The Book of Revelation, the final book of the Christian biblical canon, is perhaps one of the most complex and polyvalent biblical texts accessible to modern readers, and has been the source of many differing and divergent interpretations and readings. This is due in large part to the richly detailed language and imagery the author has placed within the book as well as the vast array of content. Both of these features function within the text to produce a book that is extremely difficult to describe within the traditional literary conceptions of genre and structure, which, as we shall see, feed into the complexity and multiple interpretations that can be drawn from it. With all this in mind, it will be the purpose of this essay to explore the Book of Revelation, examining the nature of its structure and content as well as the generic framework(s) the text function within. Following this, we will also survey one of the major ways people have read Revelation, namely the scientific/positivist understanding, and outline some of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach in relation to other models.
The examination of the Book of Revelation by those seeking to understand and explain its structure has been one of the most difficult tasks undertaken by biblical literary critics. As a result of this, there are multiple understandings of the way in which the author of Revelation has laid out the book, focusing on different aspects and particularities within it. While there is no scholarly consensus on the matter of structure in this book , there do appear to be two primary schools of thought that, while not unified, centre around the theories of recapitulation and the ‘series of seven’. Several major scholars , to varying d...
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...lark, 1993.
Beale, G. K. "The Book of Revelation." In The New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans/Carlisle Cumbria: Paternoster, 1999.
deSilva, David A. "What Does John Really Want? The Rhetorical Goals of Revelation." In Seeing Things John's Way: The Rhetoric of the Book of Revelation, 65-91. Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 2009.
Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schussler. "Babylon the Great: A Rhetorical-Political Reading of Revelation 17-18." In The Reality of Apocalypse: Rhetoric and Politics in the Book of Revelation, edited by David L. Barr, 243-269. Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2006.
Linton, Gregory L. "Reading the Apocalypse as Apocalypse: The Limits of Genre." In Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers, edited by Eugene Lovering, 161-186. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1991.
Woodman, Simon. The Book of Revelation. London: SCM Press, 2008.
LaHaye, Tim, and Ed Hindson. The Popular Encyclopedia of Bible Prophecy. Eugene, OR.: Harvest House Publishers, 2004.
He objects to a view which argues that John is speaking of God’s timing rather than ours by pointing out the concrete historicity of Revelation including churches and expressions used are “emphatic-declarative.” Regarding an objection which states that the events will ...
It is the reader and his or her interpretive community who attempts to impose a unified reading on a given text. Such readers may, and probably will, claim that the unity they find is in the text, but this claim is only a mask for the creative process actually going on. Even the most carefully designed text can not be unified; only the reader's attempted taming of it. Therefore, an attempt to use seams and shifts in the biblical text to discover its textual precursors is based on a fundamentally faulty assumption that one might recover a stage of the text that lacked such fractures (Carr 23-4).
Collins, John J. "Apocalyptic Literature," Harper's biblical Dictionary, ed. Paul J. Achtmeier. San Francisco: Harper, 1985.
Theologian Vern S. Poythress wrote, “Theological systems, whether dispensationalist, covenantal, Calvinist, Arminian, or even modernist, have a profound influence on the way we approach a given [biblical] text.” There is no portion of scripture that is more influenced by the theological system of dispensationalist than that of biblical prophecy, particularly in the area of God’s redemptive plan from for humanity. The purpose of this essay is to establish that an appropriate understanding of biblical eschatology can best be achieved through a dispensational theological perspective.
Different approaches are required in order to get to the theology of the book. Unreserved evidences from the text itself provide the clear set of evidence that God is in fact behind the scenes preserving and sheltering His people. Several other definite items such as literary structure, writi...
Watts, John D.W. Nahum. Vol. 34, in World Biblical Commentary, edited by David A. Hubbard and Glenn W. Barker, 61-90. Waco, TX: Word Books, 1984.
