Tag: Richard Bauckham

Unpolitics

and breathe…

AI-generated image by Craiyon

We have had a lot of politics in recent years, or maybe it’s just me, but I found Keir Starmer’s first words outside Downing St on July 5th 2024 refreshing:

To restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives

I am not missing (in the UK scene at least) the burlesque, the cries of ‘look at me!’ and the fighting over who gets to drive the clown car.

Even if the UK has temporarily rounded up the pub-bores who were roving wild and swinging like apes on the levers of power, unworthy people remain in charge in many other places around the world. You can feel depressed and powerless in the face of it.

Perhaps we needn’t, though. I am reading through, for the second time, Richard Bauckham’s book ‘The Theology of the Book of Revelation.‘

Really keen readers of this blog will know that I have wanted to read this volume for some time, and I have finally managed to do at a decent price via my subscription to the wonderful Perlego. Prof Bauckham wades into the Book of Revelation, disdaining the many authors and preachers who treat it as their own clown car. He is Scots-Presbyterian sober, theologically focussed, academically on top of things, devotionally hearted, and every dry paragraph can be mined for the good stuff.

It’s political. The rest of the New Testament, in my reading, isn’t really. The Roman Empire is a given. Luke, in particular, is keen to show the reasonableness of Roman rulers when he can. But all that political tiptoeing gets shoved out of the way in Revelation. Rome is a harlot, Babylon, wiping her mouth between lovers. The cultural discourse that accepts all this is a false prophet. They won’t be reformed. They are heading for the lake of fire. They will be entirely replaced with the City of God: a city still, but one not wormy with exploitation and injustice.

Prof Baukham notes a fascinating thing. What gets us to that happy place is not ‘politics’ but faithfulness. Not politics but ‘unpolitics’ perhaps.

In Bauckham’s telling, Revelation’s visions teach theological truth. Seals are broken on the scroll of history, and along come disasters on a quarter of the earth. But nothing shifts. Trumpets blow, and along come disasters on a third of the earth. And nothing shifts. Seven thunders roar (perhaps heralding disasters for half the earth) but they are held off. Why? Disasters don’t lead to lasting change, to repentance. What does make a difference? When you add to the disasters the faithful witness of the Church. That’s the picture in Revelation 11 of two prophets (you need two witnesses to establish a matter) who are martyred. Everyone parties initially. The ‘world’ has won. But then…

But after the three and a half days the breath[b] of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and terror struck those who saw them. 12 Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, “Come up here.” And they went up to heaven in a cloud, while their enemies looked on.

13 At that very hour there was a severe earthquake and a tenth of the city collapsed. Seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and the survivors were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven. (Revelation 11:11-13)

A great universal repentance follows the martyrdoms. In a reversal of Elijah’s day (when a remnant of seven thousand was preserved) a remnant of seven thousand is lost but the rest give ‘glory to the God of heaven’.

This theme recurs in Revelation 14 when there are two harvests, one, ‘the harvest of the earth’ for gathering the good grain into the barn; another for grapes for the ‘winepress of God’s wrath’.

And it recurs again in Revelation 15 where the faithful witnesses re-write the Song of Moses (sung after the Exodus) for a new and better deliverance:

Who will not fear you, Lord,
    and bring glory to your name?
For you alone are holy.
All nations will come
    and worship before you,
for your righteous acts have been revealed.” (Revelation 15:4)

What brings the monumental change? What makes ‘all nations’ come? The faithful witness of God’s people. I absolutely love this.

Of course there is a calling and obligation for some people to serve in politics. But for the rest of us, deep, lasting change at the national level is brought about by what? By living faithfully for Jesus and bearing testimony to him. This is the mountain-moving act. Slow, steady, patient … this is the mountain-moving act.

