Question from Reader-- The Book of Revelation

A New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:1-6) 
Fontaine, Nicholas.  L’histoire du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament.  Paris, 1670.

Dear Father Tony: 

I have heard many “liberal” teachers and Bible commentators say that the Book of Revelation is not about the future, but about things that happened during the author’s lifetime during the Roman Empire.  But one of my favorite passages is the vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21:1-6.  That scene is clearly a description of a future event.  So what gives?  Books like “The Late Great Planet Earth” and the “Left Behind” series seem to make the Revelation into a preview of coming events.  Is it or isn’t it about the future?   -- Just Curious  (via e-mail)

JC-- 

A very good question indeed.

As the Revelation says itself, it is about things that will "come to pass soon"  (Rev 1:1).   That doesn't mean soon to us, but soon to the writer. 

Book of Revelation is a good example of Apocalyptic literature, a style of writing in Judaism (and, later, Christianity) common in the Macchabean and Second Temple Jewish periods.  The Greek word apokalypsis means "an uncovering" or a "revealing."  What is uncovered is God's purposes and the final direction for things, not "coming events."

Apocalytpic literature is persecution literature.  It seeks to understand present (to the author) persecution of the righteous and encourage resistance to the persecutors.  It takes the rich, symbolic imagery of late prophetic literature (like Ezekiel) and develops it into a code to communicate with its readers. The authors of Apocalyptic write to encourage their readers to not lose faith, and to keep resisting the oppressors who persecute the faithful, whether the persecutors were Romans under the Emperor Domitian--as in Revelation--or the Greeks under Antiochus Epiphanes—as in Daniel.  They place it all in rich images and code so that the readers can get the message without the censors and secret police of the oppressing power catching on and then torturing and executing the author and readers.  It is thus very much about "current events" as seen by the author.  It looks to the future and uses the rich symbolic language to argue that no matter how bad things get, in the end God and the righteous will triumph and all the suffering will be vindicated.  It is only about the future in the sense of its talking about the ultimate ends of God and the final triumph of Good.  It is NOT a key-word coded guidebook to previews of coming events in the distant future. 

The 666 symbol, for instance, is almost certainly code for Nero and a belief that Domitian was Nero come alive again ("Nero Caesar" in Aramaic at that time has the numerical value 666-- Aramaic and Hebrew, like Latin, gave numerical values to letters of the alphabet.)  Because the imagery of this book is so rich and loaded with emotion, over the centuries people have applied its various images to people and events in their age, always with the idea that God’s ultimate triumph would happen soon.   Many people today do the same thing, and thus believe these books predict in order specific events of our day.  I suspect that they will be shown to be as wrong in their specific prediction of coming events based on this analysis as the people over the ages who have made the same arguments in centuries past. 

But that doesn’t mean these books aren’t valuable.  Whatever the specifics of the final consummation of history that still waits us, we must remember that these books are about hope and perseverance, and the ultimate triumph of God.

Hope this helps.

T+