This chapter explores Blake’s vocation to a public role and his exploration of creativity and conformity in his engagement with the Bible, literature and art. In his engagement with Milton and the Bible, Blake carved out for himself a creative space in his use of both, and criticised their shortcomings, while recognising the significance of what he had taken from them. In wrestling with Milton’s texts, Blake pioneered an interpretative method for any who sought a more creative and contemporary relationship with the tradition they received. Similarly, engaging with the Bible’s major themes informed his critique of the contemporary church and politics and enabled him to criticise other, to him, less palatable biblical themes, as well as pointing to a different kind of society. In so doing, Blake brought out the latent meaning of the words of the Bible, exposing the shortcomings of the biblical texts while preserving their truths. A crucial part of this hermeneutical process is the way in which Blake regarded boundaries and constraints as the necessary complement to inspiration and imagination, both crucial components of Blake’s art and his understanding of human life.

This chapter is an exposition of a visionary, apocalyptic perspective in Christian intellectual history of the early modern period which contrasts with a mainstream mistrust of apocalyptic claims. Discussion of Anne Hutchinson, Gerrard Winstanley, and William Blake concludes with a consideration of the centrality of such an apocalyptic perspective in the New Testament.

May Day in 1983 will always remain indelibly etched on my memory. It was my first Saturday in Brazil, in the middle of a period of military dictatorship in that country, and I was taken to visit some theologians working with base ecclesial communities in São Paulo. I recall entering a large building which served as a community centre for one of the shanty towns on the periphery of this enormous city. Inside there were about forty men and women listening to a woman expound the first chapter of the book of Revelation. She was standing at a table at which were sitting two men. Her lecture was constantly interrupted by her audience sharing their experience of situations parallel with that of John on Patmos: witness, endurance, and tribulation. One man who had been active in trade unions spoke with me after the meeting describing the way in which the book of Revelation spoke to his situation: he had been imprisoned without trial, and a Church which had seemed so irrelevant and remote had become a shelter and inspiration for his life. There was an atmosphere of utter comprehension of, and accord with, John’s situation, as trade union activists, catechists and human rights workers shared their experiences of persecution and harassment as a result of their work with the poor and marginalised. They found in John a kindred spirit as they sought to understand and build up their communities in the face of the contemporary beast of poverty and oppression. It was readily apparent as I listened to their eager attempts to relate Revelation to their situation that they had discovered a text which spoke to them because they had not been desensitised by an ordered and respectable life of accommodation and assimilation. The woman and one of the men at the front of the meeting were teachers at the local seminary and the other man the local Roman Catholic bishop.

Readers of this book may wonder whether its subject-matter is merely a phase of modern political theology at a time when a critical Marxism, unfettered by the rigidities of its Eastern European manifestations, pervaded the social teaching of late twentieth-century Roman Catholicism, only to be snuffed out by a determined reaction from a more traditionalist papacy. That would be a superficial assessment. We are dealing with a movement whose high point as the topic of discussion on the agenda at every theological conference may now have passed, but whose influence, in a multitude of ways, direct and indirect, is as strong as ever. The issues which concern liberation theologians today are more inclusive and extend to questions of race, gender, popular religion, and, more recently, the environment, and have taken root in other situations and religions apart from Christianity. So when the leaders of Roman Catholicism can proclaim that liberation theology is dead, sentiments echoed by some who hitherto have been exponents of liberation theology, they miss the enormous impact that this way of setting about the theological task continues to have in many parts of the world, not least in the citadels of Catholicism itself: 'the fundamental tenets of liberation theology had - almost surreptitiously - been broadly accepted in many parts of the Catholic church'. So, having flourished in the Third World many of the fundamental tenets of liberation theology are firmly established in the First World, sometimes in institutions of higher education, more often in the life of the Church at the grassroots, in popular education and among groups working for justice and peace. In thinking of it as a mere epiphenomenon of the radical social movements of the sixties and seventies, we miss the extent of its impact.