Reading Revelation Responsibly

Mark Labberton:
What a gift it is today to welcome Dr. Michael Gorman as our guest on Conversing. Michael has held the Raymond E. Brown Chair in Biblical studies and Theology at St. Mary’s University and Seminary for many years. He’s a New Testament scholar and a writer who has published over 20 books. Among the books that he has yet to come out or one that will come out in ’26 entitled Life Transfigured: A Contemporary Pauline Theology. And most recently published 1 Corinthians: A Theological Pastoral and Missional Commentary.

Today we’re going to have the opportunity to consider a book that he wrote a number of years ago entitled Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation. Michael, what a great gift it is to have you on Conversing today.

Michael Gorman:
It’s very kind of you to have me, Mark, and I’m glad to be here.

Mark Labberton:
I’ve been a fan of your writing for many years, and this book, when it came out in 2011, the book that we’re primarily going to be discussing today, Reading Revelation Responsibly, is a book that I could have definitely used when I was a regular preaching pastor. I have probably preached through many, many, many, maybe not all, but most of the biblical books, but I have to confess that I never preached through Revelation. I spoke on various texts. But part of the reason is that I didn’t have your book, and if I had had this book, I could have perhaps tackled the really challenging task of interpreting the Bible and this book in particular to a congregation of thoughtful people. So, thank you.

Michael Gorman:
Don’t feel too bad because you’re probably not alone, and there are probably a few people who have preached through the Book of Revelation who shouldn’t have done so.

Mark Labberton:
That’s true too. I love in the opening of the book in a section you call the Prelude, there’s a wonderful opening paragraph that really summarizes I think why we’re both saying the things we are. So, if you could just read that, I think it sets the stage.

Michael Gorman:
Sure. It says this book is for those who are confused by, afraid of and/or preoccupied with the Book of Revelation, not by the way, Revelation’s plural. My aim is to help rescue it from those who either completely misinterpret it or completely ignore it. It is the product of 25 years of serious reading, reflecting, teaching, and Travelling related to the apocalypse as Revelation is also known. This term is the English form of the first Greek word in the book Apocalypses meaning revelation. It does not mean destruction, end of the world or anything similar.

Mark Labberton:
I just think that paragraph summarizes or hints at the very least the complexities of why people, as you say, either distort the text or just become so obsessed by the text or therefore cause other people to simply ignore it just as you specify. What was it that most motivated you to write this book?

Michael Gorman:
Yeah. I think it started oddly enough in my high school youth group, and that is because I grew up in the faith, at least in the ’70s and the early ’70s in particular when Hal Lindsey and the Late Great Planet Earth was storming the world in the same way that Tim LaHaye and Left Behind series did a generation later. And we had one youth group leader in our church who was quite, I would say fanatical about predicting the end of the world and really in sync with Hal Lindsey. And it scared me to death Mark. It just really scared me to death.

And so, I went off to college and had what we called back then an RA, a resident assistant who was equally obsessed with the Book of Revelation and scared me even further. I mean, this young man went out in the woods on the weekends with his survival gear trying to get ready for the apocalyptic end of the world.

And so, when I went to Princeton Seminary, finally gotten scared by and then avoided the Book of Revelation for so long. And Dr. Bruce Metzger was actually offering a course on the Book of Revelation. I don’t remember if it was my first year or my second year, and I thought, “I really need to take this course.”

And that course inspired me both to understand the book and eventually to want to write about it for those who may have had similar experiences to mine. So, it was a long process of getting to that, but as I said in that opening paragraph, 25 years of wrestling, either avoiding or trying to learn from in a good way.

Mark Labberton:
Right, right. I remember a college professor that I had saying, “This class is primarily a lecture class. I’ve spent my whole adult life working on the texts that we’re going to be studying, and when you’ve spent your whole life, I’m interested in your opinion, but for now, it’s going to be my opinion.” You’re not taking that strong a stance, but the benefit of 25 years of scholarship really puts us in a position of benefiting tremendously from all the work that you’ve done.

I think one of the things I just want to say from the top, for those who are not yet acquainted with this book, that it’s written in an extremely clear and user reader oriented way that allows the reader to be guided with the right kind of voice and the right instruction that helps us understand the complexities of the text to then understand in a certain way the simplicity of the text and to try to avoid the extremes of context around the text, which have often been one of the great challenges throughout the whole history of the reading of the Book of Revelation.

