Revelation is the most difficult book in the New Testament to make sense of.

Want help cutting through the noise of:

  • crazy interpretations
  • odd images
  • strange symbols

To read Revelation well you need to appreciate that it is a foreign type of literature and get your imagination fired up for apocalyptic. Rammstein can help with that.

Revelation is Foreign to Us

The basic difficulty with reading Revelation is that it speaks a different language.

Revelation speaks the language of Apocalyptic literature. John Collins defines apocalyptic literature as:
“a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”
If that isn’t as clear as mud, I don’t know what is. In addition, apocalyptic literature makes heavy use of (bizarre) images, symbolic numbers, symbolic names, and symbolic everything else to cloak the clear in the obscure. All of this is odd to us because we don’t speak apocalyptic anymore. Mostly.

But we can fire up the apocalyptic imagination with a little help from Germany’s foremost rock band, Rammstein.

Rammstein and the Apocalyptic Imagination

Rammstein’s music video “Deutschland” is a masterclass on the apocalyptic imagination today.

Go watch the video (fair warning, it has many disturbing elements). If you don’t German, here are the lyrics in English. Once you’ve watched it, take a couple minutes to write down what you think the video means.

After reflecting, go watch this video here analyzing the symbolism throughout the video.

Mind-blowing, 🤯right? In this short video you have a highly symbolic telling of the conflicted story of Deutschland, complete with a cryptic hope for the future.

That, my friends, is how apocalyptic literature works. To read Revelation well, think about it as a compressed, symbolic telling of the story of God and his people. Think of it like Rammstein’s “Deutschland.”