The exposition of prophecy from the apocalyptic books of the Bible is the
fundamental practise of the church in defining itself. Yet a number of
questions become urgent when we seek to define the meaning of these
prophetic narratives, what does this "historic" explanation tell us about
theology, history and the church ? Dr. Desmond Ford argued that all the
theories about Revelation were credible: the traditional Adventist one,
the "spiritual" explanation of Revelation, the explanation of the symbols in
terms of their immediate historical context, and the situating all the events
of Revelation at the end of time. This attempts to sever the essential cord
between the church and prophecy, making her story a "possible" one, it
attempts to bring a pluralism into the very identity of the church. Yet
worse still is Robert Brinsmead's arguments about the inconclusive and
irrelevant nature of prophetic sagas, attempting to dismiss them altogether
from the economy of the Adventist theoretical practise. Prophecy is the
cathexis of Adventism.
In this paper I shall attempt to show that prophecy is bound to the church's
understanding of herself, it is a certain discourse of the collective being
of the church, an articulation and externalisation of images, meanings and
desires held within the church. It is not to be confused with a Theology of
the Apocalypse which is concerned with a theological exposition of the
apocalyptic narrative in relation to a specific object, i.e. Eschatology.
Neither is it to be a replacement of theology, an ontology of theology,
defining the bounds and direction of theology and belief, all this work
comes from God and his revelation in Jesus Christ, which is prior to all
theology both epistemologically and metaphysically. Neither is it to be
confused with the practise of history and historical enquiry, of collecting
and evaluating evidence and constructing explanatory stories to account for
the facts, although, as we shall see, since it deals with "history" it is
not entirely divorced from the practise of historical construction.
I will not go into any detail concerning the Theology of the Apocalypse,
suffice it to say that it is concerned with a theological understanding of
time and the future in relation to the present and the revelation of Jesus
Christ. As for making prophecy a basis for doctrine, this is a temptation
that must be resisted. If we were to take the logic of prophecy as prior
to God's Logos we would seek to understand the Logos in terms of a Greek
logic, of presuppositions, deduction, reason, induction - to trace the
topology of Christ with a prepositional calculus of interrogation in the
hall of Pilate. As we all know, such an interrogation elicits merely silence
from the true God. Or suppose we made prophecy the basis on which to affirm,
deny or confirm the Second Coming, the whole metaphysic of time would appear
as a destiny, a pagan "divining", the pointing forward to the future as a
present, the conversion of time into matter, a sorceress alchemy attacking
the essential freedom of the human subject. Even attempting to inject creation
or the Sabbath with prophetic messages and imports, with a "role", with the
skin of theology but the internal organs of prophecy does not bring these
doctrines alive, but rather weakens and renders impotent and grey these
normally beautiful and vigorous beliefs.
The semiotics of history are clearly present in the prophetic utterance, but
prophecy isn't a narrative that may conduct a dialogue with history, to be
amended by history, to be history's servant or pupil. To clarify this
complex relation we need to analyse the meaning of history. Claude
Levi-Strauss analysed the stages of historical construction with breathtaking
precision in the last chapter of "The Savage Mind" ("La Pensee Sauvage",1962).
It will suffice here if we just note a few of his conclusions:
"A historical fact is what really took place, but where did anything take
place ? Each episode in a revolution or a war resolves itself into a
multitude of individual psychic movements. Each of these movements is the
translation of unconscious development, and these resolve themselves into
cerebral, hormonal or nervous phenomena, which themselves have reference
to the physical or chemical order. Consequently, historical facts are no
more given than any other. It is the historian, or the agent of history,
who constitutes them by abstraction and as though under the threat of
infinite regress." (p. 257)
"Each corner of space conceals a multitude of individuals each of whom
totalizes the trend of history in a manner which cannot be compared to
the others... even history which claims to be universal is still only
a juxtaposition of a few local histories within which (and between which)
certainly much more is left out than is put in... In so far as history aspires
to meaning, it is doomed to select regions, periods, groups of men and
individuals in these groups and to make them stand out, as discontinuous
figures, against a continuity barely good enough to be used as a backdrop.
