The Violence in Revelation: Catharsis, Not a Call to Arms
Revelation is one of the Bible's most violent books. Two scholars explain who's actually doing the violence in the text, and why that changes everything. Revelation 19 is genuinely gory, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. But two Bible scholars argue there's a crucial detail most readers miss about who's doing the violence, and why it was never meant to justify our own.
The Violence in Revelation: Catharsis, Not a Call to Arms
Revelation 19 is genuinely gory. Blood, a warrior on a white horse, birds gorging on the flesh of the defeated: there's no getting around it, and we're not going to try. For Episode 6 of TYB — The Bridge, host Katie Haldane put the question directly to Rev. Assoc. Prof. Robyn Whitaker and Asst. Prof. U-Wen Low. How do you sit with this violence honestly, without either explaining it away or letting it justify violence in the world today? Their answer turns on a detail most readings skip straight past.
It's Meant to Be Overwhelming, On Purpose
Read Revelation start to finish, rather than in the small, familiar chunks most of us encounter it in, and a pattern shows up fast: the devastation gets described again and again, in cycles. That repetition isn't sloppy writing. Whitaker argues it's deliberate. The reader is meant to feel the full, exhausting weight of a world that has gone badly astray, not to enjoy a single dramatic climax and move on.
Here's the Detail That Changes the Reading
Look closely at who is actually doing the violence, and something important shifts. On the side the text presents as good, the violence belongs to God. Not once are Jesus's followers told to raise an army and go to war. When two witnesses appear earlier in the book, they don't fight. They're killed, and that's the whole of their part in it. As Low puts it, you can direct plenty of hard questions at God about the violence in this book. What you can't do, on any honest reading of the text, is point to Revelation and claim it as a mandate for human beings to take up the sword themselves.
Written to Be Performed, Not Skimmed
There's a second layer to this that rarely makes it into how Revelation gets taught: it was written to be performed, read aloud to a gathered community in one sitting, something like three hours, start to finish. Low draws a comparison to ancient Greek and Roman theatre, where violence typically happened offstage rather than in front of the audience. A death would occur during the intermission, and the performers would "roll the body out" afterwards so everyone understood what had happened, without staging the act itself.
The scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has written about the cathartic function this kind of structure can serve, and it's a reading Low finds persuasive. Sit with the full weight of Revelation's violence, performed and felt in its entirety, and the intended effect isn't to prime an audience for real-world violence. It's closer to the opposite: you feel it fully enough that you don't need to go out and enact it.
When Christians Read the Violence as Permission
The genuine danger, in both scholars' view, is what happens when that boundary gets crossed, when people read Revelation's violence as licence for their own. Whitaker pointed to a recent, real example: earlier this year, as the U.S. Department of War's Pete Hegseth spoke about the strike on Iran, he reached for the language of "Armageddon" and holy war. In Whitaker's reading, that's a case of humans stepping into a role Revelation reserves for God alone, and doing so is not conviction. It's idolatry, claiming for ourselves a judgment the text is explicit was never handed to us.
Not a Text for Christian Nationalism
That distinction carries through to Revelation's own ending. The final vision in the book is of God's kingdom, but God is explicitly the one leading it, not a human council or a human government. As Whitaker puts it plainly, this is not a text that tells its readers to go take over their government and make God's kingdom happen by force. It's a text that says: follow Jesus, stay true in worship, and trust that God will ultimately redeem all things. Readers are called to participate in that hope, not to lead the charge or claim that power for themselves.
The Take-Home: Wait, Witness, Worship
If Revelation isn't handing out permission to fight, what is it asking for instead? Low's framing is refreshingly concrete: wait, witness, worship. Think in terms of principles rather than a literal one-to-one pattern to imitate. What is this text actually pointing us toward, two thousand years removed from the world it was written in? Part of that, both scholars agree, is a practical question about stewardship: the world we're leaving behind for when, as the text puts it, God's kingdom fully arrives. Low compares it to renting a house from the person who actually owns it. What state are you leaving it in?
That's a very different takeaway than "Revelation endorses war." It's also, we'd argue, a far more demanding one.
Go deeper: hear the full conversation with Rev. Assoc. Prof. Robyn Whitaker and Asst. Prof. U-Wen Low in Episode 6, "Redeeming Revelation," on TYB — The Bridge, and catch the companion piece on 666, the Antichrist and the mark of the beast at trashyourbible.com/thebridge.