The Meaning of the Eschatology in the Book of Revelation

 J. W. ROBERTS  

The Book of Revelation is written against a crisis which its author saw in the future of the church. It was a crisis “coming upon the whole world to try it” (3:10), a crisis which is referred to in the book in many ways both directly and indirectly.^[1]

The interpretation of the apocalyptic vision which dealt with this crisis has been quite varied through the centuries.^[2] But four schools or systems of interpretation of Revelation are generally summed up as: (1) The Continuous Historical, (2) The Futurist, (3) The Preterist or Contemporaneous Historical, and (4) The Idealist, or Philosophy of History. The futurist interpretation is usually associated with the premillennial or dispensational groups. Of the nondispensational interpreters the balance in this century has fluctuated between the preterist and philosophical schools. According to Robert Feuillet^[3] the nearest thing to a consensus that has been reached about the study of the Revelation in this century is that the original author and readers understood the book to be speaking about events connected with and/or in the immediate future of the age in which it was written; i.e., it is to be interpreted from the preterist point of view.^[4]

This paper will assume this preterist interpretation and will address itself to one of the points of difference among the adherents of this view.

It is fairly well agreed by preterist commentators that John’s crisis was to include a period of intense persecution, even martyrdom, though the extent of that persecution does not command agreement.^[5] The suffering and martyrdom anticipated by the author were connected with the Roman policy of emperor worship, and the seer expected that the ensuing struggle would bring victory for the Christian’s cause and end in the destruction of the City of Rome. This means, in the opinion of preterist commentators, that the beast and the scarlet woman are to be primarily identified with the Roman Empire and the City of Rome. This seems assured by the description of the woman as “the great city which rules over the kings of the earth” and the reference to the “seven hills.”

One point, however, in which there is a major difference of interpretation among the preterist commentators is the relation of the destruction of Rome to the eschatological end of the world in the anticipation of the Revelation. A study of this difference is the subject of this paper. 

Many preterists take as a starting point in the interpretation of Revelation the comparison of the eschatology of Revelation with the corpus of literature to which the Apocalypse is related as a genre. They set forth something like the following as a more or less unified eschatological outlook of Jewish Apocalyptists: 

Assuming that the author of Revelation shared this unified view of eschatology, many commentators assert that, along with the destruction of Rome, John expected the end of the world and the consummation of time in the very near future. E. F. Scott, for example, says of the writer of the apocalypse:

W. G. Kuemmel in his Promise and Fulfillment says “In Revelation ho kairos eggus (Rev. 1:3; 22:10) is used unambiguously to denote the nearness of the end of the world” (p. 20).^[7] Martin Rist (Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 12, p. 367) says,

Over against this interpretation of John’s language there are a growing number of preterist commentators who hold that this literal end‑time expectation is not what John was predicting. Characteristic of this group is G. B. Caird. In his Harper's New Testament Commentary (called by the reviewer Paul S. Minear in JBL^[9] “the single best critical commentary on the English text of Revelation”) Caird states that many commentators hold that

John expected the End the final crisis of world history, the return of Christ in victory and judgment; and that everything else in his vision, the last plagues, the emergence of Antichrist, the great martyrdom of the church, and the fall of Babylon, are only premonitory signs heralding the great day of God.

But Caird says,

The other answer, which I believe to be the true one, is that John=s coming crisis was simply the persecution of the church, and that all the imagery of his book has no other purpose than this, to disclose to the prospective martyrs the real nature of their suffering and its place in the eternal purposes of God, or in Bunyan=s language, to take them about to the backside of the wall.[10]

Caird returns to this contention at numerous points in his exposition. Some of these we will notice later.
 
           It seems to this writer that the position of preterists like Charles and Scott, who think that John saw the end of the world as coinciding with the destruction of Rome, is arrived at by two methodological errors:

(1)Making all apocalyptic eschatology a unit and assuming that the writer of Revelation was controlled by this eschatology throughout, and (2) Taking all references that CAN have a bearing upon ultimate eschatology as referring to the end of the world. Thus, the Lord’s coming (either the Greek heko or erchomai ) is always seen as the Parousia. The cosmic upheavals by which Rome’s defeat is described are taken as descriptive of the end of the world. The coinciding of the Great Earthquake, the symbol of Rome’s defeat in the Revelation, with the judgment (e.g., 11:15 ff.) is taken in chronological seriousness as proof that the writer expected the two events to occur at the same time.

