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This is the introcuctory chapter from my book Understanding Revelation.
I had given up on trying to decipher it in the late 1980s and found the words of the Danish theologian and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1990, 29) practical and useful:
“But,” your perhaps say, “there are so many obscure passages in the Bible, whole books that are practically riddles.” To that I would answer: Before I have anything to do with this objection, it must be made by someone whose life manifests that he has scrupulously complied with all the passages that are easy to understand: is this the case for you? Yet this is how the lover would respond to the letter—if there were obscure passages but also clearly expressed wishes, he would say, “I must immediately comply with the wish—then I will see about the obscure parts. How could I ever sit down and ponder the obscure passages and not comply with the wish, the wish that I clearly understood.”In other words, when you are reading God’s word, it is not the obscure passages that bind you but what you understand, and with that you are to comply at once.
There is so much in the Bible that is clear and actionable, and I had enough trouble with Jesus’s clear commandments to devote myself to a book that many theologians have tried to decipher in vain for centuries, with those seemingly certain about its exact meaning mostly proven wrong within their own lifetime.
The defining moment came in the mid-1980s, when a well-known end-times teacher seemed certain that the birthmark on the then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s forehead was the mark of the beast and predicted that in the coming year Gorbachev would take over the world as the Antichrist. This was because his birthmark resembled the world map, allegedly. If it happened, it happened so secretly that we missed it, and the Soviet Union collapsed some years later without the prophesied communist world takeover. In later years, I have been able to facilitate mission in the fragments of the lost Soviet empire, and Russia has receded in the minds of most Christians as a potential birthplace of the Antichrist. But Gorbachev has proved to have been able to live a healthy and long life, so the end-times expert in question was able to peddle a theory of his return for quite a few years. No apology for the failed prophecy followed, only a steady stream of new theories about the potential identity of the Antichrist, designed for everyone to forget the failed prophecy and to make some money in the process.
Whole libraries could be filled with clearly failed predictions about the identity of the Antichrist. After all, this speculation about it began already in the second century.
Nearly every Christian has come across theories regarding who or what the beast in Revelation might be. During the days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was everyone’s favourite beast. Since then, many have predicted that the Antichrist would come from the EU, China, the Middle East, or the US, with the multimillion-selling Left Behind novel series popularising the idea about a Romanian Antichrist, who becomes the UN Secretary General. Consequently, there are millions of Christians around the world expecting the Antichrist to appear to lead a world government, and because of that, millions of evangelical Christians, especially in America, oppose any global cooperation, some even international aid and charity work.
Revelation has entered the popular culture, with novels and movies borrowing from the Apocalypse, often with great artistic freedom. For example, in the beginning of Pale Rider, a Western starring Clint Eastwood, a character called the Preacher arrives in a village on horseback at the precise moment when a young woman is reading the KJV version of Revelation 6:8, which says,
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.
I can remember discussing the finer details of Revelation with a Satanist, a fellow student of journalism, whilst waiting at the reception lounge of the largest newspaper in Finland, with the rest of the students and our professor intently listening to our conversation, looking perplexed. This Satanist had a remarkable interest in Revelation, even when he did not believe in the existence of either God or Satan.
At the time, Revelation seemed to have very little significance to my spiritual growth, and talking about it seemed to lead to endless arguments. In fact, the conversation I had about it with the Satanist has been amongst the most civilised of them all. The apparent ambiguity of Revelation appeared to make almost any interpretation possible but not provable.
And yet many Christians are studying it, and its different interpretations continue to shape global politics. For example, the rise of the Islamic State was energised by an Islamic reinterpretation of the battle of Armageddon referred to in Revelation.
In the Islamic eschatology, Dabiq in Syria is one of the two possible locations for a future epic battle between invading Christians and the defending Muslims, which in the Islamic eschatology will result in the Muslim victory. In this battle, the Muslims would be outnumbered, but Allah would give them victory.
This apocalyptic rationale behind the Islamic State’s appeal was lost to most Westerners, but it explains why many of the terrorist group members keep on fighting even when their caliphate has been lost: according to Islamic false prophecy, this battle was never supposed to be easy, with Allah coming to their help only when the Muslim soldiers would be under siege at the eve of destruction.
This Islamic false prophecy borrowed from Revelation and from other biblical prophetic books, but it then repurposed them to serve Islam. The early Muslims incorporated Jesus into their teaching to ease conversion from Islam to Christianity. If Jesus were one of the Islamic prophets—in a sense, even more special than Muhammed, as it is Jesus and not Muhammed that will return in the end of time according to Islam—then converting from Christianity to Islam would be easier. And the Middle East had large Christian populations before Islam, so incorporating Jesus into the Islamic narrative would have been a major converting strategy.
Jalal al-Din al Suyuti (1446-1505) was one of the most important interpreters of the hadiths (the sayings of Muhammed) predicting the apocalypse. He placed considerable importance on one hadith:
The Hour will not come so long as groups within my community will not have joined with the polytheists, going so far as to worship idols. In my community there will be a succession of thirty imposters, each one pretending to be a prophet. (Filiu 2011, 45)
It is because of these kinds of predictions that Islamic extremists often see Muslims that do not follow their brand of Islam as legitimate targets for execution. They are perceived as people who have left “real Islam” and apostates. Also, any cooperation between the governments in the predominantly Muslim countries and the West can be interpreted as fulfilment of this prophecy.
Al-Suyuti adopts the classical Islamic traditions concerning the Antichrist and that he would be denied access to the holy cities of Islam—Mecca and Medina. According to Al-Suyuti, the trial because of the Antichrist will be horrendous. But then the Mahdi will appear to restore true Islam for the period of seven years—according to Al-Suyuti, before Jesus, who will come to approve the work of the Mahdi. Jesus will descend on the white minaret in Damascus, chase the Antichrist and kill him at the gate of Lod, before abolishing all other religions but Islam. Al-Suyuti says about Jesus: “He will destroy the cross, he will kill the swine, he will make harmony reign, and he will drive out enmity.” (ibid., 45-46)
Al-Suyuti forecast that the Hour would not come any later than AD 2076. Because of this prediction, his influence has never been greater than today. Because of Al-Suyuti and many other Islamic predictors of the Apocalypse, the violence of the Islamic State has been legitimised in parts of the Islamic world, as the world is supposed to be a violent and horrendous place before the end of days. (ibid., 47) It is the Islamic repurposing of Revelation that will ensure that the future decades are likely to continue to be violent in parts of the Middle East.
Both Shia and Sunni apocalyptic thinkers predict that there will be a falling away from Islam—and brutal violence between the Islamic sects, and against the Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire that the early Muslims fought against for centuries—which is now reinterpreted to be the West of today. Many of these apocalyptic prophecies also predict a confrontation between the Muslims and the Jews, and the wiping out of the Jews. (ibid., 44-48)
But it is not just Muslims that have repurposed the message of Revelation to their ends. For example, Revelation has had a huge impact on the American foreign policy, even when the politicians applying it might not ever had studied it at all.
Seven Blessings of Reading Revelation
Misinterpreting and misapplying Revelation has brought many curses on earth, yet reading it is promised to bring us many blessings. Revelation contains seven specific blessings for those who remain obedient to Jesus.
Revelation 1:3 promises that “Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written in it.”
According to Revelation 14:13, blessed are those who die in the Lord, as they will rest from their work, and their good works will follow them to eternity.
According to Revelation 16:15, blessed are those who stay awake and remain clothed.
According to Revelation 19:9, blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb.
According to Revelation 20:6, blessed are those who share in the first resurrection—the resurrection of the Christians.
According to Revelation 22:7, blessed is the one who keeps the words written in Revelation.
And, according to Revelation 22:14, blessed are those who wash their robes, because they will enjoy the Tree of Life and enter New Jerusalem.
Many Christians associate Revelation with the figure of the Antichrist, but in fact, the Antichrist is not mentioned in Revelation at all. But they link the person behind 666, the number of the beast, mentioned in Revelation 13:18, to the Antichrist, making him some sort of final and evil end-time world ruler.
But I do not think that this interpretation can be easily justified.The reason is that the only books in the Bible that use the word “antichrist” are 1 and 2 John. If you accept that the author of Revelation is the same apostle John who also wrote John’s letters in the New Testament, you will be faced with a major dilemma, as John seems to refute the teaching about one Antichrist as an end-time world ruler in his letters. He writes in 1 John 2:18-19:
Children, it is the last hour! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. From this we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us.
In his letters, John gives us a very different definition of an antichrist than most Christians who are searching for the Antichrist today. For John, an antichrist is a false teacher who used to be part of a Christian community.
