were all too occupied in the business of accommodation. According to Johns, “the resistance called for was an offensive maneuver as John tried to unmask the spiritual powers at work behind the churches' compromising involvement in the empire, in its commerce, and in its imperial cult.”⁴⁰ His concern that other Christian prophets, whom he calls Jezebel—the Nicolaitans, and Balaam—were approving of such behavior raised his hackles even further. John was unyielding; there could be no compromise with any activities that gave credence to the idea that Caesar, Rome, or Rome-sponsored divinities held title to the allegiance due only God and the Lamb.

But if all this is correct, if there was not yet any persecution, if John's people were not vulnerably standing out because they were finding ways comfortably to blend in and accommodate, then the seer's immediate problem was, as Johns points out, more spiritual than social and historical. The social-historical crisis would not arise unless John's people actually started to live by the mandates his apocalyptic prophecy demanded. Johns concludes: “the resolution of that spiritual crisis would ironically induce a very real and dangerous social crisis as the churches began faithfully to resist the imperial cult and to face the consequences of their allegiance to Christ.”⁴¹

This recognition is precisely what makes Lamb-like behavior active, aggressive, and predatory even as it remains “weakly” nonviolent. If John was indeed asking his people to stand up and stand out in a world they had accepted and had accepted them, he was essentially telling them to go out and pick a fight! He was ordering them to go declare that they were now non-accommodating Christians who could no longer participate in a world that had not really noticed them since they had heretofore been accommodating to it. In a classic “don't ask, don't tell” (that I'm a Christian) kind of environment, John was essentially ordering his Christians to be about the business of telling on themselves, with full knowledge of the kind of repercussions such telling would bring. He was asking them to come screaming out of the Christian closet, knowing that it would solicit the same consequence it had attracted to the Lamb. Slaughter. However, as one can plainly see, slaughter was not the goal. The goal was an active ministry of resistance that would witness to the singular Lordship of Jesus Christ. The slaughtering would, ironically, just as Jesus' death led to his empowered life, help lead to the transformative goal of eternal life in a new heaven and new earth where that Lordship was on full display (12:10-12). This is how the homeopathic cure works. For those who are slaughtered because they stand up for Christ and therefore cause themselves to stand out to Rome and its Asia Minor vassals, defeat is conjured to victory, oppression is conjured to liberation, death is conjured to life. Like death itself, the dragon and the imperial power that worships and represents it are sLambed.

