How to Read the Book of Revelation: Empire, Power, and the Lamb (Greg Carey)

How should Christians read the Book of Revelation?

In this episode of The Faith Roundtable, Josh Burtram sits down with New Testament scholar Greg Carey to explore Revelation not as an end-times timeline, but as apocalyptic “unveiling” that critiques empire, power, violence, economics, and idolatrous allegiance.

Greg Carey is Associate Dean and Professor of New Testament at Moravian University School of Theology and the author of Rereading Revelation: Theology, Ethics, and Resistance (Eerdmans). We talk about Revelation as resistance literature, the Lion/Lamb reversal in Revelation 5, how truth and witness function as the Lamb’s “weapon,” and why Revelation presses ethical questions about politics, money, worship, and faithfulness.

If you’ve been taught to read Revelation through fear, charts, or speculation, this conversation offers a historically grounded, theologically serious alternative.

Topics include:

• What “apocalypse” means (unveiling, not prediction)

• Rome, civic religion, and imperial worship

• Revelation as resistance literature

• Violence, symbolism, and how misreadings happen

• Revelation 5: Lion of Judah and the slaughtered Lamb

• “Come out of her” (Rev 18:4) and compromise

• Revelation 18: wealth, luxury, exploitation, and empire economics

• Judgment, vengeance, hope, and the New Jerusalem

• Gender imagery, power, and prophetic symbolism

GET THE BOOK

Rereading Revelation: Theology, Ethics, and Resistance (Eerdmans)

Also available on Amazon.

CONNECT WITH JOSH BURTRAM

Email: josh@faithfulpoliticspodcast.com

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