How could John define an antichrist as a false teacher in his letters and then proceed to present one Antichrist as an end-time world leader in Revelation—but without ever using that term? Many liberal scholars would argue that the book, the letters, and the Gospel all have different authors, but I do not think we need to make that conclusion.
And there is no reason to make an effort to save the idea of one Antichrist, as historical context makes it quite clear that John was responding in his letters to a present threat in the minds of many Christians. What he was refuting was a teaching about the Roman emperor as the Antichrist.
Josephus, a Jewish historian, who led the Jewish forces against the Romans in Galilee in the beginning of the First Jewish-Roman War (AD 66-73), which led to the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, writes in The Jewish War (6.5.4.312) about messianic prophecies that stirred the rebellion:
At about that time, one from their country would become ruler of the habitable world.
At this point, Josephus had already switched on to the Roman side, and he was explaining the Roman victory some years after the destruction of the Second Temple. It appears that he had become disillusioned about the messianic prophecies and was actively repurposing them for the Roman use. So, Josephus, a Jew, loses his faith in the Jewish messianic project after he had been captured by the Romans in Judea. He then makes the claim that this messiah that the Jews were still expecting was in fact the general Vespasian who would be proclaimed the emperor whilst in Judea. It was Vespasian’s son Titus who would destroy Jerusalem and the Second Temple, whilst Vespasian would return to Rome to become the emperor, “fulfilling” the prophecy about the world ruler coming out of Judea.
According to Eusebius (Church History, Book III, Chapter 12), Vespasian then ordered all descendants of the royal line of David to be hunted down to ensure that no one else could claim this prophecy. This is the beginning of the antichrist myth; it seems that Vespasian harnessed Josephus’s lucky prediction about him becoming the emperor to be used as propaganda.
This has also been documented by the Roman historians. Suetonius writes in The Life of Twelve Caesars: Life of Vespasian 5.6 about Vespasian in Judaea:
When he consulted the oracle of the god of Carmel in Judaea, the lots were highly encouraging, promising that whatever he planned or wished however great it might be, would come to pass; and one of his high-born prisoners, Josephus by name, as he was being put in chains, declared most confidently that he would soon be released by the same man, who would then, however, be emperor.
Over the next few years, the myth about one ruler that would rise in Judea would spread over the whole Roman Empire. What John is saying in 1 John 2:18-19 is that the Christians have heard that an Antichrist—the Roman emperor—has come. But John is refuting the whole idea that the emperor would be the Antichrist. Instead, what he is saying is that the many antichrists in the world are in fact false teachers who have once been part of the Christian community.
1 John 2:22 says:
Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son.
The recipients of the letter were waiting for one political Antichrist; instead, there would be many theological antichrists. It seems that the apostle John perceived false teachers to be much more detrimental to the Church than persecution by the whole Roman Empire.
Is it not rather odd that John does not mention an antichrist at all in Revelation—the most prophetic book of the New Testament—but he mentions him in a letter written to his contemporaries where he seems to argue against one Antichrist? This should inspire us to study the Scriptures more seriously.
What seems clear is that over the centuries, Christians around the world have projected their fears onto Revelation, so much so that their interpretations often seem to reflect their time and culture more than the contents of Revelation itself.
Over time, these interpretive frameworks have diversified, and academic views on Revelation can be rather different from the interpretations generated by fundamentalist preachers. Today, many scholars seek to explain Revelation as merely a product of its time and the genre conventions the author had in his disposal. But many evangelical writers perceive the book as prophesying what is yet to come, with practically all its content referring to the end-times.
The main frameworks of interpretation are historicist, which sees Revelation as a broad view of history, preterist, which sees the book mostly referring to the first century or time until the fall of the Roman Empire, futurist, which sees Revelation as focused on the final days, and idealist or symbolic, which interprets the book as an allegorical battle between good and evil, with no major reference points to real world events.
I do not think that any of these interpretive frameworks manage to explain the contents of Revelation wholly and satisfactorily, although all of them have something to offer. But they all seek to impose a consistent external order to the text, an order that is alien to its internal arrangement. They stop wrestling with the symbols and mysteries of Revelation far too early in their attempt to fit the content of the book in their interpretive model.
Some time ago I set myself a task of reading Revelation differently. I did not begin with a Bible commentary. Commentaries abound, so we can easily rely on them more than on the actual book. In fact, many books seeking to explain Revelation turn out to be studies of commentaries rather than the book itself.