¹…Brian K. Blount, Cultural Interpretation: Reorienting New Testament Criticism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995); Brian K. Blount, “If You Get MY Meaning: Introducing Cultural Exegesis,” in Exegese und Theoriediskussion, ed. Stefan Alkier and Ralph Brucker(Tübingen and Basel: Francke-Verlag, 1998), 77-97; Brian K. Blount, Go Preach! Mark's Kingdom Message and the Black Church Today (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998); Brian K. Blount, “Reading Revelation Today: Witness as Active Resistance,” Interpretation 54 (2000): 398-412.
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²…M. Eugene Boring, Revelation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1989), 54; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgment (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 185.
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³…See, for example, the discussion on contemporary historical critical views of the Apocalypse in Arthur Wainwright, Mysterious Apocalypse: A History of the Interpretation of the Book of Revelation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), especially 125-39.
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⁴…Stephen D. Moore, “Introduction,” Semeia 82 (1998): viii. “What, then, does cultural studies have to offer biblical studies? What else but a means of critically reading the Bible in its present contexts.”
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⁵…Cf. 5:6, 8-9, 12; 13:8. See also connections to the blood of the lamb at 7:24; 12:11.
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⁶…Cf. 5:6 (throne), 8 (throne context, v.9), 12 (at the throne), 13 (throne); 6:1, 16 (throne); 7:9 (throne), 10 (throne), 14 (at the throne), 17 (throne); 12:11; 13:8, 11; 14:1, 4, 10; 15:3; 17:14.
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⁷…The term lamb, ajrnivon, occurs twenty-seven times in Revelation. On eleven occasions, it occurs with or in direct relationship to the throne. On nine occasions it occurs at or after 19:7 when the Lamb is victoriously described as the bridegroom of the new Jerusalem. The final two such occurrences, 22:1 and 22:3, occur in those victorious later chapters and are thus not figured into the combat scene equations.
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⁸…Cf., David Aune, “Following the Lamb: Discipleship in the Apocalypse,” in Patterns of Discipleship in the New Testament, ed. Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 278. “The victory achieved by Jesus through suffering and death becomes a central paradigm for discipleship in the Apocalypse.”
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⁹…JoAnn Marie Terrell, Power in the Blood?: The Cross in the African American Experience (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998), 37.
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¹⁰…Anthony B. Pinn, Why, Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (New York: Continuum, 1995), 15.
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¹¹…Terrell, Power in the Blood?, 52. “Through brute force, paternalistic compromise and the hermeneutics of sacrifice, European Americans called upon African Americans to surrender their labor, their agency and, perhaps most critically, their identity.”
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¹²…Terrell, Power in the Blood?, 75.
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¹³…Pinn, Why, Lord?, 9.
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¹⁴…Ibid., 17.
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¹⁵…Loren Johns, The Lamb Christology of the Apocalypse of John (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2003), 106.
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¹⁶…Ibid., 129.
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¹⁷…Ibid.
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¹⁸…Ibid., 130.
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¹⁹…Johns, Lamb Christology, 148.
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²⁰…By way of example, Smith offers the name change of former slave Isabella Baumfree upon her release in 1827. When she gave herself the name Sojourner Truth she initiated an “existential transformation similar to that of the young Saul in 1 Samuel 10.6” (Theophus Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], 164). Her effort was therapeutic; it remedied the perception that she was an inferior being owned by and therefore needing to be named by someone else. It was also homeopathic; “it mimicked the 'diseased situation' of racist cognitive perceptions, precisely in order to counter those perceptions and to cure that disease” (Smith, Conjuring Culture, 168). Truth laid claim to the warped principles of African American naming whereby a slave owner conveyed identity with the issuance of a name, and reconfigured them. She took that prerogative upon herself. The new name conveyed a new purchase. For freedom. John is such a conjuror. Right before our disoriented eyes, he transfigures a slaughtered Lamb into a conquering Lion without surrendering either its homicide or its helplessness. It is a homeopathic act.
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²¹…Smith, Conjuring Culture, 226.
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²²…Ibid., 169.
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²³…Ibid., 226.
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²⁴…Cf. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) and The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Frecerro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
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²⁵…Cf. Johns, Lamb Christology, 201-2. “As demonstrated above, there is little in the Apocalypse of John to support an understanding of Jesus' death as 'sacrificial' in the substitutionary or penal sense.”
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²⁶…Smith, Conjuring Culture, 199.
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²⁷…Johns, Lamb Christology, 161.
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²⁸…Ibid.
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²⁹…Smith, Conjuring Culture, 213.
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³⁰…Quoted in Pinn, Why, Lord?, 76. From “Suffering and Faith,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Washington (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), 41.
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³¹…Quoted in Pinn, Why, Lord?, 76. In “Shattered Dreams,” Boston University King Collection, Box 119 a. XVI. 16, 10.
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³²…Smith, Conjuring Culture, 183. Italics mine.
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³³…Pinn, Why, Lord?, 76-77.
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³⁴…Quoted in Pinn, Why, Lord?, 77. See Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 37.
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³⁵…Patricia M. McDonald, “Lion as Slain Lamb: On Reading Revelation Recursively,” Horizons 23, no. 1 (1996): 33. See also Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), 183. “Jesus Christ is the Lion of Judah and the Root of David, but John 'sees' him as the Lamb. Precisely by juxtaposing these contrasting images, John forges a symbol of conquest by sacrificial death, which is essentially a new symbol.”
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³⁶…Robert H. Mounce, “Worthy Is the Lamb,” in Scripture, Tradition, and Interpretation: Essays Presented to Everett F. Harrison by His Students and Colleagues in Honor of His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, ed. W. Ward Gasque and William Sanford LaSor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 68.
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³⁷…McDonald, “Lion as Slain Lamb,” 37.
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³⁸…Indeed, this lion also slaughtered Lambs God's people. Jesus' death on the cross, after all, is as much a judgment as it is a victory. That is a point John tries desperately to get across in his chapter 2 and 3 letters to his wavering churches.
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³⁹…Johns, Lamb Christology, 122. Johns points to 2:10-11; 7:13-14; 11:7-9; 12:11; 16:6; 17:6; 18:24; 19:2; 20:4-6.
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⁴⁰…Johns, Lamb Christology, 127.
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⁴¹…Ibid.
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  © 2004 THEOLOGY TODAY ISSN 0040-5736.