A truly total history would cancel itself out - its product would be
nought." (p. 257)
"History does not therefore escape the common obligation of all knowledge,
to employ a code to analyse its object, even (especially) if a continuous
reality is attributed to that object. The distinctive features of historical
knowledge are due not to the absence of a code, which is illusory, but to
its particular nature: the code consists... only in classes of dates
where each date has meaning in as much as it stands in complex relations
of correlation and opposition to other dates...it is no more possible to
pass between the dates which compose the different domains than it is to
do so between natural and irrational numbers. Or more precisely: the dates
appropriate to each class are irrational in relation to all those of other
classes." (p. 260)
"History.... consists wholly in its method, which experience proves to be
indispensable for cataloguing the elements of any structure whatever...
it is therefore far from being the case that the search for intelligibility
comes to an end in history, as though this were its terminus. Rather, it
is history that serves as the point of departure in any quest for
intelligibility. As we say of certain careers, history may lead to anything,
provided you get out of it." (p. 262)
Now we have established that history is constituted by its method rather
than by its object we may move on to examine the prophetic method, what
is its object ? What sort of questions does it seek to answer ? What type
of narrative is it ? Who is the "interpreter" of prophecy ? A scientist ?
An artist ? What is the technique of the interpreter, where does it come
from ? What does the subject bring to the text ? Does the text speak directly
through the interpreter, or is it mediated, translated, reconstructed ?
Where is the primal field of this interpretation ? The 1st century ? The
12th century ? The 19th century ? From what depths does the articulation
appear ? We shall not dwell on the nature of articulation and the drives
involved (Lacan, Derrida, Foucault etc. would provide the topology of the
process) nor shall we ponder the classifications, orderings and indexing
of the "raw" text into the "cooked" dissemination of the meaning of the
text, rather we shall analyse the literary type of the prophetic narrative,
and understand the function of that type, then explain why this function
is necessary in relation to Adventism as a whole.
Three phases characterise the prophetic narrative: the code, the impossible
and the double, these constitute what I shall call the spiritual fantastic.
The explanation for each phase shall now be given in turn. A common feature
in many stories assigned under the rubric "Fantastic" is the use of a code
which when processed in some way produces the meaning of the story. In
most cases the story contains a character to "solve" the clues for the
reader (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" is the great example,
but for more representative examples from Fanstatic literature see Edgar
Allan Poe, especially "The Gold-Bug", other examples of numbers being
essentially meaningful are common in the works of Samuel Beckett), although
some of Poe's poems leave it up to the reader to solve the code and so
explain the poem. This "cracking the code" is clearly essential to the
prophetic narrative, requiring the reader to do the work and so explain the
story (reinforcing the link with Fantastic poetry, traditionally more
spiritual than prose). The second phase, the "impossible" is summed up in
"A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms", ed. Roger Fowler, under the entry
"Fantastic": "it is characteristic of the fantastic text that the reader is
made unsure how to interpret and respond to the events narrated. Critics
have stated that the fantastic cannot exist without the notion of a clear
dividing line (which the text transgresses) between things possible according
to the laws of nature and things supernatural and impossible: for some, what
defines the fantastic is a brutal intrusion of the mysterious into real life."
The whole point of the impossible in the Fantastic is that no meta-explanation
should be found, such as "the author is describing a dream", or "the author
is mad", the works of Robbe-Grillet are examples of the author attempting to
escape such reductionism explanations. Clearly it is not difficult to give
examples of the impossible in the prophetic narrative itself, but I wish to
reveal a second order narrative of the impossible, that the prophetic
interpretation is itself part of this whole discourse of the impossible,
the measurement of history, the "joining" of the two texts of apocalypse and
history is itself an example of the impossible. Remember that we are not
dealing here primarily with an analysis of the apocalyptic literature, but
prophecy, the Adventist translation/retelling/interpretation/analysis of
apocalyptic literature. The third phase, the double, might just seem to be
an instance of the impossible, but I wish to make it a term in its own right
for two reasons: the impossible defines the actual process of interpretation,
the double is the objective relation between that interpretation and the
historical semiotic structure, secondly the double is more than the impossible,
(as will be revealed when we discuss the impossible in relation to Lacan
below), whilst present within the Fantastic narrative, it has entered from
outside, the double is an alien object governed by a different law. The best
example of the double in Fantastic literature is Dostoyevsky's "The Double",
which echoes the alien feel to the double. By "the double" I am referring to
this doubling of the object in history and in prophecy - which came first ?
which is the true object ? the French Revolution in Prophecy, or the French
Revolution in History ? Is one identical to the other ? Do they merge into
a mutant Whole, grafted together ? Is one the shadow of the other ? Does one
"complete" the other ? Do they signify an essential lack in the economy of
the theoretical object ? The whole point of the double is that we cannot
judge the true from the false, the identical twins who refuse to say which
is which, the simulacrum for which the original never existed. Our analysis
of history has shown that the historical object does not exist, and so is
destined to be haunted by semblance’s of history, apparitions in the void.
