THE MAJOR SCHOOLS OF INTERPRETATION
Since the chief purpose of Christianity is to confer eternal life upon mankind, that book of the New Testament whose primary theme is the future would seem to deserve a prominent place in Christian theology. Indeed, Revelation's imagery has significantly influenced liturgy and ecclesiastical art, yet the work as a whole has often been treated like a skeleton in the church's closet. Many early lists of the New Testament canon excluded it or placed it in a doubtful category, Martin Luther's German translation consigned it (along with Hebrews, James, and Jude) to an appendix, and many modern commentators have denied that it could have been written by the same author as the Gospel and Epistles of John. Preparers of lectionaries for public worship have included little from it (in the case of Eastern Orthodoxy, nothing from it), and average readers usually steer clear of its innumerable puzzles.
Even casual observers note the similarity between Revelation's images and Jesus' parables. There are two basic types of the latter: detailed allegories (such as the sower, Matt. 13:3-9, 13:18-23), and general illustrations (such as the unjust judge, Luke 18:1-8). One common approach to Revelation reads its images as Lucan illustrations, while others view them as Matthean allegories.
The former, often called the idealist approach, holds that John constructed a series of overlapping visions concerning the future church's general sufferings, to prepare it for a sudden return of Christ at any time. The specific correlations proposed by the other three schools are not necessarily ruled out by idealism; indeed, these are sometimes commended as typical, though not exclusive, fulfillments of John's visions.
Nevertheless, idealists are especially eager to merge the various images of Revelation together, so that the book becomes little more than a complicated development of the theme that antichrist will come, after which Christ will come. As a result, this school struggles to discern a meaningful purpose for Revelation; does the church really need twenty-two chapters of arguably the most complex symbolism in Scripture simply to illustrate 2 Peter 3:10? Tragically, idealists seem more interested in saying what Revelation is not than what it is. Many commentaries of this type are obsessed with refuting allegedly mistaken views of the millennium in Revelation 20, virtually to the exclusion of all other issues.
According to the preterist view, the book contains specific prophecies, but only of events in John's lifetime, namely, the primitive church's persecutions under the Roman Empire. John's purpose was to convince Christians of that era that Christ would soon return to earth and bring their persecutions to an end. Consistent preterists concede that any applications they might make to specific situations faced by the church today were wholly unintended by the book itself.
Preterism is the preferred approach of "liberal" or "historical critical" scholars, who deny the possibility of genuinely predictive prophecy and are not afraid to state that John's predictions did not come true. Revelation is thus read like a science fiction novel, which enables its readers to visualize their own aspirations in a mythical universe.
There are also certain "conservative" preterists who make the arresting claim that the second Advent or Parousia actually occurred in the first century, specifically when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed in AD 70. This would require the singular notion that the Parousia is quite unrelated to the resurrection of the dead, or that the latter is not a physical event.
By contrast, futurist interpreters assert that Revelation predicts the opposite end of the ecclesiastical timeline, namely, those events which will follow the so-called Rapture. The latter term refers to a supposed removal of believers from the earth prior to the Parousia, based on an argument from silence in connection with 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. The lack of any reference to the judgment in Paul's discussion of Christ's return is taken as proof that Paul thought of these as two distinct events.
According to this approach, the church will not be present on earth when most of Revelation is fulfilled. The book's heroes will instead be modern day Jews, especially those of the state of Israel. This is based on yet another argument from silence, involving the absence of the word ekklésia ("church") from Revelation except in its first three chapters and 22:16. Such an interpretation requires the singular notion that the earthly agioi ("saints," 13:7, 17:6) are not synonymous with the church.
Since the Rapture has not yet occurred, futurists can only speculate concerning which modern day persons and institutions might someday fulfill what Revelation describes. Their errant prognostications have served to discredit both the study of this book and the high view of scriptural authority on which their views are supposedly based. The most famous example is Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), whose extrapolations from circumstances of his time resulted in glaring miscalculations regarding international relations and the global economy.
The historicist school agrees that John described specific events, but declines to limit the search for these to any particular era. Its major subdivision, known as church historicism, attempts to identify Revelation's characters with various saints and heretics over the centuries. For example, Martin Luther held that the first six trumpets of chapters 8 and 9 refer to six ancient heretics: Tatian, Marcion, Origen, Novatian, Arius, and Mohammed. Most Protestant church historicists find Roman Catholicism or specifically its papacy in one or more of the book's beasts.
The following study may be categorized as a reading of John's Revelation from a secular historicist perspective. The following basic assumptions have guided the research.
In this study, the various pericopes of Revelation are termed "scenes," and specific elements and characters in a scene are termed "motifs." For example, the fifth trumpet in chapter 9 is a scene, and the fallen star in v. 1 is a motif.
