Interpreting the Book of Revelation for Today (BOOK REVIEW: CAN I GET A WITNESS?)

Brian K. Blount, Can I Get a Witness? Reading Revelation through African American Culture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), pp. 155.

Can I Get a Witness? Reading Revelation through African American Culture is a provocative new interpretation of the Bible's last (and arguably most bizarre) book. Although brief and well written, Brian Blount's book is difficult reading, due both to technical language and complex concepts. But readers who work through it will be rewarded with an interpretation (but not "the interpretive answer" [p. 6]) of Revelation that is an alternative to what "so often ends up sounding like so much mythological mumbo jumbo" (p. 5).

Blount identifies two weaknesses of historical and literary criticism: (1) biblical scholars can only "reconstruct" a writing's first-century context, knowing with certainty that their reconstruction is biased and never knowing with certainty that their reconstruction is accurate (pp. 3-4); and (2) different interpreters interpret the same text in many different ways, even when there is "some consensus about...historical context" (p. 4). In response, Blount advocates a "cultural studies approach to Revelation" (p. 5). He not only recognizes that an interpreter's culture will influence, if not determine, her interpretation (there is no such thing as an objective reading), he embraces this fact, celebrating the role of the reader in the construction of meaning. Blount calls for accepting different cultural readings and putting them in conversation with one another, allowing different interpreters and interpretive communities to be in dialogue as co-learners.

Blount's "goal is not to determine what Revelation meant in John's first-century community; the goal is to ascertain how material written in and for that community becomes meaningful for a particular twenty-first-century community" (p. 10). This reading approach has the potential to make Revelation and other ancient texts newly relevant. It jettisons the notion that a text can have only one meaning across all times and places. Blount summarizes:

We never really learn...which reading is the one objective and correct one. We learn instead how to comprehend the meaning of the text in vastly different and perhaps larger ways because we see and hear how others in their contextual situations access its meaning potential.... [T]hat doesn't mean the text can be made to mean anything. In intercommunal conversation, the tension that arises between interpreters sharpens focus on the text and brings challenge to damaging, unsavory, and untenable readings. (p. 35)

As an African American reader, Blount unapologetically reads Revelation in conversation with the African American experience. Like other biblical scholars (Harry Maier and Michael Gorman, for example), he interprets Revelation "as a call for active, nonviolent resistance [to Rome]" (p. 39). But he also connects this ancient text with African American culture--he "see[s] parallels" (p. 107).

Among Blount's more provocative and interesting insights is his observation that Revelation's image of Jesus as slaughtered Lamb does not teach an atonement theory. Rather, "[John] is showcasing [Jesus'] vulnerability and nonviolent resistance" (p. 78). If there is a developing atonement theory in Revelation, then it is a combination of Christus Victor and moral exemplar thinking: Jesus is a conquering lion who uses lamblike means, and his followers are called to use similar means. (Although Revelation undeniably features violent imagery, Blount contends, "It doesn't take much more than a surface reading to recognize that the Lamb is indeed noted for being slaughtered, not for slaughtering others" [p. 82].) The parallel named here is the nonviolent resistance of Martin Luther King Jr. (p. 83).