Canter Bridge

I am not a doomsayer.

If this sounds both egocentric and unrequired, I risk making my statement in just this way because I am headed in the direction of one of those apocalyptic texts in Revelation of which the doomsayers drink deeply and then scatter their painfully precise predictions to the wind.

As I write this, we are in the midst of or in the wake of or at the beginning of an economic shakedown that many are calling unprecedented. I’ve consulted with a lot of smart people on where events appear to be taking us. None of them knows.

I relax here in my easy chair on this post-Christmas morning watching the squirrels enjoying their cushy nest in the owl box that was meant to attract the owls that would eat the squirrel. From this angle I am doubly aware of life’s ironies and unintended consequences. I am also made sensitive to the fragility of life as we know it, both by events swirling around my family and me and by texts like this one from the Revelation‘s eighteenth chapter:

After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority; and the earth was made bright with his splendor.
He called out with a mighty voice,
‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!
It has become a dwelling place of demons,
a haunt of every foul and hateful bird,
a haunt of every foul and hateful beast.
For all the nations have drunk
of the wine of the wrath of her fornication,
and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her,
and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxury.’

Now here I must risk redundancy yet again as I seek to locate the comments I make in the shadow of this text. In the light of the recent buckling of the international economic framework in the face of egregious overleveraging and institutional weakness that almost no one seems to have fully anticipated, I am not connecting dots in order to to draw a straight line between John the Seer’s words about the Babylon-centric (a.k.a. Rome-centric) international markets of the first and second centuries of our era, on the one hand, and the capitalist, aspirationally low-barrier financial and commercial markets of our own. I do not believe John the Seer was talking about the United States of America or the World Trade Organization or the Chicago Consensus and predicting their sudden collapse.

Yet I am struck by two things. First John’s template could be said to fit comfortably rather than awkwardly over our reality, so recently throw into chaos, disarray, and panic, so recently proven to be something other than what we’d believed.

Second, I am taken by how transformative experience (one thinks of exile, the collapse of empire, unanticipated restoration, disappointment, etc.) becomes recycled within the biblical anthology. What happened one time inevitably happens in some recognizably similar way on another occasion and then often on still another. The text before us is itself evidence of this, for John is not addressing Babylon’s antipated downfall but Rome’s. Babylon had been dead and gone for centuries, but that empire’s sudden collapse—which in its moment had been chronicled, lamented, and celebrated by using texts from the prior demise of Assyria(!)—served John well as a framework for welcoming the calamity that would in his view take down the world system of his day.

It is not hard to understand why readers of the Revelation and its prophetic antecedents (Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, for example) have intuitively felt that this stuff was written for them. Not infrequently, this has led them to loosen or even to eliminate their identification with the nations and systems that would rule them, quite like the summons in Revelation 18, ‘Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins, and so that you do not share in her plagues; for her sins are heaped high as heaven and God has remembered her iniquities.’

A common theme in the prophetic ridicule that is generated by Babylon’s fall some six centuries before the time of Christ and now in this prophetic screed against Rome-as-New-Babylon is the suddenness of the calamity that would bring each to dust and ash. John has it this way:

As she glorified herself and lived luxuriously,
so give her a like measure of torment and grief.
Since in her heart she says,
‘I rule as a queen;
I am no widow,
and I will never see grief,’
therefore her plagues will come in a single day—
pestilence and mourning and famine—
and she will be burned with fire;
for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.’
And the kings of the earth, who committed fornication and lived in luxury with her, will weep and wail over her when they see the smoke of her burning;
they will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say,
‘Alas, alas, the great city,
Babylon, the mighty city!
For in one hour your judgment has come.’
And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore,

The similarities to this moment, caught between the New York Times and the Book of Revelation, are eery. Perhaps that’s all they are: superficial parallels between two historical moments that in fact bear no substantive resemblance one to the other. That is, in fact, a comforting resolution.

Alternatively, perhaps it is a time for Christians to realize again—as in the words of the exquisite Sting song—’how fragile we are …’ That is, it may be that those very structures which we believe to have provided us the security, stability, and wealth that have shaped the lives and times of most anyone capable of reading this post stand dangerously under the judgment of God in that ‘in you was found the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all who have been slaughtered on earth.’

It may of course not be so. Perhaps, as has been cogently argued often and everywhere, a system based on economic liberty, greed, the priority of free trade over matters of the treatment of human beings at the margins of the participating states’ objectives, and the energetic cultivation of secular structures that allow nation states and governments from diverse cultural contexts to interact effectively is in fact the best arrangement that can be hoped for in a fallen world. I myself have argued this.

Yet this morning, with squirrels in the owl box, the New York Times laying awkwardly beside Revelation, smart people telling me they have no idea where this thing is going, it seems unwise not to wonder for a morning whether I’ve been a fool. And whether John the Seer has come to say so.