Futurist versus Realized Eschatology
There are, however, those who contend that the academic consensus on the relationship between the two books rests upon shaky biblical foundations. A predominantly American bible studies movement working outside the academy among Reformed Protestants presents the most persistent and powerful challenge to the ruling orthodoxy. The mostly independent scholars who call themselves preterists advocate a biblical hermeneutic known as “covenant eschatology”. They do not see in the Johannine writings a house divided between the “futurist eschatology” of the Apocalypse the “realized eschatology” of the Fourth Gospel. On the contrary, their interpretation of Johannine eschatology is fully consistent with the tradition that the apostle John wrote all five books.459
Whoever wrote it, few would deny that Revelation is a prophecy of the parousia of Jesus Christ (see, in particular, 19:11–21).460 But there is a wide gulf between academic and preterist interpretations of the Johannine literature as to the time when that prophecy was or is to be fulfilled. Nor do most New Testament scholars agree with preterists on the identity of the great city Babylon which is the target of God’s wrath in the Revelation narrative. Thus far, however, it has been a one-sided debate. In print, at least, New Testament scholars simply ignore the preterist argument that Revelation is a prophetic vision of the imminent destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, a world-historical event in which Christ’s second coming, the resurrection of the dead, and the final judgement were all fulfilled. But, to give academic theologians all due professional respect, experience may have shown that populist challenges to their credibility need not be taken seriously.
Certainly, popular eschatology acquired a bad name among New Testament scholars throughout the twentieth century. For example, not many academic theologians appear to be influenced greatly by pre-millennial dispensationalists who advocate the “historical eschatology” which deals with the end of the world in the same literal manner as creation science imagines the creation of the earth. Revelation, they say, predicted what is for us a still-future but imminent apocalypse which will mark the end of the present church age. This meta-historical event will lead to the restoration of the physical Temple in geographical Jerusalem where Christ will reign from a physical throne for the thousand years preceding the end of the old and the creation of a new heaven and new earth.461 In the nineteen-thirties, the Cambridge don CH Dodd recorded his disdain for such “fantastic visions”. As a leading New Testament scholar of the day, he declared that the preaching of the early church “affirms that the decisive thing has already happened”. He argued that the first Christians thought of “resurrection, exaltation, and second advent as being…inseparable parts of a single divine event”. Christ’s parousia was proclaimed simply “as the impending corroboration of a present fact”.462
Dodd maintained that the church soon outgrew Revelation which he dismissed as a throwback to the apocalyptic fantasies of an adolescent church. In those days, all-too-many believers prayed for the early, literal and physical return of the man Jesus Christ. But not everyone was caught up in “the unwholesome ferment of apocalyptic speculation”. “Finer minds” gave “more adequate expression” to “the substantive truths of the Gospel”. Accordingly, the essential message, the kerygma, transmitted by the preaching of the church was not tied to the outcome of any particular historical event — certainly not one in which Christ plays the role of “the fierce Messiah, whose warriors ride in blood up to their horses’ bridles”.463
Instead, according to Dodd, the church preached an eternal truth “directed towards reconstituting in the experience of individuals the hour of decision which Jesus brought”. The underlying theme of the kerygma presents every individual with an existential choice: The new age is here and with it the need to repent.464 For that reason, Dodd relegated Revelation to the biblical sidelines, along with other residues of early Christianity which confused or distorted the kerygma central to the apostolic mission. He assigns much more weight to the Fourth Gospel. While conceding that, “in form and expression, as probably in date,” the Gospel of John “stands farthest from the original tradition of the teaching,” Dodd insisted that it is there “that we have the most penetrating expression of its central meaning”.465
Dodd was convinced that the early church was prey to an “eschatological fanaticism” engendered by “the belief that the Lord would in literal truth arrive to judgement upon the clouds of heaven during the thirties of the first century”. He believed that such an “excessive emphasis on the future” has the effect of relegating to a secondary place just those elements in the original Gospel which are most distinctive of Christianity — the faith that in the finished work of Christ God has already acted for the salvation of man, and the blessed sense of living in the divine presence here and now”. Dodd condemns “the tone and temper” of Revelation as a “relapse into pre-Christian eschatology”. In its warlike “conception of the character of God and His attitude to man the book falls below the level not only of the teaching of Jesus but of the best parts of the Old Testament”. Dodd saw “a certain tension or even contradiction between eschatology and ethics” reflected in the lamentable failure of Revelation to embrace the “ethical ideals of the Gospel”.466
In stark contrast, the Fourth Gospel “sublimated” eschatology “into a distinctive kind of mysticism”. While the futurist eschatology of Revelation, in common with Jewish apocalyptic literature, treated “ultimate reality…as the last term in the historical series,” it figures in John’s Gospel “as an eternal order of being, of which the phenomenal order in history is the shadow or symbol”. In the Fourth Gospel, therefore, “the crudely eschatological elements” in the primitive preaching or kerygma of the church “are quite refined away”. The evangelist deliberately subordinates the “futurist” element in the eschatology of the early Church to a “realized eschatology” in which “eternal life is a present and permanent possession of believers in Christ”.467
Dodd insisted that the eternal life of the eschatological Age to Come is “realized here and now through the presence of Christ by His Spirit in the Church”. Accordingly, Dodd had no sympathy whatever for those of his contemporaries who invoked Revelation to “work up a fantastic expectation” that Christ “will arrive in the thirties of the twentieth century”. History proved Dodd right on that score; it does not follow, however, that the “tremendous crisis” in which first-century Christians “had felt themselves to be living [also] passed, without reaching its expected issue”.468 The question remains: What was the “expected issue” of John’s apocalyptic vision of the last days (eschaton)?
The Crisis of the Last Days: Rome or Jerusalem?
Dodd drew a dichotomy between the realized eschatology of the Fourth Gospel and the futurist fantasy of Revelation. At first glance, the legitimacy of that radical opposition is confirmed by the total absence in the Gospel of John of the explicit prophecies of the destruction of Jerusalem found in the Synoptic Gospels.469 Further reason, one might think, to deny that one and the same person could have written the Gospel of John and Revelation. But long before Dodd’s work appeared, a pioneering preterist scholar, James Stuart Russell, suggested that the Apocalypse was indeed written by the apostle John and that the book serves the same function that the Olivet Discourse performs in Matthew 24 and the “little apocalypse” in Mark 13.
Russell found it “unaccountable that no notice should be taken of so important a prediction by the only one of its original auditors who left a record of the discourses of Christ”. His solution to the anomaly was that “the Apocalypse is nothing else than a transfigured form of the prophecy on the Mount of Olives”. On “this view the Apocalypse becomes the supplement to the gospel, and gives completeness to the record of the evangelist”.470 Such an interpretation of Revelation supports two conclusions: First, the Babylon of Revelation was the great city of Jerusalem; and second, the book was written before the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. Both proposi
tions contradict the modern academic consensus on Johannine eschatology.
By and large, New Testament scholars share the rusted-on conviction that Revelation was written late in the first century (i.e. well after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple) by an author who looked forward to God’s vengeance upon the new Babylon, the Roman Empire. Rome is alleged to have engaged in widespread persecution of Christian churches during the reign of Domitian. Both the late date and the Rome-as-Babylon hypotheses undergird Dodd’s dichotomy between realized and futurist eschatology, between the Gospel and the Apocalypse. If Revelation was written before AD 70 in anticipation of the imminent destruction of the Temple it can, like 1 John, easily be read as “a progressively realizing eschatology” awaiting consummation in the near future.471 Under such circumstances, the distinction between realized and futurist eschatology holds water only during the forty-year period between the cross and the siege of Jerusalem. From a preterist perspective, both the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation reflect shared eschatological expectations that were realized in part before but fulfilled, fully and completely, in AD 70.
How sound then is the consensus view that Revelation was written decades after AD 70 and that it looks forward to the destruction of the Roman Empire thinly disguised as Babylon?472 John A T Robinson confuses the issue by favouring an early date (ca 68-early 70 AD) while identifying Rome as Babylon. In his view, Revelation was written “to reflect on the terrible events of the latter 60s, both in Rome and in Jerusalem and then dispatching his warning of what could lie ahead” to the seven churches in Asia. “As it turned out,” he muses, “it was Jerusalem that fell in the autumn of 70 and Babylon that survived”. Robinson implies that the author of Revelation looked forward to the destruction of Rome as revenge for the persecution of the early church. But he does not support that proposition with a critical analysis of the evidence internal to Revelation itself.473
In contrast to Robinson, Kenneth L Gentry Jr. advocates an early date on the basis of both external and internal evidence. His analytical inquiry examines the late date evidence from Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria as well as other early church fathers. He found that “[m]uch of the late date external evidence is, in fact, inconclusive at best”. More importantly, he made an analysis of such internal factors as the theme of the book, the temporal expectations of the author, and the evidence suggesting that the Jerusalem Temple was still standing as the author wrote. Gentry also deals with the Sitz im Leben of Revelation observing that its “grammatical peculiarities and cultural allusions are evidently of a strongly Jewish color”.474 Another independent scholar notes that the “sounding of the seven trumpets” that figures so prominently in Revelation “is a thoroughly Jewish liturgical concept,” even “on ordinary days the priest blew seven times”.475 After the destruction of the Temple, Christians no longer operated within Jewish circles and institutions to such a very large extent”. Such historical and critical evidence suggests not just that Revelation was written before AD 70 but that “the great city, which is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt, where also [the] Lord was crucified” (Rev 11:8) was in fact Old Covenant Jerusalem.
Revelation in-and-out of Covenantal Context
Using Gentry’s early date hypothesis as a starting point, Don K Preston contends that “Revelation is about the fulfilment of Israel’s promises (Revelation 10:6–8; 22:6)”. This underlying theme suggests that:
Israel’s ‘sacraments’ were merely shadows of the coming reality (Colossians 2:14–16; Hebrews 10:1). In other words, Israel’s liturgical and sacrificial system was prophetic. Thus, the sounding of the trumpets in Revelation symbolizes the fulfilment of the things anticipated by Israel’s Old Covenant system.476
In fact, the entire narrative of Revelation is played out within the liturgical context of Old Covenant Israel.477 David Chilton warns that “[u]nless we see the Book of Revelation as a Covenant document…its continuity with the rest of the Bible will be lost”. The Covenant was “the marriage bond by which [God] joined [Israel] to Himself as His special people. This Covenant was a legal arrangement, a binding ‘contract’ imposed on Israel by her King”. As with any other “standard treaty-form in the ancient world,” penalties awaited a vassal kingdom which refused to abide by the terms of the Covenant. In such cases, “the lord would send messengers to the vassal, warning the offenders of coming judgement”.478 In the first century AD it was clearly Jerusalem not Rome that stood in breach of its Covenant relationship with God.
Chilton assures his readers that “[o]nce we understand Revelation’s character as a Covenant Lawsuit…it ceases to be a ‘strange,’ ‘weird’ book; it is no longer incomprehensible, or decipherable only with the complete New York Times Index”.479 Just how “strange” and “weird” (perhaps even ridiculous) Revelation can become when uncoupled from the hermeneutical framework of covenant eschatology can be seen in a recent book entitled Revelations by prominent feminist theologian, Elaine Pagels. On her reading John’s Apocalypse is little more than a polemic against first-century Rome. She dates the book to the 90s AD and ascribes authorship to a second-generation Jewish follower of Jesus Christ “horrified by the slaughter of so many of his people by Rome” twenty years earlier during the siege of Jerusalem. This John had waited in vain “for Jesus to return and for his kingdom to ‘come with power’”. When he travelled through Asia Minor, he could see evidence everywhere that the kingdom that actually had ‘come with power’ was not God’s — it was Rome’s”. Pagels acknowledges that Revelation draws “its imagery from Israel’s prophetic traditions — above all, the writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel”. But she insists that John’s chief motivation was a vengeance-fuelled desire to “create anti-Roman propaganda”.480
Pagels claims that Revelation was intended to wage John’s cultural war against the Empire “on two fronts at once: not only against the Romans but also against members of God’s people who accommodated them and who, John suggests, became accomplices in evil”. In other words, “John clearly saw himself as a Jew who had found the messiah”. Accordingly, “he took his stand as a Jewish prophet charged to keep God’s people holy, unpolluted by Roman culture”. He told his followers that Jesus had warned them to reject the “blasphemers” in their midst who “say they are Jews, and are not”. Such false prophets encouraged God’s people to eat “unclean” food and engage in “unclean” sexual practices — the very issue that had divided Peter and Paul forty years earlier. Strangely enough, according to Pagels, those who Jesus described in Revelation as “a synagogue of Satan” were not John’s fellow-Jews. The usual interpretation of Jesus’ attack on “those who call themselves Jews but are not” is that it expresses anti-Jewish feelings. On the contrary, says Pagels, John applied those words to the “Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul’s teaching” precisely because they were not really Jews. Pagels goes so far as to claim that John never knew “the term ‘Christian,’ he never mentions it, much less applies it to himself”. In Pagels’ hands, John becomes the leader of an early brotherhood of Jews for Jesus. She is confident that her John “might have seen as the greatest identity theft of all time,” the notion “that eventually Gentile believers not only would call themselves Israel but would claim to be the sole rightful heirs to the legacy of God’s chosen people”.481 Pagels’ John is a judaizing extremist who demands that only Israel according to the flesh and the law be accorded the title of the chosen people of God. Whatever else it may be, on Pagels’ reading, Revelation ceases to be a Christian eschatology.
Small wonder, then, that Pagels begins her discussion of Revelation by characterizing it as “the strangest book in the Bible — and the most controversial”. By conflating John’s Apocalypse with dozens of even “weirder” Jewish and Christian “revelations” produced after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, she implicitly calls into question its legitimate place in the Christian canon. She presents Revelation as an expression of neither a “rea
lized” nor a “futurist” but more properly of a Jewish nationalist eschatology. Pagels’ revolutionary thesis is all the more remarkable for her complete and utter failure to engage with Christian proponents of covenant eschatology. Their case for the proposition that the great city where the Lord was slain was not Rome but Old Covenant Jerusalem deserves an answer.
Professor Pagels must know that no “Biblical writer ever identifies Rome as the enslaving power”. By contrast, Preston, Chilton and many other Bible scholars have identified a “second exodus” theme in Revelation anchoring the book firmly in Covenant history. Assuming that Revelation is about an exodus from slavery into freedom, “strong evidence” would be required “to identify Rome as the nation of captivity” holding God’s people in bondage in the first century. As Preston observes, “Rome’s brief, although savage, persecution of the faithful simply does not compare in scale, with the long and sanguine history of Israel as the persecutor of the prophets of God”. Clearly, the author of Revelation believes that Old Covenant Israel “has become Egypt, the enslaving nation from which the true Israel must be redeemed”.482 Certainly, the time references in Revelation leave no doubt that the fulfilment of God’s promises to Israel “must shortly take place” (Rev 1:1). Rome was not destroyed until centuries after the book was written when its fall had no obvious theological significance for either Christians or Jews.
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