Revelation - A Trinitarian Document

Among the many wonderful things about the book of Revelation that gets lost in the obsessive preoccupation with prophecy and end-times prognostication is its trinitarian presentation. Throughout the Pauline corpus, there are variations of the fairly standard salutation 'Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ' (Rom 1.7, 1C 1.3, 2C 1.2, Gal 1.3, Eph 1.2). Richard Bauckham has noted that this salutation is of critical theological importance because it places Jesus Christ squarely on the divine side of the distinction between what he calls the divine Giver of blessings and the creaturely recipients of blessings. So very early on, there was an implicit understanding among the earliest Christians that Jesus Christ was in some way divine.

But in Revelation, John modifies this standard salutation to make it more trinitarian. While 1 Peter also has hints of a trinitarian opening, John's version of it is unique in 1.4b-5a. Bauckham thinks this opening is a very deliberate adaptation of the more standard Pauline opening. For Bauckham:

This is supported by the fact that [John] adapts the form by substituting for 'God our Father' and 'the Lord Jesus Christ' descriptions of God and Jesus which are highly distinctive of his own usage elsewhere in Revelation. All this suggests...that John has reflected creatively on the Christian understanding of the divine. Far from taking over unreflectively conventional early Christian ways of speaking of God, Christ and the Spirit, he has forged his own distinctive forms of God-language...His book is the product of a highly reflective consciousness of God. Any account of its theology must give priority...to its distinctive ways of speaking of the divine (Theology of the Book of Revelation, p. 24)

John's variation of the standard Christian salutation strongly suggests that his perception of the divine was deliberately trinitarian even at this early stage. Now it's clear that we should not attribute to John the fully mature trinitarian theology that became the standard test for orthodoxy two centuries later. But I ask you, how many people, when they think of the book of Revelation, immediately (or ever) think of trinitarian theology? Yet, this basic fact is simply essential to a right understanding of the book at large. Revelation is extremely theocentric, and this means every aspect of its vision of the world both now and to come draw from its understanding of God. Until recently, the doctrine of God (Theology Proper) was the most neglected area of traditional systematics, even during the Reformation period. Luther and Calvin did not stray a great deal from Catholic doctrine regarding Theology Proper, and it is only recently that Protestant scholars such as Frame have devoted a more proper level of effort to this neglected topic. It is little wonder that the trinitarian vision of the divine given to us in Revelation has been largely missed. Next to the Fourth Gospel, Revelation easily has the most developed Trinitarian theology in the NT. As Bauckham notes, Revelation has the potential to reawaken interest in the doctrine of God. In our day of open theism, pluralism, and a terrible neglect of the Holy Spirit, Revelation is perhaps the most profitable part of the Christian canon to vie for the truth in Theology Proper. If only we will move beyond the Last Days Madness in order to see it.