Bureaucracy as Water: Between the Dragon and the Celestial City

Revelation, Bureaucratic Process, and the Healing of the Nations

The final exposition of the Bureaucracy Chronicles, looking at Revelation 12 and 22.

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The Potential for Life, Redeployed for Chaos

Last time, we looked at the ways in which bureaucracy functions as a form of potential energy, that it could do this or that at this or that time, and that the enforcement measures of bureaucracy serve to remind us of this: deadlines, penalties, procedures. When bureaucracies are not actively doing the thing they are designed to do, they exist as potentiality. In this way, Romans 13 and Romans 16 exist as counterpoints: a formal abstractions which could kill you but isn’t, versus a living network which exists as life-giving. The Holy Spirit is not like lakes, awaiting in potentiality through your plumbing system, but as like a river: uncontrolled, always-is, always-living.

In Revelation 12, this image of the potentiality of bureaucratic power takes on a very visceral image: gushing water. It’s not uncommon to read the whole of Revelation as a theological read on the the political power that all the Romes everywhere suppose they have. That the imagery of the powers depicted in Revelation as “Babylon” bear all the marks of ancient Rome tips us off that the claims of Roman power are nothing new¹.

Revelation 12 is best known for writing the conflict between Christ, Mary, and the devil into the stars, but just after this image, we find this: