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Lex orandi, lex credendi: worship and doctrine in Revelation 4–51

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2014

Fergus King
Fergus King*
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan NSW 2308, Australiafergus.king@newcastle.edu.au
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Abstract

A number of New Testament scholars, including John O'Neill and Larry Hurtado, have drawn attention to the prospects which worship texts in the writings of the New Testament offer in revealing the way in which the first Christians thought of Jesus. Whilst the impossibility of separating the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith has contributed to this development and has also been a central impulse in the so-called Third Quest, the ancient principle of lex orandi, lex credendi, coined by Prosper of Aquitaine, gives a further theological foundation for such explorations. However, its later distortion, particularly in the aftermath of the Reformation, has privileged doctrine (credendi) over experience (orandi), and diminished the reciprocity between the two demanded by the classical formulation.

Revelation 4–5 are explored as two texts which are rooted in experience, both of Christian liturgy and the merkavah traditions which drew on the heavenly visions of prophets like Ezekiel and Isaiah. Viewed from this perspective, the visions make claims about the divinity of the Lamb and the propriety of its worship on the basis of religious experience, embodied in authoritative claims for both ‘altered states of consciousness’ and literary tropes. They give pictorial descriptions and visions which should stand as authoritative theological claims in their own right.

However, modern New Testament scholarship, following post-Reformation patterns, attempts to explain these visions in more technical and abstract theological terms such as binitarian or trinitarian. This, it is suggested, is undesirable because of the danger of importing anachronisms, with their attendant theological bag and baggage, of making overly bold claims for our knowledge of the individuals, communities and/or circumstances which produced these texts (given both the oscillation of New Testament writers between binitarian and trinitarian tendencies, and a degree of confusion caused by the role of the Spirit in related discourse), and of shifting the locus of meaning from the texts themselves to secondary explications (a phenomenon which appears peculiarly attractive to modern scholarship).

Drawing on Wittgenstein's reflections on the study and analysis of religious experience, it is suggested that it may be wiser to leave the texts to stand in their own right, rather than to be interpreted via theological categories which may ultimately say more about the concerns of modern scholars than the producers of the texts.

Keywords

altered states of consciousnesshermeneuticslex orandimerkavahRevelationWittgenstein
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 33 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2014 

In his 1995 volume, Who did Jesus Think he Was? John O'Neill launched a scything attack on the premises which he thought distorted modern biblical studies.Footnote 2 New Testament scholarship, he suggested, had swallowed hook, line and sinker the readings of the New Testament developed by Lelio and Fausto Sozzini. Both held to the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura, and both argued that the Bible itself gave no basis for belief in the Trinity and the incarnation as classically understood within the traditional creeds of Christian orthodoxy.

It was O'Neill's own contention that the seeds of both trinitarian and incarnational belief were present in Judaism of the Second Temple period, from which Christian faith emerged: he at no point claimed that the formulations of Chalcedon or Nicaea were to be found in the New Testament.Footnote 3 It is a thesis, like many proposed by O'Neill, which the New Testament guild has noted, lauded for its idiosyncrasy and scholarship, then politely ignored. That said, more recent work is increasingly and fruitfully exploring the resonances between Judaism and emerging Christianity treated with scepticism by O'Neill's critics.Footnote 4

Some have suggested that classical historical criticism may have overlooked worship material in its analysis of the New Testament data:Footnote 5 precisely the material from which O'Neill launched his programme.Footnote 6 Such reluctance may stem from personal or confessional prejudices, or the location of modern criticism in the academy rather than the cloisters. It is possible that the guild has been dominated by an understanding of theology in which doctrine comes first, then liturgy and service, or that the ‘objectivity’ of higher criticism saw worship as overly subjective. It may also be influenced by the ‘quest for the Historical Jesus’ which demanded a separation of the ‘Jesus of history’ from the ‘Christ of faith’, and would immediately have treated passages which smacked of worship as suspect: overtly connected to ‘faith’.Footnote 7

Such views can no longer be upheld. Maintaining a divide between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith cannot be sustained.Footnote 8 It demands the possibility of ‘pure history’, and is fraught with complications.Footnote 9 A recent major (flawed) attempt to do this was the Jesus Seminar.Footnote 10 Alternative strategies have increasingly explored the way in which traditions were transmitted in the ancient world, and their reliability.Footnote 11 Among them is Dale Allison's Constructing Jesus, born of his frustrations with the old paradigms,Footnote 12 which comments:

Our primary sources are not bereft of some substantial and substantially reliable broad impressions. For if those sources do not in large measure rightly typify Jesus’ actions, give us some sense of his situation, accurately exhibit some habitual themes of his speech, capture the sort of character he was, and so on, then what hope is there?Footnote 13

From perspectives such as this rather than the unwarranted scepticism so characteristic of much modern criticism,Footnote 14 in which a hermeneutics of suspicion may subtly morph into a hermeneutics of paranoia,Footnote 15 the relationship of worship and doctrine needs to be re-evaluated. ‘Worship’ texts cannot be automatically dismissed as secondary or corrupt.

Further, any view which divorces worship from ‘real’ theology, even on the grounds of some claimed objectivity, cannot be meekly accepted: it begs a number of questions about whether such objectivity is practical, desirable or even possible. Iain McGilchrist has recently reminded us that pragmatic philosophers,Footnote 16 those who see embodiment as a crucial location for philosophy,Footnote 17 philosophers of hermeneuticsFootnote 18 and even neurological researchers all raise serious questions about the possibility of a purely objective ‘view from nowhere’.Footnote 19 Views are always shaped by the attention which the observer gives to them:

A mountain that is a landmark to a navigator, a source of wealth to the prospector, a many-textured form to a painter, or to another a dwelling place of the gods, is changed by the attention given to it. There is no ‘real’ mountain which can be distinguished from these, no one way of thinking which reveals the true mountain.Footnote 20

Even the detached, scientific viewpoint is just one among many. McGilchrist also asks whether ‘technical excellence’ or ‘knowing about’ (German wissen, French savoir, Latin sapere) and the theological models identified with the Berlin schoolFootnote 21 are actually inferior to more relational forms of ‘knowing’ (German kennen, French connaître, Latin cognoscere) which explore ‘knowing rather as a process or a quest rather than objective’Footnote 22 and reveal that:

Attention . . . intrinsically is a way in which, not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact. It is a ‘howness’, a something between, an aspect of consciousness itself, not a ‘whatness’ a thing in itself, an object of consciousness.Footnote 23

This is the case for the emerging Christian communities of the first century:Footnote 24 theirs was a ‘view from worship’, not ‘from nowhere’. This is true also of Revelation 4–5 which will provide the focus for this study. Their mediation of teaching through worship is fundamental to an ancient principle: lex orandi, lex credendi.

Lex orandi, lex credendi

The ancient principle of lex orandi statuat legem credendi (‘the law of prayer constitutes the law of belief’),Footnote 25 popularly abbreviated to lex orandi lex credendi (hereafter LO and LC), was coined by Prosper of Aquitaine in 435.Footnote 26 In it, both prayer and doctrine have a role to play in theological formulations.

Some have interpreted this principle to mean the primacy of prayer over doctrine.Footnote 27 This interpretation is criticised for ‘perpetuating a view of the liturgy that is fixed, authoritarian and hierarchical’.Footnote 28

An alternative explanation comes from Geoffrey Wainwright who sees the LO and LC in a dialogue.Footnote 29 Doctrine may correct liturgical practice: the two are ‘mutually formative’.Footnote 30 Although liturgy is seen as primary (theologia prima) and doctrine as secondary (theologia secunda), the danger is that non-verbal liturgical experience becomes subordinate to doctrine, because it needs linguistic expression. In such circumstances, as often occurred in the Reformation, doctrine ‘corrects’ worship and, therefore, dominates.Footnote 31

The Elizabethan Settlement (1559), which established the worship of the Church of England, may further exemplify this. Kavanagh has suggested that the Elizabethan Settlement divorced the principle from its ancient form: the LO became a means of control imposed by a central authority.Footnote 32 Such a shift brought fragmentation and eventually a dislocation between doctrine, prayer and ethics.Footnote 33 Whether the strategy ever worked even in the short term is moot, given the ornaments proviso which followed about church furniture and liturgical dressFootnote 34 and the later rubrics in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, drawn from the 1637 Scottish Prayer Book, about the reverent disposal of the consecrated elements – not without doctrinal significance.Footnote 35