It is open to question that there is such a unified view of eschatology among the Jewish‑Christian apocalyptic writers. We have long been warned against defining apocalyptic merely in teems of eschatology.^[11] (It seems to me that John A. T. Robinson in his book Jesus and His Coming^[12] is wrong in taking apocalyptic in such narrow terms.) Nor were the Apocalyptists agreed in anticipating the coming of the Messiah and the eschaton. Some expected the Messiah to come at the end of the world, to inaugurate the kingdom of God. With them the Messianic woes precede that event. Others expected an interregnum established by the coming of the Messiah.^[13]  I am not convinced that, even if there had been such a detailed eschatological scheme as is inferred, John was so bound to this scheme that it controls the use of the symbols which he borrowed. He seems much more dependent overall upon the prophetic‑quasiapocalyptie passages of the Hebrew O.T. than on Jewish Apocalyptic. I would argue simply that there is no a priori necessity for John’s paralleling the destruction of Rome and the end of the age. If the two events are actually pictured in Revelation as coinciding, well. But the coincidence of the two must not be read into John's meaning from some eschatological program borrowed from his “sources.”

But what is the evidence in the Revelation itself that John expected the end of the world immediately? The inference is made by many commentators, first, through the references to the Coming of Jesus and, second with regard to the descriptions of the fall of Rome. Let us look at each of these.

Christ's Coming to the Churches. There are several warnings of danger in the book: in the prologue (1:7), in the epilogue (22:12, 20), in the letters to the seven churches (2:5, 16; 3:3), and in connection with the invasion of the kings at the sixth bowl. These warnings are often given a literal eschatological interpretation. The article in TWNT on Erchomai (Johannes Schneider), for example says,

But there is certainly a difficulty in seeing the conditional coming to the churches (“except you repent, I will come”) as threats of the Second Advent, instead of as Simcox says, “particular judgments” upon the individual churches.^[15]

The following from Caird,

The failure to recognize that John’s real concern is for the crisis of persecution and not an imminent Advent of Christ led Charles, among others, into drastic theories of displacement and editorial redaction. For example, he takes the clause “Behold I come as a thief” in 3:3 as “a general description of the nature of Christ’s Advent. It is, he says, “to be unexpected.” The same statement in 16:15 makes a reference to the Coming at the wrong place (there could be no question of Christ’s coming until after Rome is destroyed), so Charles transfers it back to 3:3 or 3:16. “There,” he says, “it is a definite menace, in which it is implied that the Church of Sardis will be caught off their guard by the suddenness of Christ’s advent.”^[17] But it is really the literalizing of these comings to make them refer to the Second Advent that is getting in Charles’ way. Swete seems to be on safer ground when he says of these passages, “Erchomai refers to a special coming or visitation, affecting a Church, or an individual, as in v. 16; 3:11, etc.”^[18] Hear the words of Caird on 16:15:

Rome’s Destruction. A second area of investigation lies in the visions of the defeat and destruction of Rome as the persecutor of God’s people. Four contexts in the Revelation are generally recognized as describing the overthrow of Rome. Not all preterists treat these alike, depending largely on how much the commentator is willing to allow some principle of recapitulation to the writer or, on the contrary, how strictly the material is made to run in a chronological line.

Still, nearly all see these sections as related. Even a strict chronologist like Charles, who will not recognize any theory of recapitulation, sees the scene of cosmic disturbance at the opening of the sixth seal (6:12‑17) as a premonitory warning of the ultimate end, and he takes the climactic visions at the end of the trumpet series (11:15‑19) and at the end of the bowl series (16:10‑21) as proleptic visions of the overthrow of the city, whose actual destruction he sees in the vision of the “judgment of the great Harlot‑City” in chapter 18. The difference between recapitulation and prolepsis in this material is not great. The consensus is that there are in the book four pictures of Rome’s destruction.