Instead, I resorted to reading Revelation repeatedly over months in a disciplined way by not using any external sources at all, unless Revelation itself clearly pointed at them. But when Revelation clearly pointed beyond itself, I followed the reference.
Then I read books and academic articles that focus on the history and archaeology of the first-century Asia Minor, Rome, and Judea. Many of them do not refer to Revelation at all but give a picture of the culture, history, and religious beliefs of Asia Minor at the time of Revelation’s writing, either through written documents or archaeological digs.
Eventually, I concluded that Revelation itself provides a consistent interpretive framework for itself, which, with some help of knowing history and trust in the validity of biblical prophecy, manages to explain itself rather well.
I have approached Revelation with the hermeneutical perspective common in the study of history and theology. Hans-Georg Gadamer is considered the father of philosophical hermeneutics and one of the most important philosophical voices of the twentieth century. Gadamer examined the ways historical and cultural circumstances influence human understanding, and he remains popular amongst many theologians, mainly as hermeneutics itself was birthed out of the need for biblical interpretation.
Many people are aware of the concept of the hermeneutical spiral or circle, but they might not know what it means. In hermeneutics, a text is seen as a unity when it comes to its meaning. The individual parts explain the whole, and the whole is explained by the individual parts. Interpretation consists of continual movement from the whole to the part and from the part to the whole, and this process gradually increases and deepens our understanding.
According to Gadamer, someone trying to understand a text is “always projecting.” We project a meaning on the text as soon as an initial meaning begins to emerge. This fore-projection is constantly revised, and in every revision round we project a new projection of meaning: rival projects of interpretation can emerge side by side, until it becomes clearer what the unity of meaning is. If the fore-projection is correct, it is confirmed by the text. The art of interpretation is to examine the legitimacy of the “fore-meanings” dwelling within us. (Gadamer 2013, 279-280)
Essentially, we seek to let the text itself to be the judge of our fore- meanings rather than only look for evidence for whatever theory we hold about the text.
But far too often, we are impatient with the text, and when we read a book full of symbolism and metaphors, such as Revelation, we can project our interpretation onto it too quickly. For example, a prominent Bible study site interprets the “beast rising out of the sea” in Revelation 13:1 to be the Antichrist. But is this interpretation consistent with what Revelation itself reveals about the beast? Is it consistent with the way the Bible defines a beast?
We will proceed from part—one verse—to the whole: from Revelation to the totality of the Bible. And we will soon discover that in the Bible, beasts tend to be empires rather than individuals. Revelation is continuation of the Book of Daniel, and to Daniel, beasts are empires. This means that a theory about the beast in Revelation 13:1 being the Antichrist is probably wrong, because a beast is an empire and not a person. But now our understanding of the whole has already affected our interpretation of Revelation 13:1. If empires are beasts in Daniel, then the beast rising out of the sea must be an empire.
We let Revelation itself explain an individual verse, and then we let the individual verse explain Revelation. Then we let the rest of the Bible explain the individual verse and Revelation, and vice versa. And we can also, to certain extent, let historical events explain Revelation, as some passages clearly depict events that have already passed in time of writing, and others predict events that have now clearly come to pass. When Revelation was written, they were prophecy. Now they are history. The hermeneutical process can be extended beyond the text to its reference points in the world.
Do you ever mentally skip a Bible verse because you already “know” what it means? This is an example of fore-projecting an interpretation. When we do that we no more let the Bible confront and challenge us, but we have categorised that verse in our mind as a “solved problem”, and it does not bother us anymore. This way, the Bible has lost some of its power in our lives.
Over the years, I have tried to read the Bible in different translations and languages, as the resulting sense of unfamiliarity forces me to re-ponder the text’s meaning, and I am less able to fore-project an interpretation effortlessly.
Interpretive Guidelines
Following hermeneutical principles, I would suggest following these interpretive guidelines when you study Revelation.
1. Revelation gives plenty of guidance on how to interpret itself. It is the first place to look when explaining it.
For example, in Revelation 10:2, a mighty angel comes down from heaven and holds a little scroll in his hand. It should be clear to a careful reader that a little scroll begins a new prophecy.
Revelation 1:8 says that God is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. This implies that Revelation majors in beginnings and endings.