So, Michael, you really have given the church a magnificent gift, and I would really strongly encourage anyone who’s curious about Revelation to read this book. Whatever level of familiarity you may have with the book or lack of familiarity, I think you’ll benefit greatly by taking time to read it.

Michael, when you were beginning and you were trying to sort out the issues, what we might even call the crisis of reading Revelation, what were you thinking mostly about, certainly the audience you just gave us indication of, but what were the critical that is the scholarly issues that you felt you most wanted to try to sort out?

Michael Gorman:
I think for me, at first at least, the issue was, does this book predict particular events or people or scenarios that we should map onto the contemporary age, whether it was the late 20th century or the 21st century? I think that was the driving question for me early on, and even through working through the book with Professor Metzger.

Then I think once I sorted that out and came to the conclusion that that’s not really what the book is about, it then became clear to me that I needed to keep it and myself rooted first of all in the first century. Then the burning question became for me, if it’s not predicting particular events, people, scenarios, what is its 21st century or maybe even for earlier times, 20th century relevance?

So, I think it was those two questions. What is it that it’s not about? And then if it’s not about that, what is it about? And how do we read this book as I try to say in the book’s title, how do we read this responsibly in the 21st century? I didn’t want to be in the position of saying it’s simply a first-century document and only spoke to the first-century churches, but neither did I want to be in the position of saying it was something only about today and didn’t have anything to say to the first-century churches. Those two extremes are the ones that I wanted to avoid.

Mark Labberton:
Right. And it would seem to me that you could almost say that that’s true throughout the history of the reading of Revelation, that almost every generation has felt that same tension.

Michael Gorman:
Yeah. No, I think that’s right, but I think if I can be so bold as to say the mistake, it seems to me the mistake has been made, is to map it onto particular events, people, scenarios, as I said, in a way that suggests that that’s what Revelation was predicting. And so, when those predictions fail, then Revelation gets either sidelined again or gets misinterpreted or gets scoffed at, and we’re back to ground zero trying to reconstruct how this book might actually address us today.

Mark Labberton:
Right. Well, I think your subtitle, Uncivil Worship and Witness Following the Lamb into the New Creation is a distillation of the main theme of the book. But why don’t you unpack that and set forth for us again for those who haven’t yet read it, what is the central thesis of your understanding of the Book of Revelation?

Michael Gorman:
Yeah. Well, it’s a long subtitle. I felt a little embarrassed by it, but it does summarize, as you said, the main claim of the book. So, let me just read it again. Uncivil Worship and Witness Following the Lamb into the New Creation. So, I think as I was wrestling with the Book of Revelation over quite a long period of time, the theme of and the centrality of worship really came to speak to me. And that was partly because I come from a very musical family or I’m part of a very musical family. I have an organist son, a pianist son, and a pianist wife, and we all love classical music and we all love Handel’s Messiah.

So, I knew a fair bit of Revelation because of Handel’s Messiah, “Worthy Is the Lamb” and “Hallelujah Chorus” and all those things. When I finally put it together, that Revelation really was a book about worship, not only the beautiful music that came out of it, including hymns and Handel’s Messiah and contemporary worship songs, but also the worship within the book itself. It all came together in an interesting way where I realized, “Wow, this is a book about worship.”

And then I read Eugene Peterson’s book, Reversed Thunder, in which it makes that claim. Interesting thing about Eugene Peterson and connection to me and to St. Mary’s, I teach at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, and one of its longstanding divisions is called the Ecumenical Institute. Well, Eugene Peterson was a pastor in Baltimore for 29 years. He taught part-time in St. Mary’s Ecumenical Institute. He taught the Book of Revelation as one of his courses, and when he left and moved elsewhere, I came in and I took up the mantle of teaching the Book of Revelation following Eugene Peterson. So, that’s a fun story about that connection.

So, when I put that worship motif together in my head and then got to Chapters 12 and 13 where the opposite of real worship is happening because now we have the worship of the beast, the promotion of the beast’s way of life instead of the lamb’s way of life, I thought, “Wow, that sounds an awful lot like what some people would refer to as civil religion, as religion which lifts up the secular powers or the secular state or the secular ruler in an inappropriate way.” So, I just said, “Well, let’s undo that.”

So, instead of talking about civil religion, let’s talk about uncivil religion, which of course I have to say in the book, I don’t mean impolite religion but uncivil religion or uncivil worship over against civil religion, civil worship. And then that takes us back to the main point of the book, which is worship/discipleship following the lamb into the goal of the Book of Revelation, which is new creation. So, there’s a lot packed in that subtitle, worship, discipleship, new creation, I think are probably the three places to hang your hat, so to speak along the way, as you think about the book.

Mark Labberton:
Right. Now, one of the things that I think makes the book very rich is that you are consciously and deliberately aware of trying to counter some of the interpretive dynamics or paradigms that have been imposed on the Book of Revelation that cause distortion. Why don’t you just tease out a few of those for listeners?

Michael Gorman:
Yeah. Well, I’ll preface it by saying, and a separate piece that I wrote, a more scholarly essay in which one of your former colleagues, Marianne Meye Thompson also had a part. We were at a conference together at Duke some years ago, and we each presented papers on various aspects of the Book of Revelation. Well, anyhow, I did my paper on the reception history of Revelation, principles about it, how it’s been received and taught, and the first thing I said was, “No one writing about Revelation should think they’re flawless or without sin, that those who have no sin cast the first stone.” So, there’s a part of me that wants to be hesitant to be critical of others because we all make mistakes.

Mark Labberton:
Sure.

Michael Gorman:
On the other hand, there have been some ways of interpreting the Book of Revelation that have had so much negative impact. I say in the beginning of the book, “spiritually dangerous”, and it’s such a complex set of ways of approaching Revelation that all feed together. They end up with very political and spiritual and what we call technically hermeneutical or interpretive faults or problems.

And I think the first thing that holds these different approaches together is it goes back to what I said a few minutes ago, trying to map the Book of Revelation onto contemporary events. Seeing a one for one correspondence of prediction. Not understanding that the Book of Revelation was first of all written for the first century. Its primary audience is the first century, and our job as interpreters is not to look for predictions of what’s going to happen, so to speak, but to look for parallels, analogies, similarities.

So, if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, we can call it a duck, but we don’t have to say that Revelation predicted the duck. So, I think that’s the thing that holds these erroneous approaches together. But more importantly, in the last, well, let’s just say the last 50 to 100 years, too many people have tried to associate this kind of prediction with the Middle East with war, especially even nuclear war, and in a sense being so prediction oriented about the end of the world that as one of my pastors used to say, “So heavenly minded, no earthly good.” So focused on the alleged end of the world and how that’s going to take place, that people even neglect the realities and the requirements of Christian living in the present.

So, the spiritual danger of that, the political danger of trying to say that these predictions are about the Middle East and even about, as I said, nuclear war. And as a result, people can literally lose their sense of balance. So, I talk in the book about people who have left their jobs and for instance, left their families or fired their employees because they needed to go out and tell the world that the end was coming and they needed to repent, which is theologically all true, but it’s not a prediction about a specific date. So, yeah, it’s a troubling thing to see that repeated, and it’s happened again just recently.

Mark Labberton:
Michael, one of the things that I experienced in reading the book, which I did a few times actually because I found it so rich, it felt to me like you were a very, very careful craftsman who was cleaning an aperture that had gotten layers of filtering dust and debris on the lens and made it really impossible to see the vision if you just read it in the way that you help us to see it, and actually see clearly the exaltation of the lamb, which is the gripping core and inspiration and exhilaration really of the book, which then motivates and guides discipleship a life of worship, a life of justice. Just comment a bit about that.

Michael Gorman:
Well, two things to say, I think. One is the problem with the predictive approach is failing to see the nature of apocalyptic literature. And a number of people have suggested, I think a very relevant way of seeing Revelation is to think of it as a series of political cartoons where everything is drawn big, is drawn large to capture the imagination.

And so, when we look at text like Chapter 4 verse 1, instead of thinking of it as predicting the rapture where the narrator is drawn up into heaven. Instead, what we get is a beautiful, if you will, political cartoon or a beautiful portrait of worship in heaven and it centers on God on the throne and the lamb who we learn is in the midst of the throne, and who was the one who was slaughtered, but now standing. Symbolizing the resurrection.

Nobody that I know of thinks they’re going to actually see a lamb when they encounter Jesus in the resurrection. So, we know it’s symbolic. But what’s beautiful about that picture is first of all, the lamb imagery is used 28 times in the Book of Revelation. In the ancient world, the number four and the number seven, which together obviously make 28 symbolize universality four corners, four directions and completeness, seven days so forth.

