It seems that John not only writes in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, but understands himself to be writing at the climax of the tradition, when all the eschatological oracles of the prop...
We may still ask in what sense Revelation belongs to the genre of ancient religious literature we call the apocalypse. J. J. Collins defines the literary genre apocalypse in this way: ‘Apocalypse’ is...
Although most early Christian prophecy was oral, not written, John had plenty of models for a written prophecy, both in the prophetic books of the Hebrew scriptures and in the later Jewish apocalypses...
Once we have fully recognized the specificity of the seven messages to the churches, it is possible to ask whether John also envisaged other readers. Why does he write to seven churches? These were by...
[Jesus'] resurrection is therefore God's promise of new creation for the whole of the godforsaken reality which the crucified Jesus represents. It is therefore an event of dialectical promise: it open...
The heavenly revelation he receives concerns God’s activity in history to achieve his eschatological purpose for the world. In other words, John’s concerns are exclusively prophetic. He uses the apoca...
The point is not to predict a sequence of events. The point is to evoke and to explore the meaning of the divine judgment which is impending on the sinful world.
Thus it is a serious mistake to suppose that Revelation opposes the Roman Empire solely because of its persecution of Christians. Rather Revelation advances a thorough-going prophetic critique of the...
The fact that John explicitly and carefully contextualizes his prophetic message in seven specific contexts makes it possible for us to resist a common generalization about Revelation: that it is a bo...
The range of different situations in these seven churches is sufficient for any Christian church in the late first century to find analogies to its own situation in one or more of the messages and the...
If we try to read it as prediction of how that judgment will occur we turn it into a confused muddle and miss its real point.
The extent and character of the continuity and the differences between prophecy and apocalyptic are highly debatable. But the distinction means that the relationship between Revelation and the Jewish...
Theological meaning is thus written into the detail of John’s meticulous literary composition.
Thus it would be a serious mistake to understand the images of Revelation as timeless symbols. Their character conforms to the contextuality of Revelation as a letter to the seven churches of Asia. Th...
We must try to do justice to the three categories of literature – apocalypse, prophecy and letter – into which Revelation seems to fall.
The whole of Revelation could be regarded as a vision of the fulfilment of the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Your name be hallowed, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it...
The profoundest points of New Testament Christology occur when the inclusion of the exalted Christ in the divine identity entails the inclusion of the crucified Christ in the divine identity, and when...
The device of the seven messages enables John to engage appropriately with seven different contexts in which his book would be read and also to integrate those contexts into the broader perspective of...
It is clear that John saw himself, not only as one of the Christian prophets, but also as standing in the tradition of Old Testament prophecy.
In its daring hope for the conversion of all the nations to the worship of the true God it develops the most universalistic features of the biblical prophetic tradition. In its conception of the churc...
Showing 21 to 40 of 51 results