Revelation 1:1 says that the book is about what “must soon take place.” Then in Revelation 4:1, a voice says to John: “Come up here, and I will show you things which must take place after this.”
So, Revelation is not just about beginning and endings, but also about things that will happen soon after John has seen the visions.
But in Revelation 1:19 Jesus says to John: “Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this.”
Putting this all together, it seems clear that part of Revelation concerns of things which had already happened at the time John saw the visions. These belong to the things which are.
So, Revelation interprets the past and how we got where John was at the time of seeing the visions.
Revelation tells about events that were happening at the time John saw the visions. These also belong to the things which are.
Revelation predicts what is about to happen. And then it predicts what will happen after what is about to happen. These belong to things that will take place after the time of seeing the vision. And then it predicts events which will happen in the end-times.
Based on this, much of Revelation would already have taken place within John’s lifetime, and some of it quite soon after that. This might challenge your understanding of Revelation, but that is what Jesus says Himself in Revelation.
For some, a thought that a book of prophecy might explain the past might seem contradictory. But it is not. Revelation gives us God’s perspective on the purpose of all time. God is the Great Storyteller, and He knows that for us to understand what will happen, we need to understand what has already taken place, and how we got where we are. But we should not lose sight of Revelation 1:1, which says that the book concerns of what must soon take place. This means that the main emphasis of the book is prophetic and not simply reinterpreting the past or the present, and that many developments shown should begin shortly after John seeing the visions.
2. The first reference point outside Revelation is the Old Testament.
Scholars have counted over two hundred references in Revelation to the Old Testament texts (Lo 1999, 2-3). Most of these are references to the Old Testament’s prophetic books. Altogether, there might be over five hundred allusions to the Old Testament.
This means that it would be foolish to study Revelation without also studying the Old Testament. With so many references to the Old Testament, Revelation clearly invites us to study the Jewish Bible. It is the Old Testament, rather than the New Testament, which functions as the main reference point. The reason for this is clear: the New Testament canon had not been compiled at the time of writing. Although most books and letters ending up as part of the New Testament would already have been written, they would not have been widely available.
But Revelation goes a lot further than that. It is evident that John sees Revelation as a continuation of the work of the Old Testament prophets, even the summary and the explainer of it. Revelation contains new predictive prophecies, but it also explains the Old Testament prophecies.
Revelation makes references to nearly all prophetic books in the Old Testament, and each reference is an invitation to read not just the exact reference but also the surrounding verses. These references function much like hyperlinks, so that we should read Revelation by going back and forth from Revelation to the Old Testament books if we need more clarity.
By and large, Revelation is a book that expands, explains, and continues the Old Testament prophecy. For example, when it comes to the beast, Revelation continues from where Daniel ends.
As Revelation relies so heavily on the Old Testament prophetic books, a sensible approach would be to assess whether it also follows their structure. For example, Jeremiah is structured cyclically as a series of gradually developing wailings about Jerusalem’s impending destruction, so its prophecies are not sequenced chronologically but hermeneutically, as Jeremiah seeks to understand the first shocking revelation and his own call, which leads him to a deeper understanding. So, it would be a mistake to read Jeremiah as a singular chronologically structured prophecy. The same applies to Revelation.
3. Symbolism in Revelation follows the conventions developed by the Old Testament prophetic books.
Revelation is a profoundly symbolic book, but there are no randomly chosen symbols. There is very little in the book that is literal, and at the same time, it does refer to real historical events.
Revelation is not one chronological account of world events. In fact, it contains multiple visions of the past, present, and future, looked at from different perspectives.
To understand Revelation, you must seek to understand prophetic language, principles, and visionary symbolism. Here my approach is not entirely scholarly, as my ministry and gifting in this area have somewhat directed my interpretation. But unless you understand the language of dreams and visions, it is very hard to understand a book full of visions. But this does not entitle us to haphazard interpretations. These interpretations must still be supported by te Scriptures, reasonability, and history.
According to Bailey, prophetic literature can use forms such as step parallelism, inverted parallelism, and ring composition (2011, 40-42) in short passages of Scripture. We do not need to get too technical here; the main point is that prophetic writing is not always written chronologically, but the following verses can reinforce the message of the previous verses rather than account events in linear or chronological fashion.
As a journalist, I am used to writing articles that do not outline the narrative in chronological order but move back and forth temporally to reinforce an argument, with the headline often working both as a premise and a conclusion. So, non-chronological ordering of texts should not be unfamiliar to anyone who reads the news.
