The book of Revelation has been one of the most debated books of the canon. Up until the reformation many theologians argued it shouldn’t be a part of the NT canon.
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Martin Luther proposed removing it from the canon and John Calvin didn’t write a commentary on it even though he said he was going to write a commentary on every book of the NT. They didn’t want to add it not because it wasn’t a good book,
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but because it contradicted some of the doctrines they had created and written about.

The book of Revelation is easily the most anti-empire book in the NT, it takes the ideas of Jesus w/imagery that was familiar to Jewish ppl, to extrapolate all of it and stand against
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the oppression of the empire. While Jesus resisted religious oppression and Jewish elites that cared more about money and status than people, the book of Revelation resists Rome and shows how Rome is the new Babylon and it’s promises of economic stability
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and military power must be opposed and resisted by the Church (the people of God).

The whole entire book is written by a marginalized person to marginalized ppl, it’s to be read from oppression and not to oppress.
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It’s the kind of book that governments would ban because it incited rebellion. The Slave Bible published in 1807, three years after the Haitian Revolution omitted Revelation, omitted huge parts of the book of Exodus (referenced in Revelation),
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omits a lot of the prophetic books of the OT (also referenced in Revelation). The Haitian revolution was the only slave revolt in history where enslaved ppl successfully drove out their European oppressors.
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After it the US and Europe were worried that the people they oppressed all over the world would start revolutions against them, so they took measures to ensure that didn’t happen, one of them was editing the Bible to highlight obedience and submission.
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When I say Christianity has been used as a weapon of oppression, this is exactly what I mean. It’s not that Christianity was meant to be oppressive, it started in the margins, w/the oppressed and abused.
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It was taken from there and then co-opted and appropriated to harm those it was for. Like everything good the marginalized create.

Decolonizing faith includes remembering that for those who were being oppressed by the empire in first century Rome,
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believing that heaven was possible if we cared for and centered the hurting, for them this faith wasn’t about harm, manipulation and oppression. It was about liberation.
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