A fresh revelation about economic meltdown
By Tony Campolo
19 Apr 2009
Of all the books of the New Testament, the one that I least understood and treated as irrelevant to life in today’s world has been The Revelation of St John the Divine. My attitude has changed with the unfolding current economic crisis. What I find in that book, especially in its latter chapters, now speaks to me and fills me with conviction.
When St John wrote The Revelation, he was prescribing how Christians were supposed to understand themselves and live in the context of the ancient Roman Empire. Increasingly, they had defined themselves as a people who had their citizenship in what they believed was another kingdom, namely the Kingdom of God. They had come to see themselves as aliens in what they more and more viewed as a socio-political system dominated by corrupted “principalities and powers.”
“Babylon” was the code word that St John used for the empire, so that whenever we read “Babylon” in the latter chapters of the Book of Revelation, we should substitute in our minds, “The Roman Empire.” Babylon, given this decoding, was a reference to the dominant political-economic social order wherein first century Christians were required to live out what amounted to a counter-cultural lifestyle.
If we are to relate to what John wrote about his Babylon 2000 years ago to our own contemporary existential social situation, we should recognize that what he said about the Roman Empire is applicable to every and any societal system in which Christians are required to live out their witness.
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