So, just in the way that the lamb title is used of Jesus suggests he is the universal Lord. He is the one who is all deserving of our worship, but also just the way the picture of the lamb is given as the one who was slain and is now standing. And those two things remain together that we see what the entire New Testament teaches, which is that Jesus as the crucified one is now raised from the dead, but as the risen Lord, he retains his identity as the crucified Messiah.

So, that’s why there’s blood associated with the lamb and the Book of Revelation, not just because he died, but because he remains always the crucified one, and yet he’s always standing. He’s always alive. So, that beautiful mixture of crucifixion and resurrection comes through.

But then more importantly, it’s not just a picture of who Jesus is or even what it means to engage in rightful worship, but also in discipleship, that it’s those who follow the lamb wherever he goes. That’s what is the essential definition of a Christian. In the Book of Revelation, you can say in the whole New Testament, but we don’t get that lamb image in the whole New Testament, and he’s the lamb who as we see in the move from Chapter 4 into Chapter 5 in the Book of Revelation. We’re expecting the prediction of this lion figure, this Messiah figure, this root of David, and that’s what we get.

But instead of getting the powerful conquering Messiah that some people might’ve expected in the first century, and some people expect in the 21st century, what we get is the lamb who was slain. And so, discipleship means following that kind of lamb in that kind of way rather than the militaristic triumphalistic, even violent way that sometimes we see people interpreting not only the Book of Revelation, but Christian discipleship.

Mark Labberton:
Right. So, part of what the Book of Revelation is about is really sorting out power.

Michael Gorman:
Absolutely.

Mark Labberton:
So, talk to us about that. How does it get sorted out? What is Revelation offering us as a way of coming to understand power rightly ordered?

Michael Gorman:
Well, I think the way to start with that is to begin at the wrong kind of power. So, when we get to Chapters 12 and 13, we see there a picture of what I refer to as the unholy trinity, the Satanic figure defined in Chapter 12 described as a dragon figure. And then in Chapter 13, the two beasts, the one from the sea and the one from the land, the one from the land causing people to worship and give honor to the one from the sea, the first beast.

So, what we have there is a portrait of power gone amok, gone astray, gone awry, hyper power, and it’s power that is centralized in a figure, the first beast who probably represents originally in the first century, the Roman Empire and the Roman Emperor and that head of that entity. And then those on the land near Ephesus and Patmos, where John is representing those in the what’s called the cult of the emperor, the imperial cult causing the worship in the adulation of this beast. And behind all that is the ultimate power of Satan.

So, this unholy trinity of a satanic, imperial and religious power coming together to wreak havoc, to oppress people, to bring about economic illness, to be the opposite of the kind of power that takes on evil in its to itself and is willing to absorb rather than inflict violence. And that’s what we get in the lamb who was slain and in the disciples who follow that lamb. So, power gets redefined in terms of the lamb, Revelation is about lamb power, not hyper-religious power, hyper-political power. It’s about, as I said, absorbing rather than inflicting evil, absorbing rather than inflicting violence. And all that’s related to those words.

Mark Labberton:
It’s really such a dynamic image and it does feel in a way like the whole of the Bible in my view, just as you were making some sweeping statements about the whole New Testament, perhaps I’ll go even grander and say the whole Bible is about getting worship rightly ordered and all of the ways in which idolatry and false worship can so easily distort actually who we’ve been made to be, how we’ve been made to understand and know God and be known by God and how we’ve been made to know and love our neighbour. All of that gets disordered by a disordered understanding of power and what Revelation gives us.

And I think your book does such a great job of releasing that as its primary message so that at least I find in the way that you’re reading Revelation, a fresh igniting of the transformative freedom that following the crucified lamb actually is to our ability to be free to love and to see our neighbour and to see God in a different way.

In a book that I wrote called The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God’s Call to Justice, it’s really a book about the danger of worship because the danger could be that we will be led into false worship, but the danger of true and faithful worship is a danger to a false self, a disordered use of power, a disarrangement of our affections and our desires that can often lead us into terribly tragic and painful places of loss and emptiness. Whereas what you’re giving us and helping us to see in Revelation is this grand alternative vision that is, as you say, the inverse of the false gods that are available to us, not least even in the era that we’re living in.