4. Interpretation of symbols should be consistent and not haphazard.
The symbolic system of Revelation is not haphazard but precise. Yet many scholars and Bible teachers interpret the symbols haphazardly. For example, when Revelation 7:3 refers to the seal of God on the forehead of His servants, most readers would interpret this to be an invisible seal. Yet, when Revelation 13:16-18 speaks about the mark of the beast, many expect this mark to be a physical mark. That is not consistent but haphazard interpretation of symbols. It does not conform with the symbolic system of Revelation. In fact, from the beginning to the end of the book, Revelation is painstakingly building a complex but consistent symbolic system, and this system is meant to guide a reader’s interpretation of the book.
5. The next reference point after the Old Testament prophets should be the rest of the Old Testament and the New Testament.
For example, when in Revelation 15:3 the saints sing the Song of Moses, it refers to the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32. To establish the meaning of the Song of Moses in Revelation, the most sensible thing to do is to read Deuteronomy 32 first.
But John is also writing to congregations that would have been at least reasonably familiar with Paul’s teaching, as Paul established the church of Ephesus. Hence Paul’s letters to Asia Minor can often give us useful contextual information and clues.
This referencing to the Old Testament is deeply ingrained in Revelation. As early as in the third century, Dionysius of Alexandria complained about John’s poor use of Greek, saying that he employed barbarous idioms. But many irregularities occur because Revelation carries over the exact grammatical form of the Old Testament wording, with this intended dissonance being used as a literary technique to get the reader to see the Old Testament connection more clearly. (Beale 1999, 318-321)
6. You cannot understand Revelation without some knowledge of history.
If Revelation is the book of the Alpha and the Omega, the beginnings and the endings, and what happens between, you will not be able to understand it without at least some understanding of history. How do you separate what has already happened from what is yet to happen, unless you know what has already happened?
As the Old Testament prophecies about the destruction of Israel and Judah demonstrate, God cares deeply about every generation, and not just about ours. Not every Bible prophecy is a prophecy about the end-times, with many Bible prophecies already being fulfilled in the time of Jesus.
7. You cannot understand Revelation unless you acknowledge that at least some of its content is prophecy.
Revelation is a profoundly prophetic book. Much of the historical study of it assumes that there is no actual prophecy in it with scholars perceiving it merely as symbolic commentary of John’s own time. But although our understanding of the first century history is extremely useful, it fails to explain the whole of Revelation.
Paul Ricouer, a French philosopher, saw the Bible as “the grandiose plot of the history of the world”, and each literary plot as a “sort of miniature version of the great plot that joins Apocalypse and Genesis”. (Ricouer 1985, 23)
But the Apocalypse is yet to happen,which has certain consequences. According to Ricouer, the Apocalypse, in this respect, offers the model of a prediction that is continually invalidated without ever being discredited, hence of an end that is itself constantly put off. Moreover, and by implication, the invalidation of the prediction concerning the end of the world has given rise to a truly qualitative transformation of the apocalyptic model. From being imminent, it has become immanent. The Apocalypse, therefore, shifts its imagery from the last days, the days of terror, of decadence, of renovation, to become a myth of crisis. (ibid., 23)
This sense of an imminent crisis is the ethos of how many Christians approach Revelation. But this ethos does not help us to understand it. Many Christians project this ethos of an imminent crisis onto any new crisis in their time and believe that this new crisis would somehow be the fulfilment of prophecies in Revelation. This is because all they know about Revelation is a sense of a world in crisis, and now their world appears to be in crisis, which must in their minds mean that they are seeing the prophecies regarding the end-times fulfilled.
Sources:
Bailey, Kenneth E. Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes: Cultural Studies In 1 Corinthians. S.l.: SPCK Publishing, 2011.
Beale, Gregory K. John’s Use of the Old Testament in Revelation. A&C Black, 1999.
Filiu, Jean-Pierre. Apocalypse in Islam. University of California Press, 2011.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Kierkegaard’s Writings, XXI, Volume 21: For Self- Examination/Judge for Yourself! Princeton University Press, 1990.
Lo, Wei, and Wei Luo. Ezekiel in Revelation: Literary and Hermeneutic Aspects. University of Edinburgh, 1999.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 2. University of Chicago Press, 1990.
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