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.
Metanarrative Essay The Biblical metanarrative can be explained by a Christian as the true and triumphant story from the beginning in Genesis until the future is prophesied in Revelation. Others who may not be a Christian do not understand the true power and love God has over us and for us and may just simply see it as a story or a rule book that they don’t want to follow. They see the Bible and all the things and plans God has for us and our lives and just think they don’t want any part of it and instead they live in sin. It is important that these people not only learn the true story but understand it as well.
LaHaye, Tim, and Ed Hindson. The Popular Encyclopedia of Bible Prophecy. Eugene, OR.: Harvest House Publishers, 2004.
And while describing the fiery wrath of the “Angry God,” Edwards states, “The use of this awful subject may be for awakening unconverted persons in this congregation.” By focusing on this group of people, Edwards instills a sense of fear within the audience of “sinners.” 3) Edwards purpose in delivering this sermon was to inform “sinners” of the inevitable doom that He thus creates a sense of helplessness in his audience, and encourages them to submit to God and renew their faith in Christianity. His use of parallelism allows Edwards to exponentially build a sense of fear, and it is maintained throughout this sermon.
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).
N.T Wright (2008) stated that “When we read the scriptures as Christians, we read it precisely as people of the new covenant and of the new creation” (p.281). In this statement, the author reveals a paradigm of scriptural interpretation that exists for him as a Christian, theologian, and profession and Bishop. When one surveys the entirety of modern Christendom, one finds a variety of methods and perspectives on biblical interpretation, and indeed on the how one defines the meaning in the parables of Jesus. Capon (2002) and Snodgrass (2008) offer differing perspectives on how one should approach the scriptures and how the true sense of meaning should be extracted. This paper will serve as a brief examination of the methodologies presented by these two authors. Let us begin, with an
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...
... Print. The. 2003 Hartman, Louis F. & Lella, Alexander A. The Anchor Bible, The Book Of Daniel. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Print, 1978 Cook, Stephen L. Apocalyptic Literature.
Metzger, B.M. & Coogan, M.D. “The Oxford Companion to the Bible”. Oxford University Press. New York, NY. (1993). P. 806-818.
Literalist fundamentalists read Revelation’s multivalent visions as predictions of doom and threat, of punishment for the many and salvation for the elect few. Scholarly scientific readings seek to translate the book’s ambiguity into one-to-one meanings and to transpose its language of symbol and myth into description and facts. In Elisabeth Schûssler Fiorenza’s The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgment, a third way of reading Revelation is depicted. The collection of essays in this book seeks to intervene in scholarly as well as popular discourses on the apocalypse from a liberationist feminist perspective.
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.
The book of Revelation literary genre are apocalyptic, prophetic and epistle. The author of this book is John of Patmos. Its was written circa A.D. 95-96 (Hindson & Towns, 2013). There are many key themes in Revelation. The most important themes are the message to seven ecclesians, three and a half years of tribulation ruled by the beast, Jesus’ second coming, the final battle between Jesus and Satan, the millennium, and beyond the millennium. The purpose of the book of Revelation was to inform people about the events before and after Second coming of Jesus Christ. Revelations denotes the past, present and future of what is yet to come during Earth’s end of days. Major events that Revelations denotes will occur when Jesus returns include: National
LaHaye, Tim F., and Edward E. Hindson. The Popular Encyclopedia of Bible Prophecy. Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2004.
The. Kate, Lauren. Rapture: A Fallen Novel? New York: Delacorte, 2012. Print. The.
"Open Book Newsletter No. 1: The Bible and Western Literature by Peter J. Leithart January, 1991." Biblical Horizons » No. 1: The Bible and Western Literature. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.
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.