Be Loud and Brace for Impact: Anti-Asian Violence, the Model Minority Myth, and the Martyrs of Revelation 7:9–14

The title of this address, “Be Loud and Brace for Impact,” is a prophetic call for Asian Americans not to forget our own activist history and acts as a warning to all God’s people that a public witness against injustice invites retaliation.¹This article is a modified transcript of the plenary address given by the author on the occasion of his installation as the Paul W. Brandel Chair of Biblical Studies at North Park Theological Seminary on February 16, 2024. It will be revised and expanded as a chapter in his upcoming, co-authored book on intercultural readings of the Bible with Dennis Edwards and Sophia Magallanes-Tsang (Baker Academic Press; forthcoming 2025). When the preacher speaks loudly against injustice and exposes institutions publicly for their idolatrous practices, these fallen institutions (or what the Bible calls the “principalities and powers”; Col 2:13–15) will fight back. They will attempt to silence the prophetic challenge with intimidation and even violence. The antagonism of the powers should not, however, keep us from seeking God’s kingdom first and God’s righteousness for all humanity (Matt 6:33).

Exegetical Observations on Revelation 7:9–14

Following the hermeneutical principles outlined in my article “Reading the Bible Interculturally,”²For a more detailed description of the method for intercultural biblical interpretation, see Max J. Lee, “Reading the Bible Interculturally: An Invitation to the Evangelical Covenant Church and Evangelical Christianity,” The Covenant Quarterly 73, no. 2 (2015): 4–14. I begin my interpretation of Scripture using the traditional tools of exegesis and so locate the biblical text within its own ancient historical context. It is important, despite the challenge of historical reconstruction, to interpret Scripture within the sociopolitical and cultural location of the original author and readers, that is, to understand what the text meant to the first recipients of a given canonical letter, gospel, or—as in the case for this address—the visions of John in Revelation. But I also ask questions from my own current social location even in the very process of the exegetical enterprise. I ask: “What challenges and exhortations can be drawn from Scripture that speak directly to my personal identity and ethnic history as an Asian American Christian living out my faith in the United States?” Moreover, I think theologically with all of God’s people so that any message I hear in my context is recognized as God’s word to the whole body of Christ and not just to a specific cultural or ethnic group.

So, an intercultural reading of the Bible is always a conversation between the text and reader. I—as a biblical interpreter who practices historical criticism—seek to create a healthy hermeneutical distance between myself and the ancient text so that text can speak back to me as other. I recognize and respect the text’s own voice. The text is living, not dead. Through the agency and inspiration of the Holy Spirit the Bible can generate new meanings for us today and address situations not anticipated by the ancient author and reader. Yet such new meanings ideally follow the grain (and theological trajectory) of the text, never flowing against the grain. I read the Bible with my communities of faith in all their cultural particularity and recognize every call to the “obedience of faith” (Rom 1:5; 16:25–26) in the “now” addresses the cultural location of these communities directly but also to the whole church of God.

Translation (my rendering of Revelation 7:9–14)

After these things, I [John] looked, and there was a great multitude (ochlos polys) which no one could count, from every nation (ethnos), tribe, people, and language. They stand before the throne and before the Lamb, having been clothed with white robes, and there were palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice, saying: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”

And all the angels stood in a circle around the throne, the elders, and the four living creatures. Before the throne, they fell down on their faces and worshiped God, saying, “Amen! Praise, glory, wisdom, thanksgiving, honor, power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!”

And one of the elders addressed me, saying: “These who are clothed in white robes (stolas)—who are they, and where did they come from?” I answered, “My lord, you know.”

And he said, “These are the ones who—having come out of the great suffering (ek tēs thlipseōs tēs megalēs)—have washed their robes (stolas) and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”³All English translations from the Bible are my own unless otherwise noted.

Two quick exegetical observations should be noted before applying the text to the history of anti-Asian violence in North America. First, the “great multitude” (ochlos polys; v. 9) is a gathering of God’s resurrected people. Justo González notes that at the resurrection, believers can still distinguish each other by their ethnicity, tribe, and language.⁴Justo L. González, “Revelation: Clarity and Ambivalence: A Hispanic/Cuban Perspective,” in From Every People and Nation: The Book of Revelation in Intercultural Perspective, ed. David Rhoads (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 59–60 [47–61]. The word for “nation” (v. 9) is ethnos in Greek and does indeed refer to the ethnicity, geography, customs, culture, and religion of a people group in the ancient world.⁵See Steve Mason, “Jews, Judeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007): 457–512, especially his definition of ethnos on p. 484 that: “Each ethnos had its distinctive nature or character (physis, ēthos), expressed in unique ancestral traditions (ta patria), which typically reflected a shared (if fictive) ancestry (syngeneia); each had its charter stories (mythoi), customs, norms, conventions, mores, laws (nomoi, ethē, nomima), and political arrangements or constitution (politeia).” Mason’s definition should also include religion as a major component to ethnic identity in the ancient Mediterranean world, as rightly pointed out by Love L. Sechrest, A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race, The Library of New Testament Studies (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 97–105; and David G. Horrell, Ethnicity and Inclusion: Religion, Race, and Whiteness in Constructions of Jewish and Christian Identities (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020), 47–65.

