The Contribution Of Revelation
THE CONTRIBUTION OF REVELATION
Methods of Interpretation
Any estimate of the contribution of Revelation to our understanding of Christ and the gospel demands some decision about the basic intent and subject matter of the book. What do John’s visions refer to? What are we to learn from them? The church has never come to anything close to unanimity on this point. As Gerhard Maier says after his survey of interpretations, Revelation has been "the exercise field of hermeneutics par excellence.” 81 We may categorize the majority of interpretations under the usual four headings. 82
The preterist approach. This approach, also called the "contemporary-historical” (zeitgeschichtlich), is the most common today. It insists that the visions of John grow out of and describe events in John’s own day. The symbols in the visions all refer to people, countries, and events in the world of that day, and John’s purpose is to show his readers how God is about to bring judgment on that world that is oppressing them, and so deliver them into his eternal kingdom.
The historical approach. Several movements in the Middle Ages grew up in the conviction that the millennium was about to dawn. To buttress their beliefs, they found in the Revelation a sketch of history from the time of Christ to their own day. This approach (the kirchengeschichtlich) was popular with the Reformers also, enabling them to identify the beast in the Revelation with the papacy.
The futurist approach. A consistently futurist (or endgeschichtlich) approach holds that everything in the Revelation from Rev. 4 to the end finds its fulfillment in the very last days of human history. The view is also held in a more moderate form, according to which some of the events in these chapters—particularly the earlier ones—take place in history before the end.
The idealist approach. Some scholars are convinced that we are on the wrong track altogether in trying to identify the events portrayed in John’s visions. The symbolism is designed, they argue, to help us understand God’s person and ways with the world in a general way, not to enable us to map out a course of events. Revelation, then, teaches us "the action of great principles and not special incidents.” 83 Along with several recent commentators, 84 we find some truth in all four of these views. Yet it is the futurist approach that comes closest to doing justice to the nature and purposes of Revelation. As we have seen, Revelation adapts and modifies the apocalyptic perspective. Jewish apocalyptic writers projected themselves back into time so that they could describe the imminent breaking into history of God’s eternal kingdom as the culmination of history. By writing in his own name, John discards the historical survey and confronts his readers with an elaborate vision of the establishment of Christ’s reign in history. Revelation is about eschatology, not history. 85 Nevertheless, the peculiar eschatological stance of the early church demands that we not ignore the degree to which John pictures this eschatological climax against the backdrop of events in his own day. It is likely, for instance, that John’s depiction of the "great prostitute,” "Babylon,” that is doomed to fall, has some reference to the Roman Empire of his own day, and that the terrible persecution described in Revelation would remind John’s readers of their own oppression. To some extent, then, John, while describing the end, describes it against the background of his first-century situation. But this is typical of biblical prophecy in both Old and New Testaments. While revealing his plan for history, God has not often revealed its timing; and biblical prophets have always pictured "the day of the Lord,” the eschaton, in terms of their own time. Moreover, it is clear that history itself contains many prefigurements of that end; John himself reminds us that, while "the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come” (1 John 2:18). 86