But there is also a kind of common assumption in the treatment of these passages by the commentators whose works we have been examining. This assumption is that the cosmic upheavals and apocalyptic language mean that John is following the apocalyptic pattern: Jesus is soon to return to avenge Rome and bring the present age of the world to an end.

For example, in the scene of the sixth seal (6:12‑17) there is a great earthquake, the eclipse of the sun and moon, the falling of the stars, the splitting of the sky, the dislodgement of mountains and islands, and men of all classes hiding in caves and asking the mountains to fall on them and hide them from the wrath of God. Martin Rist (IB) says of these:

There are numerous commentators who take the four passages of Rome’s destruction as the picture of the “eschatological events” (Rist on 11:15‑19) Nigel Turner (Peake’s) says of 6:12‑17 “the phenomena preceding the End are described” and calls the bowls in 16:1‑20 “the judgment which will precede the return of Christ.”^[21]

But in none of these passages is there mention of the end of the world, the end of the age, or the Parousia. Furthermore, a study of the language seems to show that John did not have this in mind at all. At least, since Sigmund Mowinckel's He That Cometh (Oxford, 1956), the assumption that the cosmic apocalyptic of language in the pre‑exilic prophets is prompted by a future eschatological hope has been under question. The cosmic language, the use of a quasieschatological terminology (“the end has come upon my people Israel” of Samaria’s fall, Amos 8:2), is the standard prophetic way of pronouncing the impending doom of political and national disaster upon Israel and Judahon their enemies. 

A careful analysis of John’s language in the passages under consideration seems to me to confirm that John has borrowed this language and this meaning. Take 6:12‑17: The references to the earthquake and the hiding in caves from the wrath of God are drawn from Isaiah’s prediction of Jahweh’s future humbling of Israel for her sins (Isa. 2:12‑22). The call for the mountains to fall on them and cover their shame is from the picture of the fall of Samaria (Hosea 10:1‑8). The falling of the stars and the rolling up of the sky come from the “little apocalypse” section of Isaiah (24:2‑4, 21), a problematic passage, but usually taken as forecasting the punishing of the nations in the day of Jahweh’s vindication of Israel. The turning of the sun to darkness and the moon to blood “portends (Joel’s) judgment of the nations which have opposed Jerusalem and resisted the restoration of the Jewish national fortunes” (Caird). Finally, the question “Who can stand?” is taken from a prophecy of the Lord’s coming in judgment to purge the worship and priesthood of Judah (Mal. 3:2). The evidence suggests that the description is a carefully chosen catena of predictions of national disaster from the prophets. I have not been able to find anywhere that a Jewish apocalyptic writer had already taken these over and combined them in a description of the end of the world,^[22] so that it might be suspected that John is borrowing an end‑time program to describe Rome's fall. Caird seems correct when he says, “We have every justification, then, for supposing that in John's imagery the earthquake stands for the overthrow of a worldly political order organized in hostility to God.”^[23]

Still there remains a problem, for it is true that particularly in the climax to the trumpet series (11:15‑19) and in the vision of judgment on the great city (ch. 18), the fall of the city (the earthquake) is followed by the announcement of the judgment (11:15ff.) and, in the case of chapter 18, by the invitation to the marriage feast, which (though other events are to transpire before it occurs) is followed by the judgment scene. So the Revelation does seem to present the fall of Rome and the world’s end as simultaneous.

But again, this telescoping of the judgment of God on Rome and the end is in line with the prophetic pronouncement of doom on the nations and the prediction of the end. So it was with Jeremiah and Jerusalem (Jer. 5:31), Isaiah and Babylon (Isa. 13:1‑22), Jeremiah and Babylon (Jer. 51:13), and Daniel and Syria (Dan. 12:7; 11:40).^[24]  In Zephaniah (1:2‑18) an unidentifiable historical visitation is to consume the entire earth and its inhabitants as "The Day of the Lord". It may be pointed out in particular that Amos refers to the day of Samaria's fall as the Day of the Lord (Amos 5:18, 27); the city’s fall is described in the cosmic language of end‑time (8:2ff.). Yet it is obvious that the prophet did not envision that literally. The time is that also of the day of the salvation of David’s people (9:11).