These are the phases of the prophetic narrative - what is their function ?
We may get a clue to the path to follow by beginning with Jacques Lacan's
formula, "the real is the impossible". The "real" describes that which is
lacking in the symbolic order (i.e. the realm of the signifier in the Saussurian
sense, the articulated, defined in terms of other signifiers), the
ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may
be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic. The
symbolic and the real must both be distinguished from the imaginary, which
is the dimension of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined.
But surely this means that for Adventism the prophetic is not the impossible,
it is articulated and therefore part of the symbolic order (and therefore not
part of the real) and at this stage we would have reached an impasse, except
that the double provides the mirror in which the prophetic practise experiences
itself as other to history (for under what rules - using what code - could
the historical narrative articulate the prophetic narrative ?) Hence it
remains for the historical discourse still the impossible, and thus the
reflexive occurrence for the prophetic enables its object to be simultaneously
the symbolic and the impossible. It is this reflexivity of the prophetic
that enables us now to analyse the problematic of its functionality. Knowledge
of the self is always via the Other and relations to the other. Understanding
of the prophetic utterance is in terms of the historic narrative, we
understand prophecy not by what it is, but by what it is not.
The symbolic determines the order of the subject. It is the articulation of
Adventism's unconscious in the prophetic, the externalisation of its inner
structure, that enables us to theorise its determinant order. Thus it is
wholly useless for Ford to want some infinite series of symbolic orders,
each separate and determined by its own rules as if to analyse some
schizophrenic church. It is equally futile to attempt to change or abolish
the symbolic order of the church, to attempt to amputate prophecy from the
church (i.e. to amputate its unconscious) or to "update" it. This is to
fail to understand the meaning of the church and prophecy. They are combined
together and may not, cannot, be separated. Anyone who would attempt to
do so would destroy the church.
It is necessary to take two further perspectives on the prophetic utterance:
firstly the meaning of agency and intentionally in prophecy; secondly the
taxonomy of the church and the structural placement of the prophetic text
within the intertextuality that constitutes the ecclesiological fabric of
signification. To begin with agency: where in the chain of signification
does that which we signify as "subject" appear, and what in this field of
cathectic and anti-cathectic discharge provides this investment in the
object (abject/pre-object etc) ? For example when man speaks there is a
sense in which he "knows" the rules of language, but this is not synonymous
with conscious (articulated) knowledge, and even if they become known to
consciousness, we realise that they were so when we did not know them and
will be tomorrow without our being aware of it. Discourse is not a conscious
totalization of linguistic laws and never can be. Hence when we approach this
"knot" (as Lacan calls a sign) designated under the rubric "Ellen White" we
we understand already that her discourse was not a conscious totalization
of linguistic, theological, pastoral or religious laws (this articulation of
a certain meaningful occurance does not mean that it is absolutely illigitimate
to "read" E.G. White as Lacan "read" Freud or Althusser "read" Marx (even
disregarding the "meaningful code" forced upon us through the cipher of
Jungian synchronicity re 1844, Early Writings, 1888 etc)). The "langue" of
Adventism appears in the instance of the "parole" of Ellen White; there is
an external language and an internal language each corresponding to its own
rules which do not appear "on the cover" of the text but "appear" (as a trace)
through certain (let us say) laws. "When the space of a lapsus no longer
carries any meaning (or interpretation), then only is one sure that one is
in the unconscious. One knows." (Lacan, "The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psycho-Analysis"). The alterity (specula image) of "Ellen White" does not
mean that this stopping point of consideration be afforded particular
privilege in our "reading" of prophecy, rather that the whole intertextuality
of the discourse be our field of analysis (the heterogeneous articulation of
Adventism). Suffice it to say that certain open paths, clues, codes, signposts
etc that this "detective" left on display regarding prophecy (for they are
not heirlooms but scribblings left in haste for those who would understand)
come together in her metaphysics of Writing as prior to speech (for the Bible
is the original text) 'Il n'y pas de hors-texte ('There is nothing outside
the text'). This Biblical priority is not to be understood as superior to
alternative authorities or pantheons of authority, e.g. the space defined within
the boundaries {reason, creation},{authority, tradition},{revelation, scripture}.
