Opening the Book of Revelation
“The Revelation…is by common consent one of the most difficult of all books of the Bible. It is full of strange symbolism. There are curious beasts with unusual numbers of heads and horns. There are extraordinary phenomena, like the turning of one third of the sea into blood (8:8), which are impossible to envisage. Modern readers find it strange. They are moreover not usually attracted by the fantastic schemes of prophecy which some exegetes find in it, and whose ingenuity is matched only by their improbability.
The result is that for many Revelation remains a closed book.” – Leon Morris
“We must not think of it (the book of Revelation) as a kind of intellectual puzzle (spot the meaning of this symbol!) sent to a relaxed church with time on its hands and an inclination for solving mysteries. It was sent to a little, persecuted, frustrated church, one which did not know what to make of the situation in which if found itself. John writes to meet the need of that church.” – Leon Morris
One of my hopes in studying the first 3 chapters in the book of Revelation is that it will give some of you more traction for personal study of the entire book. But, even if the series doesn’t accomplish that, I do believe it can equip you to understand better the overall import of the final book in the Bible. This week, as we do some introductory work, I wanted to pass along the four basic hermeneutics (interpretive views), that have been used to understand the book of Revelation. These are not original to me and in particular, I am passing on a good deal from Robert H. Mounce and Leon Morris whose commentaries on Revelation feature great introductions and discuss these 4 approaches more in depth.
1. Preterist. This interpretive approach sees the key to understanding the book in understanding its meaning for the original audience. This approach puts the fulfillment of much of the book in the context of either the fall of Jerusalem (AD 70) or the fall of Rome (AD 476). The key strength of this view is that the primary audience (John had no inkling of a church 2000 years after he wrote) gets the predominate position. The key weakness is that neither the fall of Jerusalem or the fall of Rome lead to a final and complete defeat for evil and Satan or a final and complete victory for Jesus and those who belong to Him. Also, if the book deals only with matters contemporary to its original recipients, it is largely irrelevant to current readers.
2. Historicist. This approach is to see the book as a forecast of all of human history until its coming end. Much of the fulfillment of the book is put in ‘current’ world history. The difficulty of this view is that it is constantly under revision as history itself is made. So what was ‘clearly’ the meaning of a certain symbol or sign in 1900 is no longer so clearly a sign or symbol in 2000 and so on. The strength of this view is that it gives the book great meaning for the current generation and keeps as promises of that which is to come the final victory of Jesus.
3. Futurist. In this approach, most of the book is seen as describing that which is at the ‘end of the age’ or the end times. This puts almost all of the importance of the book in the very last act of the play if you will. The difficulty here is that for all the people whose lives are between now and the ‘end times’ the book has little meaning. This would have been especially true for those who received the letter from John firsthand.
4. Idealist. The idealist starts from the premise that the book of Revelation is largely symbolic putting forward major theological principles (like good will triumph over evil) and is not in any way to be correlated with specific historical happenings. In this view, the purpose of the book then is to keep believers grounded in the theological realities set forth in the book. While this preserves the book as meaningful to all believers in all times, it negates what seems to be the final (and most important some would argue) point of the book which is that the theological truths presented in the book will be given a moment in historical fulfillment. Otherwise, history is simply a meandering tale of God, humanity, and the forces of evil which never fully realizes God’s purposes.
Now in laying out these views, you may notice that you have used one or a combination of these lenses in the past to read and study Revelation. This is not an argument against a certain view. Each comes with its strengths and weaknesses. In the end, we may indeed find that we need to use the strengths of each of these lenses to draw the fullest meaning from the final book of the Bible.
Additional Resources:
Bible Gateway has a helpful video summary of the book which, even if you don’t agree with every part of (and I don’t) still gives a nice overview and a visual outline that helps further study of the book.