I shall never forget my first visit to the serious theatre. It was a school outing to the Old Vic where they were presenting Macbeth. It was a play in which I had a personal interest because I was to feature in my school's production of the same work later in the term. I didn't have a major part; in fact, I was to be an Apparition - conjured up by the three witches to give Macbeth some rather dubious political advice! I had no name; Shakespeare simply dubbed my couple of lines as the words of 'a bloody child'! But I was all-agog to see how the Old Vic was going to handle this demanding role.
When the moment I was waiting for arrived, I was so enchanted that for all I I knew they could have been real witches on the stage. The Old Vic succeeded in producing not only some most realistic thunder and lightning, but by some clever lighting effects involving fluorescent paint, they produced an extraordinary eerie atmosphere on stage, so that the bloody Apparition whose role I knew so well appeared to hang in a halo of light in mid-air. It was joyously creepy for all the hundreds of schoolchildren who were watching. And it began an interest that lasted the rest of my schooldays, not in acting, but in stagecraft, in the technical wizardry that goes on behind the scenes. I wasn't an actor for the rest of my school career, I was a backstage boy, trying to learn some of those tricks that the Old Vic had demonstrated.
Ever since those days, I have always rather begrudged the prominence which the narnes of actors seem to have on theatre programmes, or on the credits after a TV film, just because their faces are seen. Anybody who has actually worked on a play knows that the real genius, the real brains, are not out there in front of the limelight at all; they are behind the scenes and supremely, of course, in that canvas chair that De Milne made famous, with the word 'Director' written on the back of it.
That's where the real creative genius lies - where the lighting effects, the stage sets, the camera angles, the author's script, and the actors' performance are all welded together to make of all these diverse elements, a single dramatic whole. It is the director who really ought to occupy the centre of the stage, yet he never does, and as a result, audiences are rarely aware of the supreme control that he exercises over everything that is going on.
That backstage experience of mine helps me to understand a bit the meaning of the visionary experience that John records in Revelation 4 and 5. It was the Bard himself, wasn't it, who said that all the world's a stage and all the men and women players. According to the Bible's view ... more»
There are two subjects that one is never supposed to introduce into the conversation at any polite dinner-party: religion and politics. This chapter is all about both; or to be more precise, it is about the religion of politics. The Bible does not discuss politics in the categories of Conservative and Socialist or Republican and Democrat; instead, it speaks of the spiritual alignment of those who exercise political power. Political rulers are either for God or against him, and it is the purpose of Revelation 13 to warn us that, in the period between Jesus' first coming and his second coming, we must expect periods when godless politics manifests itself in particularly vicious ways.
First, the chapter portrays the characteristics of godless politics (1-6); then the techniques of godless politics (11-18); and finally, it presents us with what the Christian response to godless politics ought to be.
1. The characteristics of godless politics
I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name (1)
It is important to read this chapter against the background of what is said in the rest of the New Testament about civil government. In Romans 13, Paul argues that the purpose of government is to reflect the just rule of God within human society. He insists it is perfectly possible for government to exercise power in a way that pleases God, indeed God himself has ordained it in order to maintain justice within a fallen world. Civil government is meant to be God's servant for the good of human society. Paul was of course aware that often civil government did not fulfil its God-given purpose. Indeed, in 2 Thessalonians 2, he anticipates a future time of political and moral rebellion when the "man of anarchy" would set himself up against God and his people; and in this passage from Revelation, John seems to be describing that same eschatological personification of antichristian tyranny. The early church called him "the Antichrist". John here calls him "a beast".
As with all apocalyptic symbolism, John's imagery is not meant to be visualised so much as decoded. In the Old Testament, Daniel had a very similar vision, except that he saw not one "beast" coming out of the sea, but four. The first was like a lion, the second like a bear, the third like a leopard, and the fourth was a hideously powerful carnivore unlike any animal he had ever seen. In Daniel 7 we are told these four beasts represented successive world empires - probably Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. So what John seems to have done is to fuse together these four symbolic animals of Daniel to make one composite monster representing the sum total of all the godless tyrannies the world had ever known.
For John, most immediately, the monster represented Roman Imperialism; to Christians, ... more»
