Revelation: The Most Misunderstood Book in the Bible

Just over 50 years ago, Vernard Eller, the eminent Anabaptist scholar, published a book titled The Most Revealing Book in the Bible. It was, of course, about the Book of Revelation. While that is doubtlessly true, I am calling Revelation the most misunderstood book in the Bible.*¹  

The Book of Revelation was the discussion topic of Great Books KC at its monthly meeting on December 6. That discussion group started in 2004, and I introduced it in a blog post for the first time in October 2014 (see here).

Although I attended regularly for many years, last month I attended Great Books KC again for the first time since last December. They have a “rule” that each year some book of the Bible will be discussed, and last year that book was the Old Testament book of Job.

Especially since this year’s selected book of the Bible was Revelation, I made the effort to drive down to the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library to attend and take an active part in the discussion of that last book of the Bible, which is so often misunderstood and misused.

While some of the 13 attendees (most of whom participated via Zoom) had a fairly good understanding of Revelation, several were clearly perplexed by it and some seemed to have a serious misunderstanding, which is seemingly true of the general public.

Misunderstanding of Revelation was augmented by Hal Lindsey, who died last month, two days after his 95^th birthday. Most of you recognize his name and remember him as the author of The Late Great Planet Earth (1970).

Lindsey’s book sold more than 10 million copies before the end of the 1970s, becoming the best-selling nonfiction book of the decade. By this and his later books, Lindsey “brought the once-obscure theology of dispensationalist premillennialism into the mainstream.”

Moreover, “Lindsey’s books demonstrated an incredible appetite for apocalyptic speculation … and paved the way for many other prophecy writers, including Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, and Joel Rosenberg …. introducing wide audiences to the concepts of the Rapture, the Antichrist, and the mark of the beast.”*² 

In March 2015, nearly ten years ago, I made a blog post titled “Do You Believe in the Rapture.” Although I did not mention Revelation, the widespread belief in what dispensationalist Christians call the Rapture is based on a literal interpretation of Revelation and, to a lesser degree, on a few other parts of the Bible.*³  

Belief in the Rapture is one of the major misinterpretations of Revelation that has been held by many Christians since the early part of the 20^th century, and especially since Lindsey’s 1970 book.

In my remarks at the Great Books KC December meeting, I emphasized the following points, which I am now sharing briefly.

** Revelation was written primarily for the Jesus-followers who were living “then and there” rather than for people “here and now.”

** Revelation was written in apocalyptic language that should be taken seriously, but not literally. As N.T. Wright writes, Revelation “is full of strange, lurid and sometimes bizarre and violent imagery.” That eminent New Testament scholar goes on to say,

This book in fact offers one of the clearest and sharpest visions of God’s ultimate purpose for the whole creation, and of the way in which the powerful forces of evil, at work in a thousand ways but not least in idolatrous and tyrannous political systems, can be and are being overthrown through the victory of Jesus the Messiah and the consequent costly victory of his followers.

   (These quotes are from the Introduction of Wright’s 2011 book Revelation for Everyone.)

** Despite all the violence depicted in Revelation, the focus is clearly on the non-violent Lamb, the historical Jesus who was crucified and resurrected.

Revelation, properly understood, has a direct link to Christmas. By far, the best-known part of Messiah, Händel’s superlative oratorio, is Hallelujah Chorus, which is often performed in celebration of Christmas.

The words of Hallelujah Chorus come from Revelation 19:6, 11:15, and 19:16. During this busy week before Christmas, perhaps you can take four minutes to listen to those words being impressively sung (here) by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

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*¹ The title of a blog post I made in October 2017 is “Revelation: The Most Misused Book in the Bible.” I encourage you to click on this link and read it (again). There are 30 comments (including my responses) posted below that article, and according to Blogger.com, there have been about 550 pageviews of that post.

*² These quotes are from a lengthy and informative 11/27/24 article in Christianity Today magazine (see here).

*³ According to the stats provided by Blogger.com, that post has, inexplicably, had nearly 3,700 pageviews. 

Note: Some of you may be interested in the 11/12/24 post by Religious Dispatches, “The Trump Administration’s Approach to Immigration is Inspired by the Bible — The Book of Revelation.” Here is a link to that provocative article about the grave dangers embedded in the widespread misunderstanding of Revelation. 

“The Garden of Impending Bloom”: Hope in the Face of Apocalyptic Doom

In my April 9 blog post, I wrote about embracing comfort and hope from George F. Händel’s Messiah, first performed publicly 280 years ago on April 13, 1742. This post is about the hope of theologian Catherine Keller as seen in her book Facing Apocalypse—and also about a much greater hope. 

Keller’s Book

Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew University, and Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances (Orbis Books, 2021) is the first of her several books I have read—and it was a delightful, and somewhat difficult, read. 

Catherine Keller (b. 1953)

While the content of Keller’s book is deeply theological/philosophical, the written style is more that of a contemporary novel than that of most academic works. 

Although the book is primarily a general exposition of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, Keller repeatedly alludes to the political and economic situation of the world in the last few years.

She concludes her book with “PostScroll” (pp. 195~205)—and ends that conclusion with the words she had recently seen on a hand-painted sign: “The Garden of Impending Bloom.”

Keller’s Hope

Keller’s earlier work, Apocalypse Now and Then (1996), was written with the fear of nuclear holocaust in the background. But she said, by the time that book was finished, “the nuclear threat had dissipated” (p. ix).