My second observation focuses on the basis of the unity for the great multitude, that is, their faithful witness to the Lamb despite persecution and suffering (v. 14). God’s call to testify and preach the gospel of Jesus means that our obedience will take us into dark spaces dominated by evil that will resist our work. Suffering (in Greek thlipsis, also translated as “tribulation,” “affliction,” or “trial”), even “great (megalē) suffering,” is an intrinsic and unavoidable experience as we pursue God’s calling in our lives.

Reading Revelation 7:9–14 Interculturally in Asian American Contexts

Suffering is not foreign to the experience and history of Asian Americans living in the United States. Before interpreting Revelation 7 interculturally in a way that the text speaks to and from this history, I pause to give a brief description of what the designation “Asian American” means.

What is an “Asian American”? Most Asian Americans do not identify themselves as “Asian Americans.” We identify ourselves by ethnic lineage, that is, as Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, or Filipino Americans. We usually refer to our ethnicity as an identity marker. The term “Asian American” originated in 1968 at Berkeley as part of a wider ethnic studies movement in the University of California educational system. It is a geopolitical term that acknowledges and describes how among East Asians, South Asians, Southeast Asians, and Pacific Islanders (collectively known as AAPI) who immigrated to the United States, though their histories and experiences are diverse, they nevertheless share a common struggle with the racial bias and prejudice lodged against them from a dominant, centrist European American culture.⁶From henceforth, the acronym AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) will be used to describe all Asians living in North America. Where a particular region or ethnicity is highlighted, such groups will be identified by their ethnic descent, e.g., Korean American, Filipino American, and so on.

I am a Korean American born in San Francisco, raised in California, yet I also self-identify as Asian American in solidarity with other Asian ethnic groups. I have experienced bias, prejudice, suffering, and threats of violence since childhood up until today. Anti-Asian bias and violence is a very real experience for many Asian Americans growing up in the States, regardless of their specific ethnic descent. According to the Pew Research Center, more than twenty-two million Asian Americans are living in the United States, about 7 percent of the nation’s population and growing since 2021. The largest group are East Asians, about 8.6 million people. The second largest group is South Asians, about four million.⁷Abby Budiman and Neil G. Ruiz, “Key Facts about Asian Origin Groups in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, April 29, 2021.

The False and Divisive Narrative of the Model Minority Myth

To introduce what the model minority myth is, I encourage the reader to watch Canwen Xu’s full TEDx Talk on YouTube (link in the notes). She shares her personal experience of growing up as an Asian American in predominantly white Midwest circles. She names stereotypes that are hard for Asian Americans to shake off. Here is a partial excerpt: (excerpt omitted for brevity in this HTML extract — full text available in the PDF)[/p>

The model minority myth claims: if I [as an Asian American] aim toward conformity, and I accommodate or even compromise my ethnic identity to fit better with the larger dominant culture (as Canwen testifies above), there is a pathway to material, social, and economic success available to me through hard work. This is a myth. It ignores the reality of systems that marginalize people of color from succeeding by pure effort alone.

One result of COVID-19 and its tragic aftermath was the reawakening of a national collective consciousness to racial discrimination and violence which specifically targeted Asian Americans. John Cho, a well-known Korean American actor, most famous for playing the role of Lieutenant Sulu in the Star Trek movies, wrote an op-ed piece in the LA Times when COVID-19 hit. At the time, we had a US president who renamed COVID-19 “the Chinese virus.” Other infamous nicknames include “Kung-flu.” President Trump located the origin of the virus’s widespread and destructive effect in China, and if the virus could be blamed on China, then people illogically blamed all Chinese people for bringing COVID-19 to the United States. Also troubling was that people could not distinguish between Chinese natives and Chinese Americans, or Chinese Americans from other Asian Americans. So John Cho offered this reflection in the wake of growing anti-Asian racial bias and persecution.

A More Faithful Account of the Asian American Narrative

Mark Twain is credited for saying: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does often rhyme.” The more recent pattern of anti-Asian violence after the pandemic rhymes as part of a larger pattern of anti-racial bias and violence against Asian Americans in a much longer history. It is not within the scope of this article to retrace this history in its entirety, but highlighting selective events is possible.

