This book is about power, or to be more precise, about the experience of being without power. It results from a journey which began with the experience of powerlessness: the world is out of control and doing hurtful things to me, to those I care about, to our society, to millions in other countries and cultures- just possibly the world is on a course for self destruction and no one is able to do anything to change what is happening. Within the experience of powerlessness, I discovered the Book of Revelation, the record of God's people in their experience of powerlessness in the first century.

This book derives from the correlation between my experience and the experience of those first-century Christians.' In a working class community in the early 1980s, I experienced something of what it means to be without the power needed to acquire the basics of food, shelter, and transporta tion. That experience opened my eyes to see the universal experience of powerlessness. I began to examine Scripture, looking for insights about this aspect of the human condition.

In Revelation I found symbols responding to the experience: the "four horsemen of the Apocalypse, ," whose glorious beginning leads to death and hell; "the beast," a multi-headed, conglomerate monster that overpowers everyone; and "the Lamb," an image of a vulnerable, unprotected Christ. These symbolic figures, as images of power and vulnerability, relate to our experience of impotence. Members of our congregation whose futures were uncertain and whose security and welfare were in jeopardy responded with a sense of identification to these im-ages. I began to study Revelation to learn what its images and its theology might tell us about God's power for our vulnerable human condition

Today most Christians do not share the perspective of those... (from preface)