Michael Gorman:
Yeah. I think your book really hits the nail on the head because worship is not just about what people do in a particular hour on Sunday morning or whatever. Worship is about the whole orientation of our lives in certain directions, and it affects, as you were saying, everything that we do from the way we view the world to the way we view God, to the way we view and treat our neighbour.

And I think what Revelation does, and I’m not saying it necessarily would be intentional on the writer’s part, although I think it might be inspired to do so, it gives us a whole new way of thinking of not only power and worship, but also what’s the goal of life? What’s it moving toward? And how is it moving in that direction? Where is the world going toward?

And what Revelation says is it’s moving toward this new creation. It’s not moving toward destruction. Destruction is a penultimate or next-to-last thing that is a kind of cleansing to prepare the way for this new creation. And as Christians, we believe that we’re already living in the new creation. So, how does that impact the way we view worship and mission and even politics? But more importantly, how does it view the way we view God? And is God some kind of divine tyrant whose primary mission is to bring about the power of one kind of people or one kind of political party or one kind of state over against others? And that’s why I think Revelation has something to say dramatically to our political environment.

Mark Labberton:
So, go on about that because the way that you treat that in the book, which I just want to say to listeners, is I found it very even-handed and very, very discerning and discreet in what you’re saying, but both bold at the same time. So, interpret the connections then. If we’re not going to misinterpret Revelation and apply it wrongly to today, how do we apply it faithfully, and as you say, responsibly today?

Michael Gorman:
Well, it’s interesting how many people, especially in the last 50 to 100 years have thought that the two beasts in Revelation 13 must somehow symbolize something like the United Nations and the pope. That is such a trope, such a common interpretation of the Book of Revelation all over the world. As Martin Marty at the University of Chicago used to say, “That way of interpreting Revelation began in England, got imported into the United States and then exported throughout the globe.”

But there’s an odd truth to that reading, and that is to say throughout history, religion, and that’s not even a word I like, but I need to use it for the moment, religion has almost always found a bedfellow in politics and vice versa. So, the use of religion by political powers and the use of politics by religious powers is nothing new.

Mark Labberton:
Nothing new.

Michael Gorman:
But it’s not predicting that the general secretary of the UN and the next pope are going to somehow take over the world. It’s rather that we need to look for places in which unwittingly perhaps and sometimes intentionally, those two forces have come together and we have been sucked up as Christians into it. So, at the moment, I think one of the main forms, but not the only form that that takes is the so-called reality of Christian nationalism.

And as some people know, I’m on somewhat of a bandwagon to not capitalize the sea in that phrase Christian nationalism because I think it’s only Christian in name and has no Christian substance, even though some Christians have been caught up into it. But it’s not just the idea that some people think that Christian nationalism is that Christians want to be in political power. That’s part of it. At its root, Christian nationalism is a form of idolatry. That’s like what we see in Revelation 13 where what is apparently religious practice and political practice gets so married that politics always wins. Political power always wins and discipleship loses, Christian faith loses.

And the thing that’s so much more dangerous today than it was in the first century, at least in the first century, Christians could say, “Well, that’s not our religion. That’s the Roman religion. That’s the Roman imperial religion being politicized and so forth.” But today, because Christianity is so dominant, at least in this country and in many western countries and many other countries as well, that nationalism and the idolatry that goes along with it is often with a coating of Christianity light. And that looks so appealing to so many people, when in fact, in my view at least, it’s so dangerous.

Mark Labberton:
Right. And what makes it dangerous? Say that.

Michael Gorman:
What makes it dangerous is what we’ve been talking about, that it puts us in a position of worshipping an idol, namely political power or a political person. It puts us in a position of engaging in practices that are more like the practices of that political power than they’re like the practices of the slaughtered and raiding and resurrected lamb so that people justify hatred, even violence while they’re carrying pictures of Jesus or while they’re invoking the name of Jesus. And that’s worse than Christian nationalism. Their only word for that is idolatry.

Mark Labberton:
What you’re saying is so important to me and so needed in being said. And it’s part of why I think when I worked on the book on worship and it became even more convinced of how permeating idolatry is on the right and the left, both are fundamentally secular, both are fundamentally about self-interest, both are fundamentally about tribal things rather than about something more generative and life-giving.

And part of it is an unwillingness to die to ourselves. I remember the Sunday before 9/11 rather, I was preaching at the church that I was in the pastor of in Berkeley, and we were doing a false series on the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism, which is what is your only comfort in life and in death? And the opening refrain is that I belong in life and in death, not to myself, but to my faithful savior Jesus Christ and who dies, et cetera. The phrase goes on.

And one of the things that struck me in that moment is that probably there was no more radical thing to say in Berkeley at any moment than to say we don’t belong to ourselves. We actually as disciples come to understand our life is in God’s hands. That change is a grounding and utterly redefining affirmation of how we understand what it means to be human. And I think part of what you bring out so beautifully in this book is how much the work of the dying sacrificed lamb is a work of clarifying our idols and of calling us toward a liberating, just faithful worship that is the character of the God that is the lamb sacrificed and standing.

Michael Gorman:
There’s something you just said that I wanted to emphasize, Mark, because I’ve sometimes been accused of being a little bit too, shall we say, left of centre politically or theologically or whatever. And so, this book really doesn’t, in my opinion at least, doesn’t fit into those neat categories of left and right, conservative and liberal politically because idolatry permeates the left and the right and probably the centre as well.

Mark Labberton:
Yes. Absolutely.

Michael Gorman:
Idolatry is not simply a way of criticizing one’s political or theological enemies. I hate that term right now, but it’s a way of saying that humanity to go back to Augustine or Calvin or just about anybody else, all the way back to Paul, humanity is turned in on itself. Humanity is distorted and comes up with all kinds of values normally in the name of something good like freedom or security or even love that have really very little to do with God’s intentions for the human race. And so, I just wanted to echo what you said about that.

Mark Labberton:
Michael, what would you say for people who are perhaps going to feel like they want to come and read this book, what would you most hope they would derive from it?

Michael Gorman:
I think I would hope that people derive from it a more robust spirituality. And by spirituality, I mean the living out of Christian experience, and that it would be guided by some of the main affirmations of Revelation, that it means discipleship to the lamb. It means practising nonviolence. It means having hope for the reconciliation of the nations and hope for the new creation, not a spirituality of despair, not a spirituality of isolation and withdrawing from the world.

It’s really interesting because Revelation says, “Come out of Babylon.” But the only way to come out of Babylon is to go back into Babylon with new values and new practices. It’s not to go off and live in a holy huddle somewhere. So, I mean, it’s a really interesting tension in the Book of Revelation. And also, to think of discipleship as more than just something we do as individuals. But Revelation is written to the church and to the church is.

It’s particularly interesting in those messages in Chapter 2 and 3. Here, what the spirit is saying to the churches, plural, one after all, seven messages end that same way. And I take that to mean not just the churches of Asia Minor in the first century, but to all churches of all times, and not just to individuals.

As a matter of fact, when Jesus is knocking at the door, Revelation 3:20, which is so often interpreted as an evangelistic, “Open the door of your heart and Jesus will come in.” Well, it’s very interesting, Jesus is not speaking to an individual there, and he’s not speaking to a non-believer. He’s actually speaking to a church named a church in Laodicea. It has kicked Jesus out and Jesus wants to come back in, which is remarkable that Jesus always wants to do that.

Mark Labberton:
And wants us to do that-

Michael Gorman:
Exactly.

Mark Labberton:
… If we have first come out. Yes. It’s just an amazing book. It’s like a hidden gem. And I think what I find so inspiring about it and the way that you’ve interpreted it is that it’s allowed the inspiration that is meant to be what the Book of Revelation conveys actually is more parent. And I think because we do live in an era where idolatries are rampant, where power is the number one issue of every day, and almost every direction you turn in, whether you’re thinking of government or whether you’re thinking of AI, or whether you’re thinking of economics or whether you’re thinking of gender and sexuality or whatever the topic may be, it’s fundamentally has elements of power that are at stake, which we need to actually understand and engage in constructively through the avenue of what you call uncivil worship and witness.

I really do thank you, Michael, for writing this book, and I have said this to you before, but I want to say again that it is just an exceptional gift to the church, and I feel like you help us recover a still greater gift that was given to the church in the Book of Revelation, but which for some of the reasons we’ve talked about, has often gotten lost or buried or distracted rather than actually been free to do its work. So, thank you very much and thank you for being a guest today.

Michael Gorman:
Well, thank you, Mark, for those kind words, and for the kind invitation to join you and your listeners. Grateful.