For although such economies are not susceptible to criticism on the basis of
interrogation for the cause (Aristotelian or Platonic), and on the level
they operate on provide a space for freedom of thought (Barth's comment that
fallen man is not a plant or a demon is not a reference to physical appearance
but to human freedom; the plant changes, but has no freedom to choose how it
will change, the demon cannot change at all and exists in a repetitive time
frame). Nevertheless they are inadequate on two counts, firstly they maintain
the Socratic and post-Socratic metaphysics of presence that seeks to deny
(exclude, marginalise, repress etc) the play of difference that is only
able to establish the appearance of identity and secondly because they
fail to deal with the whole question of the centrality of the revelation of
Christ as a fold in the intertextuality of epistemology and ontology, the
fold of the human onto the divine which is itself overlaid with the
writing of the gospels, the text of tradition etc (and so on down to the
fold of the neurone and beyond) releasing a radical undecidibility (as if
these folds were viewed from the side as a pack of cards) in the structure
that is prior to the appearance of the hierarchy. Thus the reason/authority/
revelation geometry is to be preferred to the linear Religion of the Book
(which is only able to authenticate the Bible by designating it an Absolute
Other and essentially of an alien nature), only in the sense that Greek
civilisation is to be preferred to barbarism, rather than because either
one is more Christian. The Christian Scripture is not opposed to creation,
but woven within it, for Christic utterance is writing in verity.
The Chuurch is the original space within the Christian system left to be
filled by the historical church, yet this space is not a closed space, as
the last gap in a jigsaw or the x in an algebraic equation, rather a
topological space allowing nodes, connections, direction, flow, ambiguity
and circularity. As such the "present"/"absent" church (but it is the same
thing) appears in its invisibility, as Poe's purloined letter, clearly
obvious yet unseen. The church does not exist in a dialectical relation to the
world, but rather that of a spiral simultaneously ascending and descending
(a progressive-regressive Jacob's ladder, appearing twice in the same space)
yet the dynamics that define the space of the Chuurch may be defined: the
drives of the church are miracle, mystery and authority. These are not simple
self-identical drives, but governed by the hidden/invisible, i.e. repression and
the return of the repressed (this is not sin, as may be understood by the
parity symptoms-doctrines) and thus it is certainly possible for the
continuation of an archaic discourse, that continues to flow ignorant of the
fact that it is dead. The pathos of this ignorance is the preface to the
Three Angels' message (although it is not our purpose to "read" the prophetic
text itself at this juncture, the text here may be seen as a Jungian
shadow). We may pause here and consider the ecclesiological implications of
the Second Coming: the rule of God is to instituted outside of the church,
not from the church to the world, thus the alterity of the church is not a
problem of the lack of self-identity of the church. Indeed within the
Cypriot-graphic production of the historical practise of the church there
seems to be a third one present on the road who cannot be seen, the Beast
"sheds her skin" to reveal the Roman Catholic Church, the daughters' of the
Beast the Protestant churches, yet where is the Orthodox church ? This teaches
us caution in our "interrogative" historical method whereby one question ("what
is your attitude to the law/ Sabbath ?") reveals the essence of the church,
philosophy or ideology; for a question is a sniper's bullet, all too easy to
miss our target by a fraction, and NOT get what we wanted. A question may be
one degree away from the point we wished to ask, and the answer therefore
misunderstood. To assume one question will reveal the "mark on the soul" (as
the Roman Catholics' describe certain sacraments) is to ignore Christ's
emphasis on the practise rather than the articulation of the practise. How
should we characterise the Orthodox church ? What questions may we interrogate
it with ? By what right do we interrogate ? In whose name do we act ? Yes,
the Orthodox hold that the Resurrection of the Body is the Christian hope,
they do not believe in purgatory, they reject the infallibility and function
of the Pope, they worship on Saturday night and Sunday morning, they split
with the Roman Catholics long before the Protestants, they have never had a
Spanish Inquisition but rather have often been the subject of persecutions
by the Moslems, Mongols, Turks and Communists, they believe in Baptism by
immersion, have communion about four or five times a year rather than every