The long-term effects were even more drastic. By the 1920s, the Anglo-Catholic movement had won permission for rites and vestments proscribed in the Anglican Reformation.Footnote 36 Anglican Reformers were not the only ones to be ambushed by mundane reality. John Calvin's reordering of the church at Geneva, with its elaborate pulpit and trestle table in place of a fixed altar, resulted in the ministry of the Word taking precedence over the regular celebration of communion which he had intended.Footnote 37 In all these cases, practice and practicality undermined doctrinal hopes.

Prioritising either element (LO or LC) is ultimately a betrayal of the principle in its original form. What was demanded by Prosper was a modus operandi, which rather saw the LO and LC as ‘mutually causative’.Footnote 38 Not only that: both need to be connected to what is variously called the lex vivendi,Footnote 39 agendiFootnote 40 or bene operandi,Footnote 41 that is, ethics.Footnote 42 This arises because liturgy should be expressive of the ideals of the community. Consider 1 Cor 11:23–34. In nuce, the Lord's Supper should have expressed the non-hierarchical nature of the new Christian family: the practice of the Corinthians served rather to reinforce existing Graeco-Roman preoccupations with status and honour. Paul was less than amused.Footnote 43 Thus, the Pauline experience demands links between liturgy, doctrine and ethics. Anderson gives the following succinct summary:

In such a mutually causative relationship, we begin to discover ways in which liturgical practice does have normative and constitutive consequences in the life of the church. We also discover the ways in which our life together reshapes liturgical practice. If we cannot claim that this particular practice produces that particular belief, we can at least argue for and hope that ‘engagement in the church's practices puts us in a position where we may recognize and participate in the work of God's grace in the world’.Footnote 44

All of which is a long way of justifying the exploration of worship as part of the theological task, even within academic theology, and that conclusions drawn from its depictions are a valid part of a theological matrix, and not just of anthropological or sociological interest. From this viewpoint we now turn to Revelation 4–5.

Liturgy and merkavah in Revelation 4–5

Revelation may be dated to the second half of the first century ce. Whilst many think it was written during the persecutions of Domitian, and thus date it to approximately 96, a strong case can be made for a date c.68.Footnote 45 This was preferred by the Victorian scholars who ironically developed the catena of texts used subsequently to support the later dating. The earlier 68 ce date may be preferred as based on fresh memory of the persecutions of Christians in the city at Rome (Rev 14:20), the belief in Nero redivivus,Footnote 46 the lack of references to the Destruction of the Temple,Footnote 47 difficulties with the Domitianic persecution,Footnote 48 and the better earlier date for the Seven Letters (Rev 2–3).Footnote 49

It is also a text which has liturgical concerns. A number of scholars argue that the book is designed, at least in part, for a liturgical setting.Footnote 50 It also contains scenes of worship, of which Revelation 4–5 provide classic examples.

These depictions of heavenly worship relate to actual practice.Footnote 51 Such heavenly scenes function as idealised depictions of the community which produces the text,Footnote 52 even in materialist Epicureanism.Footnote 53 Larry Hurtado and Charles Gieschen conclude that such idealised expressions are shaped by earthly experience.Footnote 54 Indeed, the hymns which feature prominently in these chapters appear consonant with the practice of the time,Footnote 55 and may come from the earliest strata of emerging Christianity.Footnote 56

These expressions show evidence of roots not just within Christian practice,Footnote 57 but also affinities to Jewish merkavah Footnote 58 which originate in visions seen in biblical literature:Footnote 59 the concepts of the chariot of the cherubim, the heavenly sanctuary, Sabbath Sacrifice and Songs.Footnote 60 Such materials overlap with the apocalypsesFootnote 61 of the Second Temple period:Footnote 62 this identification need not imply exact correspondence with the fully blown merkavah mysticism of later ages.Footnote 63 These traditions attempt to overcome the distance which exile and displacement appeared to place between God and his people, and reveal God's willingness to be known.Footnote 64 They also share a ritual dimensionFootnote 65 which is seen most clearly in the incorporation of the Isaian hymn (Rev 4:8; Isa 6:3).Footnote 66

