Conversations with Scripture: Revelation (Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars) - Softcover

Schmidt, Frederick W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819221074 ISBN 13: 9780819221070

Verlag: Morehouse Publishing, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Roadmap, myth, or history? An accessible review of The Book of Revelation for today’s audience.

Conversations with Scripture: Revelation is the first book in the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholar Study Series. Written in accessible language and sensitive to those who have little or no experience in reading the bible, each book in the series focuses on exploring the historical and critical background, as well as how the biblical texts written centuries ago can still speak to readers today.

Frederick W. Schmidt, also the series editor, explores the approaches that have dominated the interpretation of John's Apocalypse and offers the reader an accessible means of understanding and evaluating them. With this grounding in hand, Schmidt explores how Revelation can shape our understanding of God, and nurture our spiritual lives in unexpected ways. Leaving behind left-behind theology, Schmidt offers instead an approach that allows this obscure, almost opaque text to speak to us anew about God, faith, hope, and justice.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frederick W. Schmidt is an Episcopal priest and the Rueben P. Job Chair in Spiritual Formation at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. He is the author of several books, including The Dave Test: A Raw Look at Real Faith in Hard Times. He lives in Arrington, Tennessee.

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CONVERSATIONS WITH SCRIPTURE: REVELATION

By FREDERICK W. SCHMIDT

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 2005 Frederick W. Schmidt
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2107-0

Contents

Chapter One

Revelation as Roadmap

In the wake of the events in New York and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, the phone in my department of the seminary where I work began ringing. One of the first calls was from a reporter who asked the question that everyone wanted to ask: "Is what happened today a sign of the end?" That question provides a clue to the most popular way of reading the Book of Revelation; many people read it as a roadmap. Widely popular—even in circles where people avoid reading John's Apocalypse—it enjoys the presumption of being the right way to read this difficult book. People may or may not embrace it, but even those who don't often assume that if you are going to read the Book of Revelation, this is the way it must be read.

I refer to this approach as roadmap-reading because those who interpret Revelation and other parts of Scripture in this fashion use it like a roadmap to the future. In it they find a blow-by-blow description of earth's final days, the judgment of all humankind, and the transformation of heaven and earth. Matching images with events, the reader is able to determine which of the events described there have transpired. If some of them have, then the reader has a rough idea of what will happen next. If some have not, then the reader enjoys the reassurance that they will happen—and soon. They have a map. They know what lies ahead.

There are other labels that I could have used. Some use the word millennialist or chiliast, both of which refer to a thousand-year reign of peace on earth under Christ's leadership, found in Rev 20:4–6f. Others use the word dispensationalist, which refers to the notion that history, including the end-times, is divided into "eras" during which God acts in distinctive ways. Apart from their obscurity, the problem with these labels is that each of them draws on specific motifs in John's Apocalypse or refers to just one expression of roadmap-reading. So I hope that the label "roadmap" will provide a means of capturing the inspiration of this approach that is both memorable and descriptive.

Given the nature of roadmap-readings, it is easy to get lost in a conversation about what may or may not be a "sign" and about how those signs line up with the language of John's Apocalypse. Such conversations inevitably flounder on intractable debates about the significance of some of the more obscure images that the writer uses and questions about the way those images relate to events in the world around us. That said, most if not all of the interpretations that take this approach make many of the same assumptions about this extraordinary part of the Greek Testament.

Assumptions

One assumption is that John's visions describe events that await conclusion in the near—read, "our"—future. The opening line of the Apocalypse is taken literally and personally: "The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place" (Rev 1:1; emphasis mine). For that reason, the history of this interpretive approach is marked by a tendency to invent and reinvent the connections between the book and each generation's historical experience.

At the turn of the first century, for example, widespread speculation connected the visions of Revelation with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the repeated invasions that ravaged Rome. Historians of the period recorded that people so feared the coming judgment that they cried "tears of repentance" until "the tears ran down their legs, even to their toes." While refusing to comment directly on the book, centuries later Martin Luther, the great Protestant reformer, included block prints in his translation of Scripture that portrayed the whore of Babylon (Rev 17:3f.) as a figure wearing a papal tiara. Since then Protestants have, from time to time, identified one pope or another with the Antichrist and in the early 1960s some American Protestants even ventured an identification of Catholic president John Fitzgerald Kennedy with the infamous 666.

Such identifications are not unique to Protestantism, however. Nor can they be isolated to a single culture. A similar roadmap-reading of Christian traditions prompted Russian poet and publicist Valerii Khatiushin to argue that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was the work of Satan and to predict that Russia would reemerge, Christlike, as the leader of the world in the year 2000.

This sense of a specific connection with each generation's experience is closely tied to a second characteristic of roadmap interpretations that sees the events described in the Book of Revelation and other passages of Scripture as part of a timetable. There is considerable difference of opinion among its proponents about the precise sequence of events. Some believe, for example, that Christ will return before the millennium, or a thousand years of peace (premillennialists). Others believe that the return of Christ will follow it (post-millennialists). And still others believe that the so-called reign of Christ will be a reign manifested in the hearts of those who are faithful (a- millennialists).

Roadmap-readings of Revelation also differ on the timing of the "rapture": a taking up of the faithful with Christ, while others are "left behind" to face the final judgment of God. Some believe that the rapture will happen before a time of tribulation or trial mentioned in Revelation (pre-tribulationists). Others believe it will happen after the tribulation (post-tribulationists), and still others believe it will happen in the midst of that experience (mid-tribulationists).

The result is a complex series of variations. But the broad sequence of events remains largely the same:

* The moral decline of civilization

* The rise of the Antichrist

* A reign of terror or great tribulation

* The Battle of Armageddon in which the Antichrist is defeated

* The establishment of a thousand year's reign

* A final revolt by Satan that is easily countered

* The resurrection of the dead

* The final judgment

* The creation of a new heaven and a new earth

As such, another characteristic of most roadmap-readings is the interpreter's ability to locate himself or herself in relationship to those events. Those who read the Book of Revelation in this fashion vary in the way that they approach this task. For much of history, those roadmap-readings often located the interpreter somewhere in the midst of those events. Those who do are called "historicists." They can look back at events, decide which ones in the biblical timetable have occurred and, on that basis, project which ones are yet to happen.

But of late, interpreters have more often thought of themselves as living on the cusp of those events. Known as "futurists," these interpreters believe that the events described in the Book of Revelation have yet to occur. This does not mean, however, that the futurists lack an interest in current events. Believing themselves to be living on the "last days," they focus on signs that the end is near. In a widely publicized story, for example, President Ronald Reagan is said to have speculated that an imminent nuclear war with the Soviet Union might, in fact, be God's way of bringing Armageddon to the earth as described in Rev 16:16.

Predictions of this kind, of course, assume that the images used in John's...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Morehouse Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0819221074
• ISBN 13: 9780819221070
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 144
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar