There is perhaps no more contentious issue in biblical studies than how to interpret Revelation. There are certainly more important issues, more uplifting issues, more fruitful issues for our examination, but for whatever reason--most likely because the cryptic nature of the book allows for such a breadth of interpretation--nothing inspires the kind of doctrinal knockdown-dragout fights that Revelation does. Today, of all days, is the perfect day to illustrate this, as I assume that once again Harold Camping's predictions will have fallen short of expectations. No matter if you are a radio evangelist, a theologian, an exegete, a minister, a layman, or (as I am) a historian, one can easily weary by looking at contemporary and historical disputes over premillennialism versus postmillennialism versus amillennialism versus millennialism and more. At a more basic level, there are preterists and historicists and idealists and futurists and probably -ists so remote in their thinking that they have yet to find a label. A thousand issues which ultimately transcend Revelation inevitably get bogged down in its enigmatic imagery.
In a recent discussion with someone about a thoroughgoing preterist approach to the text, I made the suggestion that we might all be better off if we could just set aside the eschatological questions we bring to the text and read Revelation for the many truths it reveals about God: who He is, what He does, and how we ought to respond to Him. In reflecting on that conversation, I realized that it had not been since my early youth--ignorant as I was of the complex of controversial questions which the book generated--that I had read through Revelation for anything other than polemical purposes.
I propose to remedy that now and in the process to share what I believe are some of the eternal (and incontestable) truths which Revelation has to offer readers that have little or nothing to do with the what, the when, or the how of the end of the world. As a disclaimer, I should clarify that I do not think that Revelation is totally without anything to say on these matters. Clearly, the text raises important questions about God's ultimate plan for the world, questions that require serious thought. I am by no means a full-fledged idealist (or really a full-fledged anything). I do believe, however, that there are ideals which the author of Revelation, assumed to be John, embeds in the text, those that he wants to teach to his audience and those which are implicit by virtue of their common faith in a single God. It should not be forgotten that while the eschatological questions which dominate the study of Revelation are certainly valid, they are probably not primary. John was, after all, writing to comfort and strengthen an audience in a time of intense trial. He was not writing an academic treatise on the end times. The approach that will be taken here will be to look at Revelation as a spiritual text from an apostle to the languishing churches. The truths which will be the focus will be those that resonated with the foremost desire of the audience for salvation, for vindication, and for a glimpse (a revelation, if you will) of the God whom they served. In re-reading Revelation with these specific principles in mind, Christians can be enriched and find strength and solidarity in a text which has been the source of so much divisiveness.
List of Entries:
Encountering Jesus (Ch. 1)
Letters (Chs. 2-3)
Throne Room (Chs. 4-5)
Seals and Trumpets (Chs. 6-8)
Two Woes (Ch. 9)
Kingdom Come (Chs. 10-11)
Great Battle (Chs. 12-16)
Fall of Babylon (Chs. 17-18)
Joy and Judgment (Chs. 19-20)All Things New (Chs. 21-22)
An Invitation (Ch. 22)
Songs of the Church (Excursus 1)
Three Angels (Excursus 2)
Showing posts with label Harold Camping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harold Camping. Show all posts
Friday, October 21, 2011
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Merry Judgment Day!
Well, it is May 21st, the day believed by a very vocal minority to be Judgment Day. And there is no reason why it shouldn't be Judgment Day, though I suppose if you're sitting at your computer today reading this it is probably either not Judgment Day or it is too late for you anyhow. While so many reasonable people have laughed off, if somewhat uneasily, these predictions of final judgment today, there is no reason why judgment is any less likely to come at 6 p.m. EST than at any other time. If we appeal to the bibilical promise that no one will know the day or the hour then we forestall judgment forever because inevitably there is someone somewhere convinced that today will be the day (whatever the day may be). In truth, no matter how fervently these predictions are put forward as fact and even if Harold Camping is correct, he didn't know. He just happened to guess right the loudest.
More interesting to me than whether or not judgment is actually reigning down on us (as you read this, of course) is precisely the way people have reacted to the "knowledge" that the end is near. There has been a frantic setting of their moral lives in order and, more publicly, a surge of evangelical effort. But why? The end has been near for thousands of years, at least as far as the apostles were concerned. "The end of all things is at hand" (1 Pet 4:7). People in the earliest Christian decades lived with the constant expectation of an immediate return of Christ, as rightly they should have--even knowing now that the return would not come. After all, Jesus exhorts his disciples to this kind of attitude in Matthew 24:
Imagine if the money, time, and effort that went into this propoganda campaign about the looming end of the world had been expended in a less controversial (and, from a secular atheistic point of view, laughable) evangelistic enterprise. Or for that matter, distributed to the poor in an effort to be morally upright whether the Lord was coming today or in another two thousand years. I suppose my point is that times like these show clearly the lamentable state of Christian life. We ought to live always as if we are an eschatological people standing right at the brink of eternity. When predictions like this one gain popular currency we see that those who change were not living eschatologically to begin with and those who don't, more likely than not, are simply not convinced that there is any urgency to change.
That day is coming like a theif. It may not have come today; it probably didn't. But when it comes is oddly less important than the fact that it comes. It is real regardless of its precise timing, and we, as Christians, are called to live in the light of that reality.
More interesting to me than whether or not judgment is actually reigning down on us (as you read this, of course) is precisely the way people have reacted to the "knowledge" that the end is near. There has been a frantic setting of their moral lives in order and, more publicly, a surge of evangelical effort. But why? The end has been near for thousands of years, at least as far as the apostles were concerned. "The end of all things is at hand" (1 Pet 4:7). People in the earliest Christian decades lived with the constant expectation of an immediate return of Christ, as rightly they should have--even knowing now that the return would not come. After all, Jesus exhorts his disciples to this kind of attitude in Matthew 24:
Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.
Imagine if the money, time, and effort that went into this propoganda campaign about the looming end of the world had been expended in a less controversial (and, from a secular atheistic point of view, laughable) evangelistic enterprise. Or for that matter, distributed to the poor in an effort to be morally upright whether the Lord was coming today or in another two thousand years. I suppose my point is that times like these show clearly the lamentable state of Christian life. We ought to live always as if we are an eschatological people standing right at the brink of eternity. When predictions like this one gain popular currency we see that those who change were not living eschatologically to begin with and those who don't, more likely than not, are simply not convinced that there is any urgency to change.
That day is coming like a theif. It may not have come today; it probably didn't. But when it comes is oddly less important than the fact that it comes. It is real regardless of its precise timing, and we, as Christians, are called to live in the light of that reality.
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