The Silence of God: A Literary Study of Voice and Violence in the Book of Revelation

Abstract

The violence of Revelation remains problematic. This study offers a literary-critical analysis of the text with postcolonial theory and an intertextual foray into 1 Kgs 19. It argues that God does not speak in direct voice as a character in the story until 21.5. Places where commentators understand a voice to be God’s are undercut by an underdetermined text. Since the implied author avoids bringing God onto the stage to authorize events, the narrator assumes that a proliferation of loud heavenly voices provides authorization of the visions and their violence. The narrator is demonstrably unreliable. At the end of the visions and in the epilogue the ‘still small voice’ of God and Jesus’ quiet voice speak. Both undercut the narrator’s interpretation of the visions. And by speaking quietly in present tense and without decibel adjectives it forces us to go back and reread the whole for how God is now renewing all creation and Jesus is now offering the water of the River of Life. The violence will need to be read as something other than it at first appeared.