week, do not believe in a fixed number of sacraments, and of course hold the
definitive Christian beliefs about the inspiration of Scripture, the Trinity,
the Incarnation and salvation. Why has prophecy ignored this vast group of
Christians ? It is not as if they may be classed as crypto-Romanists, rather
they accuse the churches of the West (i.e. both Protestants and Roman Catholics)
of sharing many of the same assumptions:
"Western Christians, whether Free Churchmen, Anglicans, or Roman Catholics,
have a common background in the past. All alike (although they may not always
care to admit it) have been profoundly influenced by the same events: by the
Papal centeralization and the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, by the
Renaissance, by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. But behind members
of the Orthodox Church - Greeks, Russians, and the rest - there lies a very
different background. They have known no Middle Ages (in the western sense)
and have undergone no Reformations or Counter-Reformations; they have only
been affected in an oblique way by the cultural and religious unheaval which
transformed western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Christians in the west, both Roman and Reformed, generally start by asking
the same questions, although they may disagree about the answers. In Orthodoxy,
however, it is not merely the answers that are different - the questions
themselves are not the same as in the west." (Timothy Ware, "The Orthodox
Church", Penguin, 1963)
Neither is it because they are numerically insignificant. In Ware's book the
approximate size of the church is given:
The four ancient Patriarchates:
Constantinople 3,000,000
Alexandria 250,000
Antioch 450,000
Jerusalem 60,000
The Eleven other autocephalous Churches:
Russia 25,000,000 - 50,000,000
Romania 14,000,000
Greece 9,000,000
Serbia 8,000,000
Bulgaria 6,000,000
Georgia 1,250,000 (figure for before 1917)
Cyprus 450,000
Poland 450,000
Albania 210,000 (figure for 1944)
Czechoslovakia 100,000
Sinai (less than 100)
autonomous Churches:
Finland 66,000
Japan 25,000
China (perhaps 10,000 - 20,000)
Other provinces in western Europe, North and South America, Australia depend
on the different Patriarchates and autocephalaous Churches, however steps
have been taken to form an autocephalous Orthodox Church in America (about
1,000,000). Taken together this gives a membership of between 69,321,000 and
94,331,000, far off the Roman CAtholic total of 700 million, but a very
significant figure.
Thus we have to recognise that Prophecy tells us more about the roots of
Adventist desire and Adventism's implicit understanding of herself in the
world than about the objective nature of Christianity and the history of
the Church. Yet it is for this very reason that it becomes a hidden, secret
text, for the repressions and anxieties that were unable to surface in the
explicit church doctrines now appear as the return of the repressed in the
guise of "necessity" - we do not wish to believe these things, but we are
FORCED to, thus all responsibility is removed and we may distance our
beliefs from our responsibility for our beliefs. Yet this field of the
unconscious which we name yet cannot name suffers any sort of objective
articulation, for if it deals with history is cannot tell us other than
which we already know. History is consitiuted by its method, we have to ask
history certain questions, yet where do these questions come from if not
from theory ? Suppose we designate the meaning of the Apocrapha M , which
we generate as the sum of the meanings of the Apocryphical text:
M = m + m + m + m + m + ... + m + m
And suppose we designate the meaning of History M , which we generate from
the sum of the meanings of the historical text:
M = m + m + m + m + m + ... + m + m
Yet the cypher with which we generated the meanings of the Apocrypha is
itself not held within a closed self-referential circle of signification,
but is rather a gesture into the multiplicity of interpretations. The
strategy with which we centred the interpretative subject and situated
the apocryphical text does not pre-empt further situatings, thus:
meta-meta-interpretation
meta-interpretation
interpretation
the cypher the cypher the cypher ... the cypher
the apocryphical text
Scriptural Millerite Enlightenment
Tradition Theory Theory of History
19th US Christian Expositors: ....
Christianity Joachim of Floris,1190 etc
Puritanical Protestant Jewish Expositors:
Conceptions Interpretation Benjamin Ben Moses etc
.... .... .... .... ....
These series of aggregated meanings thus do not tend to a limit, but rather
provide an exponential growth of interpretations the further the moves
being made to produce this interpretation are investigated. The
interpretations may be presented thus:
I = i x i x i x i x i x ... x i x i
For any given text, and thus the only "objective" meaning is the one situated
by the church, true for itself when it is about itself.
© John Mann 1981