What Does Revelation Reveal?: Unlocking the Mystery - Softcover

Carter, Warren

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1426710143 ISBN 13: 9781426710148

Publisher: Abingdon Press, 2011

Synopsis

The Book of Revelation has been mysterious, confusing, and misunderstood for centuries. Its content has been studied and analyzed by scholars from every corner of the globe.

What is it about Revelation that draws us to it? Is this biblical book about end-time mysteries and hidden codes? Does and it relate to our present day?

So what does Revelation actually reveal? Or should Revelation be left behind? According to Dr. Carter, the book of Revelation can tell us about biblical times as well as our own. It can show us how we, as Christians, are to live and hope for our world.

Revelation reveals God's Word to God's World: that culture accommodation is dangerous, that judgment is taking place now, that the world does have a chance to repent, that there are evil powers working behind the scene, that the time is up for the eternal empire, and that God is coming in triumph.

About this title

About the Author

Warren Carter is Professor of New Testament at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, with a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. Before moving to Brite in 2007, he taught for 17 years at Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City. His scholarly work has focused on the gospels of Matthew and John, and he has focused on the issue of the ways in which early Christians negotiated the Roman empire. In addition to numerous scholarly articles, he is the author of many books including The Roman Empire and the New Testament; What Does Revelation Reveal?; The New Testament: Methods and Meanings (with Amy-Jill Levine); and God in the New Testament published by Abingdon Press. He has also contributed to numerous church resources and publications and is a frequent speaker at scholarly and church conferences.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

What Does Revelation Reveal?

Unlocking the Mystery

By Warren Carter

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2011 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4267-1014-8

Contents

Preface, 
Chapter 1. Leaving Revelation Behind?, 
Chapter 2. Revelation Reveals That It Is God's Word to God's World (Rev 1), 
Chapter 3. Revelation Reveals That Cultural Accommodation Is Dangerous, Part 1 (Rev 2:1-17), 
Chapter 4. Revelation Reveals That Cultural Accommodation Is Dangerous, Part 2 (Rev 2:18–3:22), 
Chapter 5. Revelation Reveals True Worship (Rev 4–5), 
Chapter 6. Revelation Reveals That Judgment Is Taking Place Now (Rev 6:1–8:5), 
Chapter 7. Revelation Reveals That the World Has a Chance to Repent (Rev 8–11), 
Chapter 8. Revelation Reveals the Evil Powers behind the Scenes (Rev 12–14), 
Chapter 9. Revelation Reveals That Time Is Up for the Eternal Empire (Rev 15–18), 
Chapter 10. Revelation Reveals the Coming Triumph of God (Rev 19–22), 
Chapter 11. Should Revelation Be Left Behind? Reading Revelation Today, 
Appendix. When and for What Circumstances Was Revelation Written?, 

CHAPTER 1

Leaving Revelation Behind?

Revelation has often been a controversial book. Throughout the church's two thousand-year history, it has been "read" in all sorts of ways. It has frequently been used as a weapon against opponents. It has been used to "scare the hell out of people and people out of hell." Some select groups have claimed to possess the key to its right interpretation, which the rest of us lack.

By the same token, some have found its descriptions of heavenly worship very moving. At various times and places in the church's long history when governments or groups tried to forbid worship and service for God, some have found its demand for loyalty, even to death in martyrdom, to be sustaining and motivating. Some have found its vision of a world in which all things are finally in right relationship with God an inspiration to lives invested in a quest for justice in the present world.

Then there are some people who just can't get enough of the book of Revelation. They read it constantly. They're always going to Bible studies and conferences to hear speakers update the latest revelation on Revelation. They talk about being "premillenialists," about the "tribulation," about "the rapture." They see connections between reports on their favorite news channels and some verse somewhere in Revelation. Everything is a "sign of the times." Everything is part of the countdown till the world is destroyed and Jesus returns, whether in the year 1988, or 2000, or 2012 or.... They know they won't be left behind.

