I was provoked to write this over-long post by a comment dismissing the relevance of Nahum 3:4 for the interpretation of John’s description of the fall of Babylon the great in Revelation 18 as a “tenuous consideration”. I have spent too much time on this matter already and I don’t expect anyone to read the piece unless he or she has a strong interest in refuting may basic position—and even then maybe we’re all getting a bit bored with the topic. It’s just something I need to do…. Humour me.

Anyway, what I have done is set out what appear to be the obvious cross-references for the chapter. The proclamation of the fall of Babylon the great draws extensively on the Old Testament, and the point made here is that nearly all of the passages referenced speak not of God’s judgment on Jerusalem but of the fall or destruction of a powerful pagan city, typically for having defied the God of Israel. To my mind this strongly suggests that John thought he was describing the fall of the city of Rome.

In the opening chapter (“Setting the Stage”) of Paul and His Recent Interpreters Tom Wright makes the basic point that our modern culture has separated religion from politics and public life and has confined Paul to the religious sphere. Both in the academy and in the church he is viewed as a proponent of ideas and beliefs—about God, Jesus, salvation, the life of the church, the end times, etc.—that do not directly impinge on those aspects of modern life that would normally be classified as politics, economics, or culture. We are so thoroughly conditioned by this defining premise of secularism that we do not think twice about its relevance for interpreting the New Testament.

Don Preston has been arguing at length in comments on an earlier post against the identification of “Babylon the great” with Rome (Rev. 14:6-11; 16:19; 17-18). One reason he gives for the view is that the great harlot, which is Babylon the great, is not to be identified with the beast on which she sits: “the woman (Babylon) is not the beast, the woman rides on the beast. Babylon sits on the seven hills. It is the seven hills that equal the beast”. He notes, in particular, that “the Beast turns on the woman and destroys her” (Rev. 17:16-17).

Rather, in his view, Babylon the great is Jerusalem. Revelation 17 describes a “partnership of persecution” whereby the Jews incited Rome to persecute Christians. He quotes Gentry: “The fact that the Harlot is seated on the seven headed beast (obviously representative of Rome) indicates, not identity with Rome, but alliance with Rome against Christianity.” Evidence that Jews poisoned the mind of Nero against the Christians in Rome is alluded to. But in the end, Rome turns against Jerusalem and destroys it.

I recently chanced upon this quotation from a book by Vernon White, Atonement and Incarnation, published in 1991:

The universal claims of the Christian faith are not easy to sustain. It is sufficient merely to spend some time sitting at a roadside café in a busy, cosmopolitan city, watching the world go by. It is a big world, with too many people. It stretches the imagination a long way to think how God could have significant personal interest in every individual.… How are we to imagine our little local Christ event reconciling all that?

I don’t know where White takes this line of thought. Is the failure of the imagination a reason not to believe in a universal atonement? Is he encouraging his readers to explore new ways of making the universal claims in a busy cosmopolitan context? Does he have a better way of believing in “our little local Christ event”?

David Sunday asks how Jesus can be called “Everlasting Father” in Isaiah 9:6:

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

“How can Jesus the Messiah, the second person of the Godhead, be called Everlasting Father?” Sunday insists that Isaiah is not teaching us that “God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, is the same person as God the Father”. That can’t be what Isaiah means because that would be the heresy of modalism, and obviously Isaiah wasn’t a heretic So what Isaiah must mean is that Jesus is “father-like” in the way that he treats us. Moreover, this is an “eternal” characteristic. The child described by Isaiah is “the author of eternity”, the “father of time”!’ He is fatherly in that he reveals the Father to us (cf. Jn. 14:9-10).