In the United States, at the moment, the New Apostolic Movement is busy ‘mapping spiritual strongholds’ and seeking to overthrow them. (As described in a fine piece of journalism in The Atlantic.) They are hungry and zealous for God and for reform. I unfortunately believe they are being played by the current President Elect, who has co-opted them. I studied under Pete Wagner, the first and most influential academic to write about this stuff, and I appreciated Pete Wagner, but I do not agree with him here. It isn’t revolutionary holy struggle that gets us Christians where we want to be. It isn’t ‘spiritual mapping’. It isn’t politics as such–politics follows the path others have beaten down.

It is faithfulness.

We know this from the psalms:

Do not fret because of those who are evil
    or be envious of those who do wrong;
2 for like the grass they will soon wither,
    like green plants they will soon die away.

3 Trust in the Lord and do good;
    dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
4 Take delight in the Lord,
    and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:1-4)

Unpolitics. The superpower.

The game is up for the Christian publishing industry?

I need help.

I have just thought a terrible thought.

The single biggest obstacle to getting books into the hands of eager readers is the Christian publishing industry, an industry that I love, respect and owe much to.

Here’s the problem.

I am preparing a talk on Revelation. I would like to read a book called ‘The Theology of Revelation’ by scholar Richard Bauckham. An internet search tells me it’s on sale at Amazon for £21 or rather less on Kindle. The same search pulls up a pdf copy of the book available for free.

I am queasy about downloading the pdf because I am cheating somehow, but I am also queasy about shelling out £20, even if I did this through my local Christian bookshop. £20 is a lot of money.

What I would really like to do, it occurs to me, is email Richard Bauckham and ask if he minded me reading the free pdf. I do not think he would mind (I don’t know him). But I also think he would say he has a contract with the publishers and they would mind.

I decide to do without the book, so I neither download it nor buy it. The Christian publishing industry made the barriers too high for me.

In the late-medieval days of yore– say 1989–the only way to get material from a fine mind like Richard Bauckham into my lesser head was to have a Christian publishing industry. And it was fantastic. It shaped the Protestant world.  The book cost £20. That was relatively expensive, but we paid it sometimes because we knew that although some money went to the author, most went to maintaining a world-spanning chain that edited, printed, marketed, warehoused, and displayed this and thousands of other wonderful books and made them available everywhere. In an analogue world, this was a modest cost for unimagineably vast benefits.

But everything has changed. Getting Prof Bauckman’s book direct from his head to mine now costs almost nothing, probably less than a penny.

So why can’t the book be available for 99p, most of which would go to Prof Bauckham? Why not? Because the publishers and the booksellers can’t live with that price, and through their contractual arrangements they stand in the way of it being available at that price.  Christian publishers and booksellers, once the friend of Christians who wish to learn, have become their enemy. This is my terrible thought. Committed to an archaic ante-deluvian distribution model, they make books needlessly, ruinously expensive and thus drastically reduce their circulation and usefulness. Bauckham should be read by his tens of thousands; but thanks to the Christian publishing industry, he only has his thousands, or indeed his hundreds. What a terrible waste! 

But, say the industry, it’s not so simple. They will tell me I am underplaying their contribution: talent-spotting, editing, marketing,  gate-keeping; that magical work of taking an MS and making it fluent, coherent, available, and hallmarked as theologically solid and well-written.

I will return and say that may have been true once but is so no longer. Editing? You jest. Developing authors? Dream on. Marketing? Authors have to  do it themselves. Typesetting and cover design? Free or cheap alternatives will do just as well for this kind of book. (See what CUP did with Bauckham’s book, below: this is intern stuff.) Gatekeeping? Proper reader reviews are worth much more than the fluff that goes on the cover. What is left? The prestige of being published by a respected house. This is true. But it ain’t worth £19, not when these very respected names are being taken over by accountants and falling off the perch like the rest of the rust-belt.

Publishing once was a world-changing industry; so was coal-mining.

Please someone help me, save me from my sins!

I edited this blog after first writing it, to try to simplify the arguments. I changed the title from ‘Christian bookshops’ to ‘Christian publishing industry’. I also added the Amazon ref to Prof Bauckham’s book, which I would like to warmly recommend–but of course I  haven’t read it.