'Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.'
'Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.'
'You explain nothing , O Poet, but thanks to you all things become explicable.'
The above are several one liners on poets and poetry that I've noted from here and there. The first one is whimsical and hints at the capacity of poetry to juxtapose the unlikeliest things, so that incongruity and ambiguity undermine logic and linear thinking. The second reminds of the partiality of our sight, the transience of our perceptions and the possibilities of seeing the unexpected. The third defends the significance of mystery as that which awakens our deeply human longing for explanation, while recognsing that part of that same humanity is recognising the significance of the inexplicable. Poetry does all these things.
These thoughts link in my mind with a book I recently ordered, Seeing Things John's Way, by David DeSilva, (Westminster John Knox, 2009). It's an examination of the Apocalypse using rhetorical theory, and exploring what John does with words and images used to rhetorical effect in the service of theology. John's goal is to help his readers / hearers to see things in a new way, (or in the words above), opening and closing doors in order to give glimpses into an alternative reality, explaining nothing but enabling all things to become explicable. For Christians under the constraints of Empire, such rhetorical deconstruction of power, and reconstruction of divine purpose, would embolden faith by recharging the imagination with visions of the majesty of Christ, and the planned future for a Creation in which God will be all in all.
It's one of the great losses to Christian discipleship that the Book of Revelation has far too often been made to say and mean what it was never intended to say and mean. While on the other hand the author's artistry as a poet and his prescience as a prophet have seldom been given the attention they deserve as great gifts of vision and imagination capable of subverting even great empires, by appeal to the One who is greater and whose Kingdom is more durable. At times of cultural crisis, we need the poet prophets to deconstruct the rhetoric of empire by exposing it to the rhetoric of the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world, who sits in the midst of the throne, and who thus redefines power and majesty in ways that have eternal and cosmic consequences.
I remember as a young and innocent (ignorant?) Christian reading through the Book of Revelation and being thrilled, scared, puzzled and hooked. Since then NT scholars like Austin Farrer, G B Caird, and Richard Bauckham have educated my responses. There's a lot in this new book that should be preached today (you can see the contents on the amazon.com site) – and I don't mean the allegedly safe first three chapters. In a world awash with secular apocalytic scenarios, projected and actual, the Book of Revelation represents a triumphant canoncial contradiction of all those who say it has to be that way. And it does so by calling in question all those counsels of despair that simply assume evil and power have an unbroken monopoly in human history.
I hope De Silva's book is taken seriously by preachers, and will make a substantial contribution to the kind of preaching on Revelation that is neither other-worldly, world-hating nor world-denying. Instead, using this massive visionary text, preachers will once again call in question secular apocalyptic scenarios, by pointing to a redeemed and renewed creation, imaged in some of the most theologically potent ideas which focus on Christ as Lord of all, the Lamb slain from the foundations of the world, and the permanent overwhelming of evil by that which finally negates it. In his Apocalyse, John speaks forth the renewal, redemption, reconciliation and eternal shalom of God's Creation, and the reign of a God whose nature, revealed in Jesus Christ, is eternal purposive love, expressed as communion and endlessly creative mercy.
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