Revelation

How can thinking Christians who want to live faithfully and responsibly in our contemporary world hear the word of God in Revelation? The basic information one needs in order to read the Apocalypse with insight and appreciation can be concentrated into two simple sentences which represent the thesis of this commentary:

1. The last "book" of the Bible is a pastoral letter to Christians in Asia in the late first century who were confronted with a critical religiopolitical situation, from a Christian prophet who wrote in apocalyptic language and imagery.

2. Like the Bible in general, there is some difficulty in understanding Revelation, but it can and should be understood, for it has had enormous influence in religion, history, and culture and has an urgently needed message for the contemporary church.

These two sentences contain ten theses on understanding Revelation which we may now explore one at a time.

In vivid, sometimes grotesque pictures of the future establishment of God's just rule throughout the creation, including scenes of the last battle and the last judgment, the "book" of Revelation portrays the triumphant finale of this drama, and thus was appropriately placed by the church at the end of the canon as the last "book" of the Bible.

The inclusion of Revelation in the Christian Bible did not happen without a struggle. From the moment of its composition, Revelation has been a controversial writing. We should not suppose that everyone in the seven churches to which it was originally addressed accepted it as authentic Christian teaching, for these churches contained rival prophets and teachers who opposed John and his message (2:2, 6, 14-15, 20-23). The letter was, however, accepted by many Christians and within a few decades had achieved such a wide circulation that it was cited as authoritative Christian teaching by bishops and other Christian leaders, not only in its native Asia ( Melito, Bishop of Sardis, 160-190, who wrote a commentary on it) but in Egypt (Clement of Alexandria, d. 215), North Africa ( Tertullian, d. 220), Rome (Muratorian Canon), and South Gaul ( Irenaeus, 177-202).

Yet questions and disputes arose. A second-century Christian leader named Montanus caused much excitement by teaching that the church had entered into the final age of the Spirit, and predicted that the End was near and the new Jerusalem would descend at the nearby town of Pepuza , in what is now Turkey . Since he and the sect that followed him drew support from Revelation for their views, Revelation fell into disrepute among "mainline" Christians- not the last time in church history that Revelation would be rejected because of its misuse by its false friends. The "Alogi," an anti-Montanist group, refused to use Revelation on the basis that it contained errors in fact and had not been written by an apostle. Gaius, an influential presbyter of the Roman church, wrote (ca. 210) a manifesto declaring that Revelation had been written by the gnostic heretic Cerinthus.

About 250 the Bishop of Alexandria, Dionysius, made a careful study of the language and grammar of Revelation and concluded that it could not have been written by the same author as the Gospel of John and that it was therefore not apostolic. His conclusion provided helpful support for those Alexandrian Christians who wanted to oppose the use of Revelation in the churches, on the basis that its literal interpretation, especially of the "millennium," was a distortion of the spiritual nature of Christianity. Thus as late as the fourth century, when Eusebius (d. 340) classified the Christian literature purported to be Scripture into "accepted," "rejected," and "disputed," Revelation was still classified as "disputed." Cyril of Jerusalem ( 315-386) was even more negative, omitting it from the list of canonical books and forbidding its use publicly or privately.