J.D.G. Dunn, Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? pp 130-31.
The uninhibitedness of Revelation’s christology is easily illustrated:
The status given to or recognized for the Lamb has to be read in the context of the cosmic evil portrayed in the images of the great dragon, the horrific beast and the richly clad prostitute.
That is not the language of everyday theology nor the context of everyday worship. Apocalyptic visions burst free from such constraints and portray their message in the symbolism, often grotesque symbolism, of a Hieronymus Bosch. The exaggerated lines of the brightly coloured depictions are a way of figuring a reality that is beyond everyday description and imagery.
Even so, the status attributed to and recognized for the exalted Christ (the Lamb) should not be played down. The merging of the Son of Man with the Ancient of Days and of the Lamb with the Lord God are to be taken with the same seriousness as the high christologies of the other New Testament writers.
The question posed, however, is whether the visions of the seer of Revelation are more like a highly coloured symbolical assertion of what he indeed shared with the other christologies just reviewed (the Lord Christ as the divine presence), than the description of a reality that can be expressed in literal terms and propositions. Is the imagery perhaps better described as surreal than as real metaphysics? The hermeneutical rule governing the interpretation of apocalypses should not be forgotten: to interpret them literally is to misinterpret them.