The encounter between the U.S. government forces and the Branch Davidians in Waco, and the subsequent conflagration, brings the study of the interpretation of the Apocalypse to a head. This recent event demonstrates in graphic and disturbing terms the power of the text to cause social upheaval and to turn lives around or better yet upside down. It also shows the great misunderstanding of religion and religious commitment in U.S. society by the authorities, the media, and the majority of on-lookers.

It seems to me that the Waco conflagration brings us back to our starting point, the text of the Apocalypse itself and the rhetoric of power in the text. For in Waco we see David Koresh doing what, perhaps, John of Patmos tried to do in Ephesus and Laodicea. The following excerpt from my manuscript "The Streets of Heaven" (copyright 1996) is offered as a conclusion to the course and the study of the Apocalypse and Waco.

Bob Royalty

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Revelation is a highly rhetorical text that tries to do something; it is, in fact, performative rather than referential language. (1) But what exactly is the text trying to do? Other contemporaneous texts, such as the Deutero-Pauline epistles, the letters of Pliny to Trajan, or the C. Vibius Salutaris inscription in Ephesus, tell a quite different story from Revelation. The "beast from the sea" and the harlot Babylon appear in other narratives as the Emperor and City of Rome; the "synagogue of Satan" is called elsewhere the synagogue of the Chosen People of God. "Chrestus" is neither the Lion/Lamb nor the Divine Warrior but merely a troublemaker who disturbs the Roman pax. The social world presupposed by the narrative of the Apocalypse is considerably at odds with other narratives. Which ones are correct? This raises questions of historiography that have long been debated. The attempt to show a greater or lesser degree of commensurability between the narrative world of Revelation and the "real world" of first- and second-century Asia suffers from the fallacy that there is one "correct" narrative that describes such a "real world" accurately. (2) Scholarly metanarratives, moreover, cannot pierce the layers of interpretation or obviate the point of view and ideological baggage that come with their sources:

The issue of ideology points to the fact that there is no value-neutral mode of emplotment, explanation, or even description of any field of events, whether imaginary or real, and suggests that the very use of language itself implies or entails a specific posture before the world which is ethical, ideological, or more generally political: not only all interpretation, but also all language is politically contaminated. (3)

Some narratives may be more "real" than others in that they support or reflect the symbolic universes, the structure and processes of world construction, for large communities of people. But who is to say whether Caesar really was a beast or not?

The raids by the U.S. government on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in February and April of 1993 bring this issue into sharper focus. While many Americans might take a negative view of their government, few would go as far as the members of the Davidian church. The Branch Davidians were not uninformed about events in the world "out there." But their interpretation of these events, based on David Koresh's interpretation of Revelation, was dramatically different from the interpretation presumed by most of American society. Here we see the intersection of a narrative world--a subnarrative at that, the seven seals in Revelation 6­8--and a social world with consequences both disastrous and unfathomable to many observers, even those who have studied Revelation or are familiar with the Bible. David Koresh convinced the members of his church that he was the Lamb who was sent to open these seals; that the first four seals had been opened; and that the raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms marked the opening of the fifth seal. (4) Two biblical scholars spent considerable time discussing Revelation with a member of the Davidian church and presented their own interpretation of Revelation to Koresh on a Dallas radio station. A letter from Koresh suggested that these scholars had convinced him that there must be a waiting period while he published his interpretation of the seven seals. (5) All of this took place in terms offered by the narrative world of Revelation, for it was from this text that the Branch Davidians constructed their symbolic universe and within which these scholars made their arguments. David Koresh created a crisis in the social world of the Branch Davidians in large part by his reading of Revelation. (6)

So too the narrative world of the Apocalypse of John does not reflect a social historical situation so much as it attempts to create one. This view of the Sitz im Leben of the Apocalypse, now widely held, stands in contrast to the traditional view that the book was written in a situation of extreme oppression and organized persecution by the Roman authorities. The latter, more traditional view derives from the rhetoric of Revelation itself and is not necessarily consistent with the way other writers, including other ancient Christians, understood their world. To say that the rhetoric of Revelation attempts to create a crisis in the social world of its audience is slightly different than speaking of the crisis of the Apocalypse as "real or "perceived," as does Adela Yarbro Collins. (7) In essence I am saying the same thing about the social setting of the Apocalypse as Yarbro Collins, but I object to the implication in her terminology that, with more data, we could really know what was going on. All crises are perceived, as the events in Waco remind us yet again. More promising is the sociology-of-knowledge approach to the narrative world of Revelation set forth by Wayne Meeks. Meeks writes that "the general strategy of the Apocalypse is to oppose to the ordinary view of reality, as anyone might experience it in Smyrna or Laodicea, a quite different picture of the world as seen from the standpoint of heaven." (8) Revelation, according to Meeks, robs the perceived social order of its greatest asset, "its sheer facticity," by removing "common sense" as a guide for perceiving the social order and thereby turning the social order upside down. Leonard Thompson, also using the sociology-of-knowledge approach, has presented a full analysis of the social world as constructed by John of Patmos and other enemies of Domitian, such as Suetonius and Pliny, and the social-historical situation as he constructs it with the help of sources more friendly to Domitian. (9) Thompson's volume is a new addition to a growing consensus among scholars. To quote Thompson, "In a nutshell, the conflict and crisis in the Book of Revelation between Christian commitment and the social order derive from John's perspective on Roman society rather than from significant hostilities in the social environment." (10) The crisis of the Apocalypse is a construction that stems from the community of John and his circle of prophets.