Engaging Nonviolence

A few months ago I attended some nonviolence training workshops run by Pace e Bene Australia, centred around the Engage: Exploring Nonviolent Living workbook. These fascinating workshops touched on both the theory and practice of nonviolence, and the format of the sessions ranged from information sessions, to discussion groups, to role-playing and more. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, contacting Pace e Bene is a really good starting point (in my opinion).

I’ve been thinking a lot about what we covered in the sessions, and want to reflect on just a few points here. The sessions (run over three full Saturdays) covered such a broad range of topics that there is really no way that I can summarise it all, but I thought I might just reflect on four principles of nonviolence that have been especially important in my thinking since participating in the workshops.

More Resources for Reading Revelation: Matt Anslow’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’

Though I outlined a few (I think) helpful resources for further reading at the end of my final post on Reading Revelation, I wanted to link here to some posts from my friend Matt Anslow over on his blog Life:Remixed.

Matt’s blog is one that I reckon you should read as a matter of course, but these posts in particular may be helpful in going a little deeper into some of the prominent themes in the book of Revelation. You will notice that Matt and I understand things quite similarly in regards to the book of Revelation, but Matt brings a number of very special observations to his work on this topic, and I just love reading pretty much everything that he writes!

His posts on Revelation centre around the idea of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in the book of Revelation, with a specific focus on Empire. He takes some of the significant images on display in the text and unpacks them each a little bit, in a very helpful way. I highly recommend checking the posts out.

1. Part I: Revelation in Context
2. Part II: The Beast – Might and Power
3. Part III: The Prostitute – Seduction and Luxury
4. Part IV: The Lamb – The Witness of the Cross

Reading Revelation (Part V)

So, here we are at the final post in this 5-part series. If you’ve made it this far, then I tip my hat to you : )

In the first post, I suggested that the traditional interpretive frameworks for approaching the book of Revelation are all a bit naff, and that we would be better off approaching the text with a more well-rounded triple-layered approach consisting of a contextual examination, an intertextual  examination, and a literary-rhetorical  examination. In the next three posts, I explained each of these ‘layers’ in order seeking to lay-out a reasonably comprehensive introduction to approaching the text in the space available here (excluding, obviously, detailed exegetical examination).

In this last post, I want to try to bring it all together (…as best I can). In order to do that, I am basically going to be asking the following questions:

1) What did the text mean to the original recipients?
2) What might it mean to us?

Reading Revelation (Part IV)

In my first post in this series, I outlined my belief that the traditional interpretive categories used to approach the book of Revelation were less than helpful, and suggested that there was a more excellent way.

In my second post, I started to outline an alternate reading strategy, consisting of three interwoven ‘layers’, and discussed the first of these: the contextual layer.

In my third post, I discussed the second of these interpretive ‘layers’: the intertextual layer.

In this post, then, I wish to discuss the final interpretive ‘layer’: the literary-rhetorical layer. It should be noted, however, that all of these ‘layers’ of interpretation are integrally connected. The ‘intertextual’ layer is, in a sense, the meeting point of the contextual and literary-rhetorical examination, and binds them all together in a way that means that there is a fair amount of overlap between the categories themselves. Although I am treating them separately here, this does not take away from the inherent inter-connectedness of these interpretive elements.

Reading Revelation (Part III)

In my first post in this series, I outlined my (strong) belief that the traditional interpretive categories for approaching the book of Revelation are not a very helpful starting place.

In my second post, I began to outline the first ‘layer’ of my proposed methodology: the contextual examination of the text. In that post I made the (I think) reasonable claim that texts usually make some sense to their original recipients. The book of Revelation, I suggested, was written by a real person (named John), to a bunch of real Christians in the cities around Ephesus at the end of the first century C.E., as an urgent message that he thought they really needed to hear. The whole region was under the control of the mighty Roman Empire, and for those who bought into the Roman system (including treating the Roman Emperor as some sort of divine being), things were ok. But for those who didn’t, well, their fate wasn’t looking very rosy. Rome didn’t play nice with those who dared challenge her power, and Jerusalem post 70C.E. stood as testament to this. John, it seems, saw the inevitability of conflict with Rome for faithful Christians (who could only ever proclaim Jesus as ‘Lord’, not Caesar), and seems to have written his bizarre text to speak into this situation.

But why did he write what he wrote? Why did he pick the particular style that he did? Why didn’t he just simply say, “Rome is not so good and her systems and structures are, pretty much, antithetical to the claims of Christianity, so don’t buy into it all”?

I’m glad you asked : )