Book Review: Worthy Is the Lamb

Title: Worthy Is the Lamb

Author: Ray Summers

Date: 1951

Publisher: Broadman

ISBN: none

Length: 218 pages plus introduction and bibliography

Quote: "There has been such a profusion of conflicting opinions about the meaning of the book [of Revelation/Apocalypse] thatmany have despaired of ever securing a comprehensiveinterpretation."

Summers proposes a minimalist approach to understanding the final, and most confusing, book in the New Testament. Quoting a 1935 book, "Let him who is without his favorite speculation cast the first stone!", he tries to set aside all attempts to identify the apocalyptic prophecies with any past or current events, "determine the meaning of the book for those who first received it," and apply it in a general way to whatever "conditions" readers may have in mind.

This is not every Protestant's preferred reading. Many Baptists, like many of Summers' colleagues, historically identified the ancient churches named in the book of Revelation with historical periods or "dispensations." Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses disagreed on the precise count, but read the numbers in the books of Daniel and Revelation as relating to historical events in such a way as to foretell the Second Coming in 1844 or in 1914, respectively. Other denominations and factions within denominations have other preferred interpretations. For some whole-Bible Christians these interpretations are a crucial part of their understanding of the Bible, and Summers' attempt to understand the book of Revelation in a general, abstract, moral-philosophical way may seem to miss the point for those who still believe that something of great spiritual significance occurred in 1844. That's what some readers won't like about this book.

For others, Summers obviously seemed to strike an ideal compromise. For him the book of Revelation is not necessarily the work of St. John and does not foretell events according to a clear chronology, but is a book of spiritual guidance containing advice on how we should react to various conditions.

So, how should we interpret the warning that "the number of his name," for the evil ruler, was to be 666? (Remember Viv Ivins in the Left Behind series? VI VI VIns?) As all baby-boomers learned from our Golden Book Encyclopedias in primary school, a favorite trick in the Middle Ages used to be finding a way to convert the letters in someone's name to numbers that spell out 666. Summers discusses ways to read NERO CAESAR, LATINUS (the Latin/Roman church/state), VICARIUS FILII DEI (the Pope), or HITLER as 666, and dismisses them. The original writers and readers of Revelation weren't concerned about any of those people; they were being persecuted by the Emperor Domitian. Reading the letters as Roman numerals, DOMITIAN adds up to 1502; reading them on the Pythagorean grid, DOMITIAN adds up to 40 if you count I and J as separate letters, 36 if you don't. Then there's the claim that the number may originally have been 616 anyway. Summers prefers not to bog down in such minutiae but to read 666 as a symbolic number. In the Pythagorean system 6 was the stay-at-home number, lucky for married women and unlucky for soldiers or travellers. In the Hebrew system, Summers says, where 7 was the number of completion, 6 was the number of incompletion; 8 was the number of more-than-completion, and an obscure old text assigned Jesus the symbolic number 888, so the author of Revelation was simply calling Domitian inadequate-in-three-ways.

This web site is not going to take sides. I don't claim to know whether any more elaborate (or "speculative") interpretation is better than Summers'. I'll say this: Summers has made a thorough study of what the book literally says. If it has a more esoteric meaning--if, perhaps, all people whose names add up to 666 really are sources of confused if not positively evil thought, or the Christian Church as a whole has gone through seven distinct stages corresponding to the conditions the author of Revelation addressed in the seven churches--that would be an addition to its literal, historical meaning. For those who want to study the weirdly impressive imagery of the last book of the Bible, this is a first guide.

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