Thursday, December 30, 2021

Richard Bauckham on “The Spirit of Prophecy” (Revelation 19:10)

 

The Spirit of prophecy

 

In post-biblical Judaism, as is well known, the Spirit is especially the Spirit of prophecy, the Spirit who speaks through the prophets. In Revelation also the Spirit is almost exclusively the Spirit of prophecy. This observation, however, is not especially helpful without an understanding of the meaning of ‘prophecy’ in Revelation. We shall see that it carries probably rather broader connotations than might at first be thought.

 

Parts of the Apocalypse are explicitly said to be the words of the Spirit: the seven messages to the churches; 14:13b; and 22:17a. The seven messages are ‘what the Spirit says to the churches,’ equated with the words of the exalted Christ. The significance of 14:13b would seem to be that the words of the Spirit are the Spirit’s response, speaking through John, to the heavenly voice. As John obeys the command to write the beatitude, the Spirit inspiring him adds an emphatic endorsement of it. In 22:17a, ‘Ερχου is certainly (pace the majority of commentators) addressed by the Spirit and the Bride not to the one who thirsts, but to Christ. It is the response to Christ’s promise in 22:12, just as the same promise and response recur in 22:20. Again in all probability ‘the Spirit’ is equivalent to the inspired utterance of the Christian prophets, here in the form of Spirit-inspired prayer.

 

Thus the Spirit of prophecy speaks through the Christian prophets bringing the word of the exalted Christ to his people on earth, endorsing on earth the words of heavenly revelations, and directing the prayers of the churches to their heavenly Lord. These are the special functions of the Christian prophets, whom Revelation distinguishes as a special group within the churches (11:18; 16:6; 18:20, 24; 22:9). The doctrine of the spirit in the Apocalypse has sometimes been felt to be deficient in that the Spirit is only the Spirit of prophecy, rather than moral or life-giving power in Christian life. There is a real distinction here from some other New Testament writers (notably the Fourth Gospel and Paul), but it should be remarked that the Spirit of prophecy is envisaged as having life-giving and life-changing effects. For the Spirit brings to the churches the powerful word of Christ, rebuking, encouraging, promising and threatening, touching and drawing the hearts, minds and consciences of its hearers, directing the lives and the prayers of the Christian communities towards the coming of Christ.

 

Is Spirit-inspired prophecy a function which the Apocalypse confines to the Christian prophets or is there a sense in which the church as a whole has a prophetic vocation? One reason for suspecting the latter is the relationship between prophecy and the phrase ‘the witness of Jesus’ (μαρτυρια Ιησου), which, along with some related expressions, is very frequent in the book. In this expression ‘Ιησου seems to be always a subjective, not an objective genitive, so that the phrase always means, in some sense, ‘the witness Jesus bore’ Thus, when 19:10 says that ‘the witness of Jesus is the Spirit of prophecy’, this difficult statement must mean that the witness Jesus bore is the content of Spirit-inspired prophecy. It is therefore also the content of John’s own prophecy, the Apocalypse itself (1:2): the word of God which John’s prophecy communicates is attested primarily by Jesus himself (22:20), as also by the angel who communicates it to John (22:16) and by John (1:2). In essence, this word of God is also that to which Jesus bore witness in his earthly life (1:5) and to which his followers now bear witness in the world (1:9 etc.). Witness in Revelation is verbal (see especially 11:7; 12:11), though it is linked with obedience to God’s commandments (12:17; cf. 14:12) and its consequence, in the circumstances envisaged in Revelation, is expected to be martyrdom (2:13; 6:9; 17:6; 20:4). Those who bear the witness of Jesus are certainly not just the prophets (19:10) but Christians in general (12:17). Yet in 11:3, where the faithful church in its witness to the world is portrayed under the mage of ‘my two witnesses’ who ‘prophesy’ (cf. 11:10), prophecy and witness seem to be equated. The characterization of the Christian community as ‘those who bear the witness of Jesus’ seems therefore to attribute a prophetic role to the whole church.

 

Probably a distinction is to be drawn between the special vocation of the Christian prophets to declare the word of God within the Christian community, and the general vocation of the Christian community as a whole to declare the word of God in the world. The former will then subserve the latter. The Spirit speaks through the prophets to the churches and through the churches to the world. (Richard Bauckham, “The Role of the Spirit,” in The Climax of Prophecy: Studies in the Book of Revelation [London: T&T Clark, 1993], 160-62)