On the other hand, some folks don't want anything to do with Revelation. They find it scary or weird, the obsession with it freaky, and think it simply irrelevant to any news report. Despite its claim to be a revelation, they find it obscure and frustratingly concealing. They often attend churches where there is little preaching from or reference to Revelation and they like it that way. They don't understand or care about terms like "premillenialists," "tribulation," or "rapture." They often think those who take Revelation really seriously are fanatics at best and crazy at worst. They find the very notion of the end of the world or that some will be "left behind" distasteful and intolerant. In fact, they're quite happy to have Revelation left behind.

These very different evaluations of and approaches to Revelation raise a central question. How do we read this difficult book? I am using the word read to mean "how we make meaning or sense of Revelation." How do we understand it? What reading strategies or approaches are helpful and which are unhelpful for making meaning of this book? How we read the book of Revelation very much determines what meaning we make of it. That means it is worth thinking carefully about the reading strategies that can be used for the book.

In this chapter I will evaluate two quite different ways of reading Revelation. With each approach I will show the decisions that each makes about how to read Revelation. Both strategies have strengths and weaknesses. From our discussion will emerge a third strategy that I suggest offers a more adequate approach. In the subsequent chapters I will use this third strategy to "make meaning" of Revelation by asking the central question: what does Revelation reveal? Remember, the reading strategies we adopt very much shape the meaning we will make as we read Revelation.

Reading Strategy 1

This approach should really be called a "nonreading strategy." Some people think Revelation is best left unread. Why?

First, some find Revelation a strange book with weird creatures, bizarre numbers, and strange sequences of visions. It doesn't seem to make sense. It's too fanciful and bizarre.

Second, some find Revelation to be an offensive book. It seems to be full of visions of destruction. God appears angry and vengeful. It has unkind things to say about Jews. It presents women in negative ways. Others find it smug and self-righteous, dangerous in its declarations of favor for Jesus-believers and destructive for everyone who does not believe.

Third, some are turned off from Revelation by all the interpretations that have been offered for the book. Numerous interpretations have turned out to be wrong because what they claimed Revelation to be predicting did not happen. As the world approached the year 1000 C.E., there were numerous readings of Revelation that predicted the end of the world. Similar things happened as the world approached the year 2000 (remember Y2K?) and are happening now as we approach 2012 (based on Mayan predictions). Such readings seem so arbitrary—and obviously off target.

One conclusion to draw from such observations is that we need not bother with Revelation. But if Revelation can be read in such obviously wrong and offensive ways, we surely need to be thinking carefully about how we read it and the meaning we make from it. Is it offensive? Is it dangerous? Is its interpretation arbitrary? Does it predict the future? These are important questions to engage, especially so when Revelation belongs to the Scriptures of the church. The community of faith is an important location to think about, talk about, and evaluate such issues.

Reading Strategy 2

The most popular way of reading Revelation today understands it as a book that predicts the end of the world that will soon take place.

This approach, known as a dispensationalist or premillenialist approach, has been popularized by several best-selling books and movies. Published in 1970, Hal Lindsey's book The Late Great Planet Earth interprets Revelation and some other biblical books (especially Ezekiel and Daniel) in relation to current events of the 1970s and 1980s. Lindsey sees these decades up to 1988—forty years or a generation after the establishment of the state of Israel—as especially important in leading up to the end of the world. Before then, at least three things will happen: (1) Believers will be raptured (taken up to heaven), (2) Jesus will return before the time of the seven-year tribulation, and (3) Jesus will establish his thousand-year reign. Lindsey's emphasis on 1988 as the decisive year for accomplishing God's purposes turned out to be wrong. I bought Lindsey's book in the early 1980s and since 1989 I have been waiting for a refund.

Between 1995 and 2007, the Left Behind series of sixteen bestselling novels written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins appeared. There were also teen versions, movies, dramatizations for radio, and video games. The technique of using novels (and films) to dramatize events that this reading strategy understands Revelation to be predicting is not a new approach. There are examples of similar novels from the early twentieth century.

