Month: April 2018

Peter Leithart’s new commentary on revelation recently came in the mail.  On reading the introduction I came upon these gems, which respectfully but clearly take apart idealist and a-millenial readings of revelation.  You can find the commentary here.

One of the biggest questions in reading revelation is how specific John intends his imagery to be.  The idealist reading of Revelation argues that John’s writings are not specific to a time or a place but rather are abstract.  Leithart argues:

 “Idealism” is a coherent, plausible, and venerable method for interpreting the symbols and types of Revelation.  It is not however, consistent with the way biblical poetry works.  Isaiah describes Jerusalem, not some generic city of man, as Sodom, and so does Ezekiel.  Daniel sees beasts coming from the sea, and the beasts are identifiable kingdoms (with some qualifications, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome). Daniel sees a goat racing over the land without touching the ground.  It crashes into a ram with two horns and shatters the ram’s horns (Dan. 8:5-8).  That is not a generic portrait of “conquest.” It is Alexander’s conquest of the Persians. We can tease our generalized abstracted types from the historical referents: The goat is Alexander, but other fast-moving empires have appeared in history (e.g., Hitler the speeding goat who shatters the horns of Poland and France), and we can and must extend the biblical imagery to assess and evaluate them.  There will be other cities like the Babylon of Revelation, and they will display some of the same features that John sees in the city and, importantly, meet the same fate.  But John is not referring to those other cities, nor to some transcendent concept or class of “harlot-city” of which there are many specific instances.  He refers to a real harlot city, one that existed in his own time, and that harlot city becomes a type of future cities.

He is appealing very simply to the way the rest of the Bible is read.  People will often approach the book of Revelation with a whole different set of hermeneutical rules than the rest of the Bible.

A similar problem is encountered with the time markers of Revelation and in the rest of scripture.  After summarizing the scriptural evidence for expectations of an immanent apocalypse, Leithart argues:

Faced with this mass of evidence, we have several options in reading Revelation.  We might fudge the time frame:  God’s arrival is always near.  Common as it is, that option is exegetically irresponsible.  We cannot eliminate the claims about timing, or the agitation it creates, without excising much of the NT. We might project the time frame into the future: The kingdomis near, but the prophetic clock does not start ticking until much later, perhaps in the thirteenth, or the nineteenth, or the twenty-first century.  Once the clock gets all wound up, then it is imminence all the time.  Until, then we are in a holding pattern.  That too is exegetically irresponsible, the result of digging that chasm between Jude and Revelation I mentioned above. If the Apocalyps is part of the NT, we expect it to have some connection with the concerns of those living in NT times.  We might, alternatively,  take the time references seriously, and conclude that Jesus, Paul, James, Peter, and all the rest were wrong. Christianity bursts into the Greco-Roman world full of apocalyptic vim, but it soon sovers up, and (like every fervent religious movement?) becomes routinized, regularized, bourgeois, Catholic. That option has the virtue of taking the NT at face value.  It has the vice of implying that all the NT writers – Jesus included -are liars.

There is another apotion: The apostles mean what they say when they say the end is near; John means that the events of the Apocalypse are going to happen soon. And they did happen.  That has the virtue of taking the time references seriously, but seems ot have the vice of forcing us to fudge everything else.  I think not, and this is where our discussion of the OT background of Revelation comes helpfully inot play.  When the Lamb opens the sixth seal, the sun goes black, the moon turns red, and stars are shaken from the firmament (Revelation 6:12-17).  The universe collapisng?  Not if we read Revelation within the imaginitive framework of the OT.  Heavenly lights rule the sky and earthly times (Gen. 1:14-16) and symbolize rulers (cf. Isaiah 13-14). The sixth seal describes the “eclips” of political powers, the “fall” of kings and princes from their “high places.” The poison springs and rivers from from the temple, the well-watered place that is supposed to supply living water for Israel.  To say that the springs of the alnd are poisoned is to say tha the temple produces somehting deadly rather than something healthful and life-giving.  And to say that is just to say what Jesus has already said: “This house shall be a house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves.”

At no point does this line of interpretation move from “literal” to “mere figure.” A universe really does collaps when the sixth seal is opened — not the celestial universe, but a political one.  The temple really does poison people. The imagery is, always, literal-figurative, nourishment to the metonymic imagination and typological encouragement to faithful discipleship.

Once again, Leithart encourages us to read Revelation just as we would the rest of scripture.  That we take the imagery and the time markers seriously.  I like that.