In Revelation 4, a number of details resonate with these traditions, specifically the merkavah of Ezekiel 1:Footnote 67 the open door and heavenly ascent (4:1–2), the throne (4:2), the elders (4:4), the torches (4:5), the glass sea (4:6), the hymnic chanting of living creatures (4:8),Footnote 68 and (perhaps) their eyes (4:8) as equivalents of the wheels of Ezekiel 1:18.Footnote 69 The vision ‘guides the history of the world’,Footnote 70 depicting God as ruler and creator.Footnote 71Merkavah not only gives material, it also gives authority. Whilst there is much debate about whether the depiction is based on revelatory experience or is primarily a literary trope, the fact is that both criteria grant authority, and they are not mutually exclusive.Footnote 72 John is portrayed as a writer who has seen the creator: the one who controls the world.Footnote 73 In so doing, the merkavah tradition is at odds with modern perceptions which would not readily grant authority or privilege to the product of an ‘altered state of consciousness’, whether real or fictional: modernity treats such phenomena with suspicion, not privilege.Footnote 74 Such unease may explain the urge to develop doctrinal expressions rather than let such experiences stand alone. To this we shall return.

The themes of Revelation 4 continue in Revelation 5,Footnote 75 but include the Lamb. Liturgical features are seen in the bowls (5:7) and the hymn (5:9).Footnote 76 Revelation 4:9–11 is paralleled by 5:8–12: doxology and the hymnic form are reserved exclusively for God in Jewish tradition.Footnote 77 The description of the throne which runs throughout the book (Rev 3:21; 5:1, 6–7; 7:9; 14:3; 19:4; 21:3)Footnote 78 starts with the bisellium, the two-seated throne commonly used of deities in the ancient world: it presumes equal statusFootnote 79 for those who share it.Footnote 80 Significantly, this happens in a text in which ‘right-minded’ heavenly creatures take great care to ensure that they are not wrongfully worshipped (Rev 19:10; 22:8–9): only imposters allow themselves to be wrongly worshipped.Footnote 81 The LO, exemplified here by early Christian experience, liturgical forms and merkavah, provides the imagery of the text: the Lamb shares the status of God,Footnote 82 a claim earthed in the honour/shame conventions of the time.Footnote 83

This is a powerful statement, but I am wary of developing it further in doctrinal terms (LC). Such hesitation may need to be justified. It starts with the caution which many scholars demand in applying trinitarian terms to the New Testament,Footnote 84 and asking if similar rigour needs to be applied to the use of all related terminology.

Description and doctrine

Larry Hurtado has identified these scenes (Rev 4–5), and others in the New Testament, as ‘binitarian’:Footnote 85 a term used to describe theologies in which an identification in nature is made between the Father and Jesus, and from which the Spirit is often conspicuously absent.Footnote 86 There are several concerns.

First, the term implies a degree of systematisation inappropriate to the era: it is derived from trinitarianism, which is a terminology from a later period, adapted and applied retrospectively to earlier periods. Philologically, terms may not translate well from one time and place to another, even over short periods of time.Footnote 87 Caution needs to be exercised in even using terminology appropriate to a second-century phenomenon in a first-century context. After all, do we not routinely identify these as different periods within church history?

This is true also of the cultural matrices which shape such terms. The early date suggested for Revelation would put it well before any formal schism between Judaism and emerging Christianity. It suggests a strong Judaic flavour to what is going on. Jewish critics of Christianity, even in later periods, did not use the language of binitarianism, preferring to speak of ‘two powers’ in their descriptions of claims about the divinity of Jesus.Footnote 88 Binitarianism may read the text against the wrong context.

G. D. Kilpatrick has made an analogous point, stressing that the term ‘sacrament’ as commonly used cannot be simply retroverted back into the New Testament world: its dominant shape is post-Augustinian.Footnote 89 It is more historically and culturally appropriate to read the New Testament against descriptions of Jewish sacramentalia as:

a special rite in which supernatural gifts are mediated through natural external means which are often prepared in a special way to have the power they lack in ordinary use.Footnote 90

The substance of the terms is related, but they are not identical. In short: there are both philological and contextual difficulties in applying ‘binitarianism’ to New Testament documents.

