Babylon is first mentioned in Revelation in 14:8, and is immediately associated with wine. It’s called the “wine of the passion of her immorality.” That suggests a number of connections. The Song of Songs links wine with love: Love is better than wine, and the lovers drink each other and become intoxicated by love. The harlot is the false Bride, the seductive Lady Folly, who offers wine that inflames passion of infidelity. In chapters 17 and 18, the harlot’s cup... Read more
Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold examine the James Bond Songs in a forthcoming book. It doesn’t seem an especially promising subject; it’s not the kind of thing you expect from the venerable Oxford University Press. But Daub and Kronengold show that the music is revealing in more ways that the obvious one (to state the obvious: silhouettes of naked women dancing during the opening credits). Daub and Kronengold suggest that the music keeps the Bond films tied to their historic origins... Read more
In contrast to other commentators, Stephen Smalley (The Revelation to John) doesn’t think the “wrath” of God in Revelation should be understood as “the impersonal consequence of sin, worked out in history and disclosed at the parousia.” In Revelation and the rest of the New Testament, rather, “‘wrath’ . . . is seen as a direct activity of God himself, realized in the present . . . as much as in the future . . . ; it may be... Read more
Scholars have doubted the coherence of this chapter, one calling is a “pastiche” of themes from other parts of the book of Revelation. In a brilliant article, Pieter GR de Villiers has presented a compelling structural analysis of the whole chapter. As a number of scholars have pointed out, chapter 14 begins a section that is concluded in chapter 15. The 144,000 are said to learn a new song, which only they can learn, but chapter 14 does not say... Read more
Three angels issue announcements in Revelation 14. The first angel is said to be flying in midheaven (14:6), the same phrase used for the eagle who appears after the fourth trumpet blows (8:13). Both speak with a loud voice (8:13; 14:7). The messages are somewhat contrasting: The angel announces three woes, and these woes are fulfilled in the release of the locorpions (9:12), the two witnesses (11:14), and the fall of the dragon to the earth, where he assaults the... Read more
Drawing on Andrew Walls’s idea of the “Ephesian moment” in world Christianity, Emmanuel Katongole notes that the coming together of different cultures into the church depends on a common table: “the expression and test of that coming together was the meal table: ‘two cultures historically separated by the meal table were not able to come together at table to share the knowledge of Christ’ . . . . Thus, the meal table – the institution that had once symbolized the... Read more
With everyone abuzz with the latest Pew findings, one can hardly wait for the publication later this year of Robert Wuthnow’s Inventing American Religion. Polls haven’t always, of course, played so prominent a role in our understanding of American religion as they do today. They have not always been treated as “the trusted oracles of the day.” Wuthnow’s book traces the history of how religious polling in the U.S. grew out of community surveys designed to assess needs. He reviews some... Read more
The word “spring” (Gr. pege) is used five times in the book of Revelation. Each time, it is linked with the word “water” (Gr. hudor), but with slight variations. Twice the phrase is “spring(s) of the water of life” (7:17; 21:6, where the word is singular), and three times it is “springs of waters” (8:10; 14:7; 16:4). The uses of pege are patterned chiastically: A. Lamb as shepherd guides to “springs of the water of life,” 7:17. B. The third... Read more
In a 2006 Pro Ecclesia review of Lamin Sanneh’s Whose Religion Is Christianity? Emmanuel Katongole claims that Sanneh continues to allow geopolitical concerns to shape his understanding of African Christianity: “although Sanneh reads the growth of Christianity in Africa as a blessing to the West, he still shares the same geopolitical preoccupation as those who view the growth in the non-Western churches as a threat to the West” (143). Katongole continues, “What the West/non-West geopolitical preoccupation in fact betrays is the... Read more
The thesis of Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God is that “the postwar revolution in America’s religious identity had its roots not in the foreign policy panic of the 1950s but rather in the domestic politics of the 1930s and early 1940s. Decades before Eisenhower’s inaugural prayers, corporate titans enlisted conservative clergymen in an effort to promote new political arguments embodied in the phrase ‘freedom under God.’” Citing “private correspondence and public claims,” he argues that “this new ideology was designed... Read more
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