(But now in 2022 with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, some have again begun to fear that same threat again—and the terrible prospect of MAD, mutual assured destruction.)

Keller correctly points out that the 2021 “nightmares” were, “for instance, a climate-forced collapse of civilization within not many years, escalating mass migration and starvation, white supremacism, degrees of fascism, elite escapes, population decimation, and possibly worse” (p. xiv).

She realizes that many who understand the plight of the present have sunk “into a savvy nihilism.” Such people “see hope as delusional, and surrender to the spiral of our species’ self-destruction” (p. 2).

It is against that background that she attractively articulates the auspicious content of the biblical Book of Revelation. And by her erudite exposition we glimpse her underlying hope. This is especially seen on pages 132~6 where she referred to Händel’s Messiah (as mentioned in my previous blog post).

A Greater Hope

While Keller does briefly mention “the prophetic dream of a collective resurrection” (p. 135), she sees seven possible scenarios ahead, ranging from “exhumanity” (“the extinction of our species”) to “the age of enlivenment,” the optimum human response to the present ecological crisis.

In harmony with her worldly hope, Keller closes her book with the dream of a garden of impending bloom. It is an appealing dream, but since it depends on humans doing the right things, I don’t share her optimism. Impending doom seems more realistic.

So, I have been drawn back to the writings of German scientist/theologian Karl Heim (1874~1958). The last section of his book The World: Its Creation and Consummation is “The Future of the World in the Light of the Gospel of the Resurrection,” and indeed, he presents a much greater hope than Keller.

Keller mentioned the “savvy nihilism” of the present, but savvy or not, Heim wrote about nihilism in the 1950s. He contended that we humans are faced with two possibilities: “The first is the radical hopelessness of nihilism, . . . The second possibility is the universal faith of Easter” (p. 149).

The stupendous meaning of Easter is not the resuscitation of the physical body of a crucified Jewish man. Rather, it is a divine act with cosmic dimensions. It is the beginning of what will eventually become “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1).

I certainly don’t know how, or when, that will take place, but it is the living hope to which I cling.

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** The second edition of Heim’s book Weltschöpfung und Weltende (1953) was published in 1958 and the English translation of the latter was published in 1962 with an additional subtitle The End of the Present Age and the Future of the World in the Light of the Resurrection. It was probably the next year (59 years ago!) when I first read, and was invigorated by, that book as a graduate student. (I wrote a bit about Heim in my April 15, 2021, blog post).

Revelation: The Most Misused Book in the Bible

While I usually try not to make strong, dogmatic statements that cannot be empirically supported, I am quite certain that the book of Revelation is the most misunderstood and misused book in the Bible.

A Traditional View of Revelation 

Growing up in a conservative Southern Baptist church, it was not uncommon to hear sermons about the impending end of the world based on passages from Revelation, the last book of the Bible.

Especially when visiting evangelists preached “revivals” at my home church, Revelation was often used to emphasize that the end times were upon us for sure and we had better get ready for the rapidly approaching doomsday. I still remember hearing frightening sermons along those lines in 1950 or before.

Twenty years later, the final Battle of Armageddon still had not come, but Hal Lindsey wrote powerfully about the impending end times in The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), said to be the bestselling non-fiction book of the 1970s.

Especially over the past 200 years, the Bible has been used frequently to predict the imminent end of the world. The books of Ezekiel and Daniel in the Old Testament have also been used for such “prophecy,” but the main basis has been the book of Revelation.

But I have long been convinced that the traditional “dispensational” view of Revelation is wrongheaded and that the widespread way Revelation has been used among conservative Christians is erroneous. 

A New View of Revelation 

In the early 1960s, my understanding of Revelation greatly changed—and greatly improved, I believe—by reading the book Worthy is the Lamb: An Interpretation of Revelation (1951) by Ray Summers, who was one of my seminary professors.

One of the main points that I realized from reading Dr. Summers’ book is that Revelation was written for Christians at the end of the first century, not for the purpose of prophesying what was going to happen in the last half of the 20th century.

During each of my two pastorates while a seminary student, I taught Revelation over the course of many Sunday evenings, using Worthy is the Lamb as the main commentary for interpreting that difficult book of the Bible. 

Repeatedly, I reminded those in attendance that every part of Revelation was written to help/encourage the persecuted Christians at the end of the first century. Thus it is important, first of all, to see what meaning each part of the book had for them. 

To say the least, it would not have been helpful for the early Christians to learn that Revelation was predicting how Russia was going to trigger the Battle of Armageddon in the 1960s or ’70s.

A Recommended View of Revelation 

This article on Revelation was prompted by Brian Zahnd, author of the previously introduced book Sinners in the Hand of a Loving God. Three of the chapters (7~9) of that engaging book are about Revelation, and last month BZ preached a sermon at Word of Life Church where he is pastor on “What About the Book of Revelation?” (That sermon, which you can hear here, is certainly worth listening to).

BZ also agrees with my opening dogmatic statement. He writes, “The book of Revelation is easily the most misunderstood and misused book in the Bible” (p. 149).

Revelation is, truly, an important part of the Bible. It must, however, be read and interpreted wisely. If properly read and interpreted, it gives us Christians hope for the future and strength to oppose political idolatry and evil in the present.

Rather than neglect Revelation because of its misuse, we need to pay attention to its abiding message, even for us today.