There are also methodological considerations. Such terms gain primacy in the quest for meaning. Annabel Wharton's remarks about the Dura-Europos frescoes being interpreted through texts are pertinent:

The inevitable result of promoting the text is the effacement of the image. In other words, by identifying the text – not the image – as the locus of meaning, signification is literally moved outside the visual representation.Footnote 91

and

This priority of the text is again reasserted; meaning is restricted to the written word. This preoccupation with identifying the explanatory text seems to be a peculiarly scholarly form of controlling meaning.Footnote 92

Here a similar phenomenon is taking place: words (interpretation) to explain liturgy (the worship of heaven), and a corresponding shift from the event to the interpretative language. If we return to the LO/LC dynamic, it effectively diminishes the significance of the ‘picture’ of worship (LO) and privileges the doctrinal interpretation (LC), like the anachronistic BCP and post-Reformation pattern.

The use of binitarianism to describe worship further implies that some doctrine lies behind the text. Here, Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough are apposite. It dangerous to say that the practice of ritual comes from a theology: ‘where that practice and these views go together, the practice does not spring from the view, but both of them are there’.Footnote 93 We cannot simply assume that there is a theology which underpins a practice. Sometimes the data are simply not available, as in discerning what the ancients understood as happening in the imperial Roman cults.Footnote 94

Furthermore, to assume the existence of a theology may imply that an exclusive systematic formulation is in place. Not necessarily so. Consider Paul. Romans 15:16 and 1 Corinthians 8:6 show that he alternates between binitarianism and trinitarianism,Footnote 95 suggesting that there may be no single ‘physics of things’Footnote 96 behind his writing. Herein lies the problem: we may construct a chain of cause and effect which demands a foundation in binitarian theology, perhaps even exclusively, when it need not.

A further difficulty comes when we ask what binitarianism is. Hurtado's usage is further compromised in his earlier work since he does not initially define it.Footnote 97 Such a lack of clarity is further complicated because ‘binitarian’ may also be used in a markedly different fashion, as when Martin Buber uses it to describe the divine and human aspects of God revealed in Jesus by the writer of the fourth gospel.Footnote 98 This is also true of ‘fine tuning’: Hurtado's later work seems to exclude key elements associated with both binitarianism and trinitarianism such as essence and person.Footnote 99 Interestingly, Hurtado sometimes places technical terms within quotation marks,Footnote 100 suggesting a degree of caution. But this asks whether we might not more accurately talk of proto-binitarian or proto-trinitarian tendencies rather than use the unqualified terms. Still more recently, Hurtado has divorced himself from terms like ‘binitarian’ or ‘trinitarian’, opting for alternatives like ‘triadic’.Footnote 101

As Wittgenstein further observed, attempts to fit phenomena into distinct categories may say more about observer than observed:

I think one reason why the attempt to find an explanation is wrong is that we have only to put together in the right way what we know, without adding anything, and the satisfaction we are trying to get from the explanation comes from itself.Footnote 102

The use of binitarianism seems to work this way. Part of our problem here may be Western and modern: left hemisphere abstraction and analysis predominate.Footnote 103 Yet there is no guarantee that other cultures, including the precursors of modernity, shared this preoccupation. Socio-historical studies remind us of the differences between the ancient world and our own.Footnote 104 This also lies at the heart of Wittgenstein's criticism of Frazer, who ‘cannot imagine a priest who is not basically an English parson of our times with all his stupidity and feebleness’.Footnote 105 Biblical criticism knows similar concerns from both Schweitzer (even the ‘German spirit’ might make Jesus in its own imageFootnote 106) and Tyrrell (liberal critics confuse Jesus with their own reflectionsFootnote 107).

Yet even Hurtado's own work raises questions about the term (binitarian) being fit for purpose. An elusive ‘Spirit of God’ is also involved:Footnote 108 the relationship of God, Jesus and Spirit remains fraught as in ‘the witness of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy’ (Rev 19:10)Footnote 109 and the language of the Seven Spirits (Rev 1:4).Footnote 110 Here, Bauckham's reading leads him to suggest Revelation is rather ‘trinitarian’.Footnote 111 Hurtado-binitarian; Bauckham-trinitarian: If nothing else, this variety suggests the use of such terms is inconclusive.