The Left Behind novels focus on the time after God has "raptured" believers before Jesus returns to establish his thousandyear reign. Those who are "left behind," the focus of the series, live in a world that is under the sway of the secretary-general of the United Nations, Nicolae Jetty Carpathia. For those in the know, he is the Antichrist who opposes God's purposes. A small group of believers emerges who understand that the end of the world is very near. They seek to save people in preparation for the coming time of tribulation in which God will judge the world.

These are but a couple of examples of this very popular reading strategy. What assumptions are at work in this reading strategy? What decisions about how to read Revelation does this approach make?

Five Assumptions

1. This reading strategy understands Revelation as a book of future predictions. This understanding comes from Revelation's description of itself as a "prophecy" (1:3; 22:7). The term "prophecy" is understood in this strategy to mean that Revelation foretells events that will very soon take place to restore the world in line with God's will.

2. This reading strategy reads Revelation as referring to literal events that will soon take place. It does not understand Revelation's language to be symbolic or poetic. So when Rev 11:2 depicts "the nations" trampling over Jerusalem for "forty-two months" (three and a half years), this is understood to be a literal event. Likewise, the 144,000 will literally be gathered on Mount Zion (14:1), a final battle will occur at Megiddo in north Israel (Armageddon; 16:12-16), Christ will establish a thousand-year reign (20:4-6), there will be a literal New Jerusalem (21:9-27). Those who employ this approach pay close attention to contemporary events to identify these biblical events beginning to take place.

3. This reading strategy chooses to focus on our contemporary world. It understands that Revelation has not made sense to any previous generations. But now, this reading strategy claims, it makes sense to us because we stand on the edge of what Revelation is predicting will take place any day now. It understands that Revelation depicts the present world as out-of-shape and under God's judgment. Things are so bad that humans cannot do anything about them. It sees Revelation predicting future events through which God will very soon intervene to rescue the world.

4. This reading strategy for Revelation is eclectic. It chooses to interpret Revelation by drawing on other New Testament writings. So it includes the ideas of a rapture (God's removal of believers from the earth) and of the Antichrist. Neither of these elements appears in Revelation. The first is borrowed from Paul in 1 Thess 4:17. The second is borrowed from 1 and 2 John.

5. Finally, this reading strategy elicits a largely passive response from readers. Its emphasis on the world being so out-of-shape means that God's imminent intervention is the only available remedy. Humans shouldn't and can't do anything about the present state of the world. Readers are to remain watchful and faithful in awaiting God's intervention, while warning others about being prepared for what is soon to happen and how not to be left behind.

Assessing Reading Strategy 2

This reading strategy has some important strengths. It is a popular reading strategy because it takes seriously human fears and anxieties about the world and offers the hope of God's imminent intervention. It makes sense of the present by putting it in the context of God's good purposes. It assures people about the future by predicting events that will very soon enact those purposes. It takes Revelation as a biblical document seriously and shows how it can be relevant to people's lives.

But while these are significant strengths, this strategy has some serious weaknesses. One is the assumption that Revelation predicts events that will come to pass only in our time. This claim means that only present-day readers can make sense of Revelation. The implication of this approach is that the writer of Revelation did not know what he was writing and that Revelation, though written two thousand years ago, has not been comprehensible since to any readers across the last two millennia. These claims are simply not convincing. Human beings, even writers of Scripture, are not robots. And communities of believers have always made meaning of the writings in the canon for their own lives.

A second weakness is that this approach, focused on predicting future events, takes no account of the circumstances from which this text originated and that which it addressed. The strategy deems these past circumstances to be irrelevant. Only the present (twenty-first century) and future matter. Such a view fails to take seriously that God is involved in human history and events in the past, as well as the present and imminent future.

A third weakness concerns understanding Revelation as a prophecy that predicts future events. While Revelation identifies itself as a prophecy (1:3), we need to ask what this word prophecy means. In strategy 2, the word often means to predict or foretell the future. But across the biblical tradition, the word prophecy often has a different meaning.

While prophets can predict future events, prophets in the Bible are predominantly concerned with the present. They analyze or interpret present situations in relation to God's purposes (Isa 5:1-7). They denounce injustice and the misuse of power (Isa 1:17, 28). They interpret international events from God's perspectives (Isa 7-8, 10). They declare God's will and what God requires (Jer 2:11-25). When they talk of the future, they often do so in terms of the consequences of the present (Isa 35).

