Judith Kovacs and Christopher Rowland are scholars of the history of Revelation’s interpretation and impact. They suggest that there are two ends of a wide interpretive spectrum for the book of Revelation: the “decoding” pole and the “actualizing” pole. Decoding interpreters focus on details, looking for correlations between the text and specific events and people (later events and people in church history and/or in their own time), while actualizing interpreters seek to “convey the spirit of the text” and to “perform” it in new circumstances. Every
