The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

by Richard B. Hays

Hal Lindsey’s popular book The Late Great Planet Earth, originally published in 1970, is an excellent example of this approach.7 By identifying the Soviet Union with the Beast from the abyss, Lindsey promoted hard-line Cold War politics in the name of evangelical Christianity. The book sold more than seven million copies,8 but its reading of Revelation was summarily disconfirmed by the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1980s. There was nothing surprising about this outcome, of course; ever since the second century, interpreters who have adopted similar reading strategies have experienced similar disappointments. Whether the Beast was identified with the pope or Cromwell or Napoleon or Hitler or Gorbachev, the result has been the same: history goes on, and the ardent predictions of the interpreters are consigned to the junkyard of exegetical curiosities. Yet history’s inexorable disconfirmation of all such attempts never seems to discourage new generations of readers from thinking that now at last the pattern of events concealed in Revelation’s mysterious symbolism is coming to light in the present time.