Applying Occam's Razor To Revelation
Today (in the Florida panhandle) I rode the elevator with a hotel repair staffer who told us he listens to a pastor in Gravette, Arkansas. Apparently it’s a ministry that hosts a one hour bible class every day on television, broadcast on over 150 channels (plus all the social media means of watching television these days).
A quick perusal of the church web site led us to a “we believe” page, and I noted among the things the church believes this item: “We believe the seventh trumpet sounds after the tribulation.”1
This sent me down a thought rabbit hole the remainder of the day that I’m inviting you to go down with me. Basically, I realized I’m an Occam’s razor Christian. Occam’s razor applies the principle of parsimony (which in my mind is always something more seedy—it isn’t seedy—and I can never remember that word for regular use), that is, “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.”
Always go with the simplest explanation.
If you start digging around in popular Christian discourse, you will find quite a lot of discussion about tribulation, millennialism, essentially a lot of words spilled discussing how the end of days will occur and what they will be like.
To be fair to those discussing such things, they are trying to make sense of biblical texts that are themselves loquacious on “the end times.” We can think here of Revelation, plus some of the stuff that makes it into the pseudo-Pauline epistles and a few of the teachings of Jesus.
Most millennialist theories are attempting to harmonize all of these texts out of a (hopefully well-meaning) fundamentalist (literalist?) fidelity to Scripture. The only problem: the more one attempts to harmonize them, the more complicated everything becomes, and pretty soon you have thousands of theories about the order of events as described in Revelation and how they relate to present day events.
Hal Lindsey, anyone?
So let’s apply Occam’s razor to this situation. Jesus teaches, “No one knows about that day or hour.” Jesus also teaches, “Don’t worry.”
End of story. We can’t really know what the end times will be like, and anyone who claims to know is claiming more than Jesus himself. So don’t worry about it.
Don’t worry about it.
Now that we’ve made it as simple as that, we can offer a few additional observations. First, once we stop worrying about the end times we are set much more free to attend to this present reality. There’s no good reason to spend a bunch of energy on end-times prophecies when there are your neighbors basic needs to meet.
And… There are actually some good reasons NOT to invest energy in end-times prophecy. These good reasons are an additional application of Occam’s razor.
First, a basic and helpful principle for reading Scripture is to try, as much as possible, to read it in the way the first readers of the text would have read it. So, for example, Revelation. The cities who received these writings weren’t busy asking themselves, “How will these texts be related to Saddam Hussein, or Putin, or Biden, or Trump?” The first readers of these texts read them in the spirit in which they were written. They were apocalyptic texts, offered as such so those carrying them might not be caught with overtly political tracts in hand, because in most areas where Christianity was growing, it was also oppressed.
Revelation was written as word of comfort. The text was designed to give hope, and a sense of solidarity.
Unfortunately, apolacyptic is a messy form of literature, and because it is so strangely capacious, it can and does allow future readers to read a lot into it that isn’t there. This is true of all apocalyptic literature. Just think of Nostradamus.
In fact, I guess it’s possible that Christianity’s long engagement with these texts, it’s constant positing some kind of literal reading of Revelation, has trained many Christians unfortunately to believe other kinds of conspiracies as well.
Teaching about things like “the seventh trumpet after the tribulation,” though not intentionally alt-right or conspiracy theory adjacent, nevertheless does train a whole community of readers to believe and trust in other texts that predict really strange occurrences.
I don’t know if you can draw a straight line between teachings like millennialism and the people waiting this summer in Dallas for the return of JFK. If someone has a more simple explanation for how people can believe such things, I’m all ears.
But I do have one theory about Qanon and other conspiracy theories that I think does pass the parsimony test. It’s this: it isn’t so much the specifics of the conspiracy theory, and more the hope such theories provide.
People are looking for comfort in a complex world, and if the conspiracy theories provide that comfort (even if that comfort is also laced with things like anti-Semitism and racism) then people latch onto them not so much because they are “true” but because they succor. And unfortunately, hate can be comforting.
Of course this was also true as I mentioned of Revelation. The first readers of the text wouldn’t have taken the text literally. They would have read it as a text of hope and promise.
I don’t know what to do with this fact. Martin Luther famously lowered the status of Revelation when he translated it into German, placing it at the end of his translation, stating it was edifying but not canonical, and even argued it shouldn’t be widely read because it is difficult and easily misread (he had similar issues with Daniel).
Of course as Luther took on in later life a more apocalyptic worldview Revelation became increasingly attractive to him, but then that’s all the more worrisome because that was the same period of time in Luther’s scholarship when his writings turned more anti-Semitic and conspiracy-inflected.
So the issue: the more anxious communities or readers become the more likely they are to latch onto these apocalyptic texts. But as we know at a very practical level, such texts describe events (or set us up to believe in future events) about which we can’t actually know anything.
You can’t really know whether that trumpet is going to blow. You just can’t. And you can have a very high view of Scripture and still not know.
Occam’s razor offers a cure.
Let go.
Let go of being busy discussing and trying to work out the meaning of texts in relationship to a future that is in God’s hands alone.
Which is to say, the most parsimonious move of all is also the most faithful: trust God. Live this life. End of story.
There’s also this one, “Jesus Christ is your spiritual Husband.” But I’ll leave that one for another day.