The Book of Daniel is the only full-blown apocalyptic book in the Protestant recognized version of the Canon. A literary device divides the book into two halves. Chapters 1-6 are a collection of stories that introduces the reader to Daniel and three other Israelites as unwilling guests of the Babylonia Empire ruled by Nebuchadnezzar. The second half, Chapters 7-12 consists of apocalyptic imagery of deformed beasts and the heavenly court. The focus of this paper will be on chapter 7, which serves as a bridge of the two halves. Chapter 7 is the earliest of the visions as it identifies with the genre of 8-12 while through language and content it reverts to Daniel chapter 2. The linguistic break down is not as neat as the literary divide in that Dan. 2:4b-7:28 was written in Aramaic while other portions of the book is written in Hebrew.
This essay will argue that the eschatology of the Book of Revelation forms an integral part of John’s attempt within the pages of his book to form a literary world in which the forms, figures, and forces of the earthly realm are critiqued and unmasked through the re-focalization of existence from the perspective of heaven. It will attempt to show that, in response to the social, political, religious, and economic circumstances of his readers, the Book of Revelation forms a counter imaginative reality. Through drawing upon an inaugurated sense of eschatology and evocative imagery, John is able to pull the reader in and show them the true face of the imperial world and consequences of its ideology, forcing the reader allegiance to fall with either ‘Babylon’ or the New Jerusalem.
The first two parts of the book discuss the kind of theological-historical perspective and ecclesial situation that determines the form-content configuration of Revelation. The first section attempts to assess the theological commonality to and differences from Jewish apocalypticism. Fiorenza focuses of the problem that although Revelation claims to be a genuinely Christian book and has found its way into the Christian canon, it is often judged to be more Jewish than Christian and not to have achieved the “heights” of genuinely early Christian theology. In the second part of the book, Fiorenza seeks to assess whether and how much Revelation shares in the theological structure of the Fourth Gospel. Fiorenza proposes that a careful analysis of Revelation would suggest that Pauline, Johannine, and Christian apocalyptic-prophetic traditions and circles interacted with each other at the end of the first century C.E in Asia Minor. She charts in the book the structural-theological similarities and differences between the response of Paul and that of Revelation to the “realized eschatology”. She argues that the author of Revelation attempts to correct the “realized eschatology” implications of the early Christian tradition with an emphasis on a futuristic apocalyptic understanding of salvation. Fiorenza draws the conclusion that Revelation and its author belong neither to the Johannine nor to the Pauline school, but point to prophetic-apocalyptic traditions in Asia Minor.
Pentecost, J Dwight. Things to Come: A Study in Biblical Eschatology. Grand Rapids, MI: Academie Books, 1964.
Metzger, B.M. & Coogan, M.D. “The Oxford Companion to the Bible”. Oxford University Press. New York, NY. (1993). P. 806-818.
As defined by Migliore, Revelation means an “unveiling,” uncovering,” or “disclosure” of something previously hidden. Today, Community of Christ affirms the Living God is ever self-revealing to the world through the testimony of Israel and Jesus Christ. Revelation provides important decisions about who God is and how we are to understand the world and ourselves. In seeking to understand, as a member of Community of Christ, we must explore the historical and contextual response of the leaderships to revelation within the setting of the Restoration and the Reorganization era.
Revelation identifies itself as “both an “apocalypse”…and as prophecy”, making it distinctly different from the rest of the New Testament. “Jewish apocalyptic literature flourished in the centuries following the completion of the OT canon”, and it is scattered throughout the Old Testaments in books such as Daniel, Ezekiel, and Isaiah. Apocalyptic literature is full of “visions that dramatize the prophet’s admission to God’s heavenly council”, and convey their meaning primarily through symbolism. John brings a “balanced message of comfort, warning, and rebuke” in Revelation, testifying to the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ. Apart from the OT literature, Revelation shows a distinct optimism toward the end of days, for “Christ’s death has already won the decisive victory over evil”, with the Kingdom of God already among believers. This book was written in “approximately A.D. 95 on the island of Patmos”, which is still standing to this day. It was written under the emperor Domitian, with Roman authorities exiling John “to the island of Patmos (off the coast of Asia)”. The events in Revelation are also “ordered
Answering these questions is the purpose of this essay. I begin by arguing that the Bible cannot be adequately understood independent of its historical context. I concede later that historical context alone however is insufficient, for the Bible is a living-breathing document as relevant to us today as it was the day it was scribed. I conclude we need both testimonies of God at work to fully appreciate how the Bible speaks to us.