Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation

by Michael J. Gorman

mythical and poetic language to express great truths about God, evil, history, and so on. It is sometimes called the idealist, spiritual, non-historical, timeless, or transtemporal approach. This approach has always been somewhat reactionary as well, responding to perceived interpretive abuses in a predictive approach but also to deficiencies in a purely historical reading. Church fathers such as Origen, the great third-century allegorical interpreter, and, to a lesser extent, Augustine (354–430), building on the work of an interpreter named Tyconius, reacted against futuristic interpretations. More recently, Paul Minear called Revelation an “animated and impassioned dance of ideas,” and J. P. M. Sweet said it was “more like music than rational discourse.”12 Eugene Peterson labels it a “theological poem” that “does not . . . call for decipherment” but “evokes wonder,” and Richard Hays writes of its “theopoetic” language.13 Although these interpreters do not rule out historical study, they reject decoding approaches, whether preterist or futurist, as violations of the genre and language of Revelation. Thus this approach is not merely reactionary; it argues that the importance and truth of Revelation are not limited to its original connection with Rome and the particular historical context in which it was written, or to its alleged correlation with specific future realities. 4. The fourth approach can be called political, or theopolitical. This approach, for our purposes, do...