NO BOOK IN THE BIBLE has been interpreted as variously as Revelation. Students of prophecy and mystics especially have found in the visions of Revelation fertile ground for speculation and spiritualization. It seems as if every new commentary on Revelation reveals a new approach.
Craig Keener, the author of this volume on Revelation, offers a “new” approach by focusing on the “old.” In order to understand this fascinating book, he says, we must focus on its “ancient rather than modern” background: “If today’s newspapers are a necessary key to interpreting the book, then no generation until our own could have understood and obeyed the book.”
In focusing on Revelation’s message to its original audience, Keener is not denying the genre of the book (apocalyptic), its purpose (prophecy), its method (use of symbols), or its message for readers today (God’s awesome majesty and control). On the contrary, Keener reaffirms the value of all previous approaches—idealistic, historical, preterist, futurist—in understanding the message of this book, or at least certain aspects of it.
His main point, however, is that focusing totally on present-day application may sell millions of books and pay lip service to the authority of Scripture over all aspects of modern life, but such an approach only seems to do that. In reality, what it does is call into question or make problematic two fundamental bedrocks of Christian faith.
(1) It questions the universal and timeless nature of God’s truth. When the great visions of Revelation are interpreted as dependent on the great evil empires of the twentieth century—Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, China, the Islamic world—then every shift of modern political fortune changes our understanding of the book. As Professor Keener so ably shows, the great symbols of Revelation were aimed at early Christian ears, not twentieth-century ones. We learn what they mean by understanding what they meant.
(2) We are tempted to forget that God has acted and continues to act in all political contexts. We have no monopoly on God’s attention. The great prophecies of Revelation meant as much to Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Edwards, and Barth as they mean to us today. Just as the visions of Revelation make up parallel rather than serial understandings of God’s mighty deeds, so every Christian age develops an understanding of what Revelation means that is parallel to all other ages, not a chronological series of events.
Indeed, one of the great marvels of God’s gracious activity toward us is that it occurs in real time without being prejudiced in favor of any particular age. Just because we are the latest does not mean we are the best. The effects of sin prevent any age—including ours—from being “golden,” at least in the spiritual sense. Every Christian generation learns equally the lessons of Revelation—that God is in control, that the powers of the world are minuscule when compared with God, that God is as likely to work through apparent weakness and failure as through strength and success, and that in the end God’s people will prevail.
Revelation is the last book of the Bible. It reveals important truths about the end times. But it is also last in another important sense—it calls on all the hermeneutical courage, wisdom, and maturity one can muster in order to be understood properly. In many ways it serves as a graduation exercise for the NIV Application Commentary Series, an opportunity to fully apply the many lessons we have learned in the Bridging Contexts sections of previous volumes.
God’s time is his, not ours. The story of God’s gracious activity on our behalf will be fulfilled in a great and glorious conclusion. But all Christians, everywhere and at all times, have equal access to the time. That access has been and is made possible by God’s message in the book of Revelation.
Terry C. Muck