Eating the Scroll

(Or a Stomach-Ache from Christianity)

“So I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter.” —Revelation 10:10

For me, the most interesting part of Revelation chapter ten is when John eats the scroll. Similar to the prophet Ezekiel shoving sweet papyrus in his mouth (Ezekiel 3:3), John receives angelic command to, Eucharist-like, “Take and eat.” For both prophets, eating the scroll symbolizes divine call and willing acceptance of the prophetic vocation. Ezekiel’s scroll is sweet with no mention of a bitter aftertaste. John’s ingestion tastes like honey at first but doesn’t digest well. It turns his stomach bitter.

To catch us up, for the textually alert: six angels have recently blown trumpets that heralded destruction, and in chapter ten the reader is given a reprieve. Revelation is dotted with choice visionary interludes, in which John is transported to the heavenly throne room and weary readers take a breather from apocalyptic battle. Previously, before the trumpets begin blowing (chapters 8–9), the slain Lamb is opening seals (ancient mail) from God. Between the sixth and seventh seal, John envisions an interracial, international multitude worshipping God (chapter 7). Here, in between the sixth and seventh trumpet blast—a pause again before seven, the number of divine wholeness—John is caught up in a cosmic, angelic encounter.

Image credit: Seven angels with seven trumpets, and the angel with a censer, from Bamberg Apocalypse, 11th century, Public Domain.

The angel he sees is descending from heaven, with a rainbow over his head, with one foot on the sea, and one foot on land. The scene mimics, and mocks, a Roman sculpture of Emperor Claudius astride earth and water that sits in Turkey’s Aphrodisias museum, which can be viewed here. “God is the Creator and Ruler of the cosmos,” John’s vision seems to say, “and don’t let the emperor tell you otherwise.”

The angel holds a scroll, and John hears a voice from heaven—as he has repeatedly throughout—instructing him to walk up to the angel and take it. The bitter after-effect has to do with the prophetic call: a prophet is always hated in her hometown, Jesus says (Luke 4:16–30). Or perhaps John knows what is about to unfold in Revelation’s visions: a beast is about to emerge from a bottomless pit, leaving bodies strewn on Sodom’s streets; a great red dragon with seven heads is about sweep stars out of the sky with the flick of a tail. It’s enough to give anyone a stomachache and more.

What comes to my mind this month, though, is the bitter after-effect of “eating” Christianity itself. I’ve been spending some time and effort revisiting experiences and doctrines of my evangelical childhood and young adult days. Two books that I’m reading have nudged me towards a core sadness that I carry, even in the midst of a joyful present. The first book tells the truth of the toxicity and failure of much of Christianity itself, on full display in the United States today. The chapter titles alone of Brian McLaren’s newest Do I Stay Christian? are enough to deflate even the most optimistic of Christians. Reasons to say “No” to Christianity are plentiful, and McLaren covers them:

Because Christianity Has Been Vicious to its Mother (Anti-Semitism);

Because of Christianity’s Suppression of Dissent (Christian vs. Christian Violence);

Because of Christianity’s High Global Death Toll (Crusader Colonialism);

Because of Christianity’s Loyal Company Men (Institutionalism);

Because of Christianity’s Real Mastery (Money);

Because of the White Christian Old Boys’ Network (White Patriarchy);

Because Christianity is Stuck (Toxic Theology)

Because Christianity is a Failed Religion (Lack of Transformation)

Because of Christianity’s Great Wall of Bias (Constricted Intellectualism)

Because Christianity is a Sinking, Shrinking Ship of Wrinkling People (Demographics)

It’s not that any of McLaren’s analysis in Do I Stay Christian? is exactly new for me; it’s simply that seeing the case laid out so clearly, and cumulatively, is the equivalent of a bucket of ice water thrown in my face. It wakes me up, shocks and dispenses any remaining denial, and stirs the parallel equivalent of weary sadness in me for making it so long in such a system. I should mention that there is an entire section devoted to the good news, reasons to say “Yes” to Christianity. Those reasons are indeed very good, and dovetail with many of the reasons I still love Christ and even the religion of his name. But wisely, McLaren counsels religious readers to linger with the bad news, and not to skip cheerfully to next section.

Another book I’m reading is A Gentler God by Douglas Frank. Frank headed the evangelical study-away Oregon Extension program for years. Numerous of my friends at Gordon College attended the “OE” and came away transformed. The opportunity to read great books, such as The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky or Waiting for God by Simone Weil, in a caring and questioning community proved life-changing for many. In earnest personal prose and careful scholarship, Frank peels back the surface of core doctrines of evangelical Christianity and lays bare the emotional pain upon which the whole edifice is built. I realize that’s not how many experience it—but it is how I did, how Frank did, and his book is a salve for wounds I had not tended in a long time.

In the first chapter, “Born Again. . . and Again,” he takes on the repeated conversions that many evangelicals go through. Due to the ever-present reality of sin, and the eternal possibility of hell, many people like myself and Frank received Jesus into our hearts repeatedly. We “ran scared to Jesus” (page 39) because we were afraid of divine punishment. One of Frank’s gifts is patiently pointing out the logical assumptions of such beliefs. If our beliefs about God’s love differ so drastically from human love that we run scared to Jesus—both fleeing to and from God—then God’s love doesn’t look much like love at all.

Most of all, A Gentler God is profound because of the remarkable psychological acuity that Frank demonstrates alongside his theological insights. He holds his boyhood self through the text as a beacon of morality, of sorts, and I love Frank and the book for it. Even as seven-year old Frank embraced his family’s fundamentalist religion, joining them, for example, at a Philadelphia street corner with tracts, he also trusts the deeper wisdom that his seven year old self knew:

I am certain he knew in his heart that genuine love—the love for which he inwardly yearned—does not threaten its beloved with pain and death. And I trust that little boy’s heart more than ever. (58)

As a young evangelical convert raised in a pastor’s family myself, that last line took my breath away. In that line lies decades, I believe, of therapeutic, inner work to recover and trust the seven-year old boy’s wisdom. Or maybe I’m talking about myself. I’ve never met Douglas Frank, but I do think that Frank is giving us his life’s work of healing in this book. I’ve known about A Gentler God for years, but I think I knew somewhere inside that I wasn’t ready to revisit the beliefs from which I had long since moved on. The beliefs themselves were too entwined with the pain, and it takes a gentler heart to appreciate the wisdom of A Gentler God.

I’m eating the scroll, and it is sweet. But I still have a stomach-ache.