That is, prophets preach more than they predict. They proclaim a word of the Lord to the present circumstances of their audience more than they forecast the future. Prophets "forth-tell" more than they foretell. Prophets analyze and interpret the present in terms of God's purposes rather than declare tomorrow's headlines today. A reading strategy that concentrates on prophecy as predicting the future significantly misreads Revelation by trying to make it do what it cannot do.

Moreover, Revelation does not consist of only one genre or type of literature. It also employs two other genres, that of a "revelation" or an "apocalypse" (1:1), and a letter (1:4; chs. 2–3). I will explain these genres in the next chapter, but it is sufficient to note here that both apocalypses and letters also address the present circumstances of their readers. Reading strategy 2 ignores these genres and their focus on the present.

The recognition of these multiple genres raises questions about the literal understanding of Revelation's language that this reading strategy employs. Prophecies and apocalypses often use symbolic or metaphorical language to talk about God's ways and to describe social conditions. This poetic language engages our imagination, it creates an overall impression, it establishes a general effect. Details contribute to this larger impression; they are not meant to be interpreted literally.

To confuse symbolic language as literal language leads to serious misunderstanding. If someone says, "Give me a hand," we recognize immediately that this is a metaphor, that the person wants our help. We don't literally cut off a hand and give it to the person. Understanding Revelation's symbolic language—which often draws on the language of the Hebrew Bible as well as firstcentury culture—is a significant challenge in reading Revelation.

Further, as we noted above, reading strategy 2 borrows several notions such as "the rapture" and "Antichrist" from other New Testament writings to interpret Revelation. The problem is, though, that Revelation does not refer to a rapture. It does not provide the option of believers miraculously escaping the world and its tribulation by being taken up into heaven. In fact, Revelation 21 reverses any such notion and has the New Jerusalem and God's presence coming down from heaven to be among people on earth! Nor does Revelation use the term Antichrist. This reading strategy randomly imports these notions from other New Testament writings. The text of 1 and 2 John refers to opponents in a church fight as "antichrists" (plural, not the singular "Antichrist") and not as some international figure or world ruler. Those who use this strategy have often employed this notion of the Antichrist in negative and selective ways to vilify various social and political figures with whom they disagree. Importing such notions into the interpretation of Revelation distorts its meaning.

And finally, this reading strategy fundamentally creates passive readers who remain indifferent to the pain and brokenness of the world while they wait for God's intervention. Such indifference or escape is contrary to Revelation's own teaching, as well as to that of the biblical tradition. God's people are to be in partnership with God, agents of God's healing and life-giving work in the world, not disengaged from our brokenness and escapees from the world. A reading strategy that creates readers so out of step with the biblical message needs an alternative.

Reading Strategy 3

From this evaluation of the second reading strategy, a third strategy for reading Revelation emerges. It has four dimensions. I will mention them here briefly and elaborate them in the next few chapters.

1. Circumstances Addressed

This strategy recognizes that Revelation is an ancient text. It comes from a time and culture vastly different from our own (see appendix A for discussion). Some two thousand years and many cultural changes separate us from it. This ancient world has left its mark on Revelation in its language and forms of thought, just as our world influences us as readers. We know that cultures and the meaning of words change over time. The word peculiar, for example, once meant "special"; now it means "weird." The word gay once meant "happy" but now for the most part it designates a same-gender sexual orientation. Recognizing and respecting the time-gap between our world and that of Revelation matters if we are to understand it carefully.

Appropriately, strategy 3 takes seriously the time period when Revelation was written and the circumstances to which it was addressed. Because the writer of Revelation did not have my third-grade teacher, he did not know to put the date on his work. Clues from within Revelation and references to it from other writings suggest it was probably written between 70 and 100 C.E., perhaps in the last decade of the first century. I outline some of the factors leading to this conclusion in appendix A.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from What Does Revelation Reveal? by Warren Carter. Copyright © 2011 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1426710143
• ISBN 13: 9781426710148
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144