This raises the whole question of the nature of apocalyptic‑eschatological language and imagery—a question which is much discussed and with varying solutions. This Old Testament material just discussed led Sigmund Mowinckel to deny that there is any eschatology in the literal sense in the Old Testament, and thus the foundation for any N.T. formulation of such is removed. Others for various reasons have argued against a radical or literal view, e.g., in the teaching of Jesus. C. H. Dodd sees Jesus as embracing a realized eschatology in which the kingdom of God is seen as already present, and he sees it as a symbol of an accommodation of language to express what is in reality beyond time. John A. T. Robinson sees the language of eschatology as expressing in terms of the temporally ultimate what is actually only a logical ultimate. He excludes from the teachings of Jesus any reference to a future coming. Both Dodd and Robinson think that the disciples of Jesus and the early church misunderstood his teaching and adopted from Jewish apocalyptic the literal expectation of a future Parousia. But over against this the majority of scholars would attack such a view of eschatology and hold with Schweitzer to a thoroughgoing view. They thus attribute to both Jesus and the early church (as Charles and his followers do to John in Revelation) a literal expectation of the end of the world in their own lifetime.^[25]

What seems to this writer a profoundly more important contribution to this discussion is made by G. B. Caird in an article on the meaning of Biblical eschatology.^[26] Caird argues convincingly for the poetic nature of prophetic eschatology. The Hebrew prophet thought in parallel or paratactic ideas and sentences. This characteristic way of thinking is perhaps a key to the prophets’ seeing in an impending historical crisis a type of the “absolute crisis of divine judgment, beyond which nothing could conceivably happen. But because the prophet’s mind inhabited superlatives by choice, the historic crisis was always described in absolute terms; and because Hebrew knows nothing of abstractions, the vision of eternity was always clothed in intensely concrete imagery. The two crises, therefore, always tended to coalesce, and the one inevitably called up the other by association.” This lies behind both Jesus’ view of the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the world (Mark 13) and John's telescoping of the fall of Rome and the end of the world.

In addition to the view taken here of the nature of John’s eschatology, one other point remains. There are indications within the text of Revelation itself that John did not expect the end of the world to coincide with the end of Rome. Charles recognizes (though others do not) that there is difficulty with the interpretation of the sixth seal as the end of the world, parallel as it is (as a proleptic vision) with Rome’s destruction. He notes that after such things as the falling of the stars and the removal of heaven as a scroll men could not be “described as hiding themselves in caves and rocks of the earth,” etc., if this were “the end.” Consequently, he takes it as only a premonitory vision. But what is true here is true also of the later and parallel descriptions of Rome’s fall. In 11:13 the great earthquake destroys only one‑tenth of the city and 7,000 of its population, and the Seer anticipates a general turning to Christianity from among the remaining population (i.e., “the rest become fearful and give glory to God”). At the conclusion of the fall of the city in 16:17‑21 there are survivors who blaspheme God on account of the greatness of the plague upon the city (16:21). In the unmistakable final scene of the devastation of Rome (ch. 18) there is no indication of the total destruction of the world. Indeed, when the city has perished, the survivors are indicated here no less than as Charles observed them at the opening of the sixth seal: “And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo any more. They stand afar off weeping and mourning aloud” (18:19).

We return therefore to the question raised by the first sentence of the Revelation. What did John think was “bound to happen soon”? Certainly not the end which was at least a millennium away. He expected an event so important that it could properly be described in eschatological terms, an event in which the End was so embodied that through their involvement in it men would be committed to taking sides in the battle between good and evil and to being judged before the throne of God. That event was the persecution, in which he saw God’s victory over Babylon, as surely as in the Cross he had seen God's victory over Satan. If this is indeed the nature of John’s eschatology, it raises the further question whether the same is not true of all eschatology. Could it be that no ancient writer (except perhaps the imitative pedants responsible for some of the pseudepigraphical literature) ever used eschatological imagery except to express his confidence that God was working out his purpose in the events of contemporary history? Dodd has coined the phrase “realized eschatology” to explain certain aspects of the teaching of Jesus, and has been criticized for producing a paradox amounting even to a contradiction in terms. Is it possible that “realized eschatology” is instead a tautology, because only literalists ever used eschatological language for any other purpose than to give a theological interpretation to the critical moment that is called Today (Heb. 3:13)?

 

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