In 2021, Paula Yoo published the book From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chen, detailing not only the brutal attack on Vincent Chen by white Chrysler autoworkers but also the activist work of his mother, Lily Chen. Vincent’s death and Mrs. Chen’s activist movement galvanized a generation of Asian Americans to engage justice work. They inspired the founding of American Citizens for Justice (ACJ), a nonprofit started in 1983 as an Asian Pacific American civil rights advocacy group.⁸Paula Yoo, From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement (New York: Norton Young Readers, 2021).

Racism’s Strategy of “Divide and Conquer” Yesterday and Today

In the previous sections of this address, I described how one strategy of systemic racism is to divide people of color, pitting them against one another. The model minority myth—a racial construct from a white dominant cultural center—has historically pitted Asian Americans against non-Asian people of color, faulting the latter for not “pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps” when the education acceleration-tube seems to pave a pathway to material success for the former. It has also divided East Asians from Southeast Asians, the latter of whom tend not to be included with the former as “model minorities.” History might not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and so we find that in today’s world we have new strategies of division.

Calling for Solidarity and Confronting Evil in Revelation

The grand vision of Revelation 7:9–14 focuses on the common calling of all God’s people—a great multitude from every ethnos, tribe, people, and language—to endure suffering from the powers and principalities and proclaim the gospel that heralds: “salvation belongs to our God… and to the Lamb.” It is a gospel message that confronts evil in a time of empire during the first-century church’s day and ours. It is our fidelity to proclaim this gospel and to endure the pushback by those who wish to silence our prophetic challenge that should be the basis of ecclesial unity.⁹For Revelation’s anti-imperial, or rather, alter-imperial message and theology of justice, see Shane J. Wood, The Alter-Imperial Paradigm: Empire Studies and the Book of Revelation (Leiden: Brill, 2015); cf. Blount, Revelation, 1–14.

Final Exhortations

Revelation 7 functions as an angelic trumpet call to all saints, including the Asian American Christian community, to clothe themselves with priestly white robes (stolai; vv. 13–14) and intercede on behalf others as a way to bear witness to God’s love and justice for our world. It is no small task that requires nothing less than the blood of the slain Lamb (v. 14) covering over every priest and washing them of their own evils before trying to expose the evil of other external agencies.

So, with the great multitude, may all of God’s people say, “Amen! Amen!”

This article originally published with the Covenant Quarterly on April 7, 2025.

Endnotes

• 1
  This article is a modified transcript of the plenary address given by the author on the occasion of his installation as the Paul W. Brandel Chair of Biblical Studies at North Park Theological Seminary on February 16, 2024. It will be revised and expanded as a chapter in his upcoming, co-authored book on intercultural readings of the Bible with Dennis Edwards and Sophia Magallanes-Tsang (Baker Academic Press; forthcoming 2025).
• 2
  For a more detailed description of the method for intercultural biblical interpretation, see Max J. Lee, “Reading the Bible Interculturally: An Invitation to the Evangelical Covenant Church and Evangelical Christianity,” The Covenant Quarterly 73, no. 2 (2015): 4–14.
• 3
  All English translations from the Bible are my own unless otherwise noted.
• 4
  Justo L. González, “Revelation: Clarity and Ambivalence: A Hispanic/Cuban Perspective,” in From Every People and Nation: The Book of Revelation in Intercultural Perspective, ed. David Rhoads (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 59–60 [47–61].
• 5
  See Steve Mason, “Jews, Judeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007): 457–512, especially his definition of ethnos on p. 484 that: “Each ethnos had its distinctive nature or character (physis, ēthos), expressed in unique ancestral traditions (ta patria), which typically reflected a shared (if fictive) ancestry (syngeneia); each had its charter stories (mythoi), customs, norms, conventions, mores, laws (nomoi, ethē, nomima), and political arrangements or constitution (politeia).” Mason’s definition should also include religion as a major component to ethnic identity in the ancient Mediterranean world, as rightly pointed out by Love L. Sechrest, A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race, The Library of New Testament Studies (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 97–105; and David G. Horrell, Ethnicity and Inclusion: Religion, Race, and Whiteness in Constructions of Jewish and Christian Identities (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020), 47–65.
• 6
  From henceforth, the acronym AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) will be used to describe all Asians living in North America. Where a particular region or ethnicity is highlighted, such groups will be identified by their ethnic descent, e.g., Korean American, Filipino American, and so on.
• 7
  Abby Budiman and Neil G. Ruiz, “Key Facts about Asian Origin Groups in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, April 29, 2021.
• 8
  Paula Yoo, From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement (New York: Norton Young Readers, 2021).
• 9
  For Revelation’s anti-imperial, or rather, alter-imperial message and theology of justice, see Shane J. Wood, The Alter-Imperial Paradigm: Empire Studies and the Book of Revelation (Leiden: Brill, 2015); cf. Blount, Revelation, 1–14.