This becomes more apparent if other writings are brought under examination.Footnote 112 John's Gospel identifies the Spirit as ‘another Paraclete’ (John 14:16–17): a further stream of identification, and/or potential conflation, with Jesus.Footnote 113 Like Paul's writings,Footnote 114 Revelation may embrace both the binitarian and Trinitarian.Footnote 115 Vagueness about the Spirit means that any talk about binitarianism may be inappropriate or premature: how can we describe a text, writer or community as binitarian if our knowledge about their view of the Spirit is uncertain? To be sure that binitarianism is an accurate term demands greater clarity about the Spirit than we possess.

Concluding remarks

When worship texts are given due place in investigations of emerging Christianity and the history of christology, caution is needed. Terms used should be fit for purpose and avoid importing anachronisms, false claims and impressions, or distortions. The importing of doctrinal terms may effectively mean that the phenomena of Christian experience (LO) are diminished, and doctrinal concerns (LC), to which we feel a greater affinity, privileged. The observer dominates, and the event disappears from sight.Footnote 116 At such junctures, layers of interpretation obscure or divert attention rather than reveal. As Tambiah says of Wittgenstein:

Sometimes a description without adding anything is more meaningful than a forced search for an ‘explanation’ which concept belongs to a framework of ‘hypotheses’ deriving from ‘theory’, and their testing for error or truth as ‘opinions’.Footnote 117

On occasion, less may actually be more.Footnote 118

Footnotes

1

An abridged version of this article was presented at ‘Bounden to Say: The Book of Common Prayer Then and Now’, the 3rd St Paul's College Symposium, University of Sydney, 30 Nov. 2011.

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61 Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, pp. 2–12. For merkavah and the genre of the apocalypse, see Aune, David E., Apocalypticism, Prophecy and Magic in Early Christianity, WUNT 199 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), p. 57Google Scholar, esp. the bibliography in n. 56; Gruenwald, Apocalyptic, pp. 29–72.

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70 Afzal, ‘Wheels’, p. 200. Note that this identification with merkavah does not exclude elements of political parody of Rome also being present, see also Boring, M. Eugene, Revelation in Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1989), p. 103Google Scholar.

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73 Afzal, ‘Wheels’, p. 209.

74 This exemplifies the earlier discussion on the role of worship texts in historical criticism. For material on altered states of consciousness, see Malina, Bruce J. and Pilch, John J., Social-Science Commentary on the Book of Revelation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), pp. 41–4Google Scholar; Pilch, John J., ‘Altered States of Consciousness in the Synoptics’, in Stegemann, Wolfgang, Malina, Bruce J. and Theissen, Gerd (eds), The Social Setting of Jesus and the Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), pp. 103–15, at p. 105Google Scholar; Tart, Charles, ‘A Systems Approach to Altered States of Consciousness’, in Davidson, Julian M. and Davidson, Richard J. (eds), The Psychobiology of Consciousness (New York: Plenum, 1980), pp. 243–69, at p. 245CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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98 Buber, Martin, Two Types of Faith, trans. Goldhawk, P. M. A. (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1951), p. 128Google Scholar.

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102 Wittgenstein, Remarks, p. 2e.

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104 Thus Clinton Arnold's introductory comments in Wilkins, Michael J., Matthew, Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), p. viGoogle Scholar.

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106 Schweitzer, Albert, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. Montgomery, W. (London: SCM, 1981), 2nd edn, p. 311Google Scholar, see also Pope-Levison, Priscilla and Levison, John, Jesus in Global Contexts (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), p. 14Google Scholar.

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108 Hurtado, At the Origins, p. 94. See also O'Collins, Gerald, ‘The Holy Trinity: The State of the Questions’, in Davis, Stephen T., Kendall, Daniel and O'Collins, Gerald (eds), The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 1–25, esp. p. 7Google Scholar. For an overview of the Spirit in Revelation see Bauckham, Richard, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 109–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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110 Bucur, Angelomorphic, pp. 91–104.

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115 Bucur, Angelomorphic, p. 100.

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117 Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 57Google Scholar.

118 Scroggs, The Text, pp. 219–33, further explores the interplay between dogmatic theology and New Testament theology.