Essays on Revelation: Appropriating Yesterday's Apocalypse in Today's World

by Gerald L. Stevens

Publisher:

Pickwick Publications

, 2011

Overview

The book of Revelation perennially provokes outlandish futurist predictions proven patently false over time. Such prophecy failures leave the inquiring mind with a strong sense that the book of Revelation is nothing but a hoax, safely ignored and without contemporary relevance. The inevitable practical result, not only for church members, but for their ministers as well, is a canonical book stripped bare of canonical authority. In this volume, six contributors collectively attempt to provide a path toward recanonizing Revelation, reclaiming its authority and relevance through christological foundations. The result is a book not only useful in the collegiate and seminary classroom, but also for serious small-group Bible studies wanting to glean from Revelation something deeper than a fear of being "left behind."

Contents

Top Highlights

“First-century Mediterranean people were strong group-oriented persons.¹⁵ To them, the integrity of the group—loyalty—was more important than self-reliance.¹⁶ Purity is a socially shared map of space and time involving values held in common by members of a group and especially relevant in a strong group.¹⁷ An unclean person, then, is a person out of place, collectively deemed a deviant. Deviant labels therefore are a matter of perspective.¹⁸ Behavior deemed ‘out of place,’ or ‘out of order’ by a group is labeled unacceptable in that group. In Christian groups such behavior is labeled ‘sin.’” (source)

“To equate the status attributed to the ‘divine’ Roman emperors with the Christian perception of God is to fail to appreciate the role of the gods in ancient Mediterranean pagan culture. Worship of the pagan gods functioned as an integral component of a complex society that differed in many ways from the culture inhabited by twenty-first century western Christians. A useful basis for comprehending ancient Mediterranean paganism in general and the imperial cult in particular is to recognize the Greco-Roman world as an honor/shame culture and a limited-goods society.” (source)

“Those who are labeled unclean are thereby identified publicly as having the potential to contaminate group members with unacceptable values. Clear negative labeling helps preserve group cohesion. Transferred into the Christian arena, labeling deviant behavior as sinful can cause Christians to seek purity and to avoid certain behaviors. Therefore, in terms of behavior, purity and labeling are correlated.” (source)

Praise for Essays on Revelation

"This work is a valuable guide to understanding the meaning of Revelation for the contemporary believer. Informed by the historical, social, and literary contexts of the first-century, these essays succeed in bridging the gap between the world of John of Patmos and the situation of modern readers of Revelation. Teachers, pastors, and individual readers will appreciate the many thought-provoking insights provided by these scholars who write with one foot in the academy and the other in the church."
--Mitchell G. Reddish
Professor and Chair of Religious Studies
Stetson University

"The Book of Revelation is one of the most complex and puzzling books in the Bible. It demands clear, knowledgeable insight in order to make sense of it. These twelve Essays on Revelation provide just that clarity for the serious reader. These are must-read articles that will turn study of the book into an exceptional feast for every student."
--Grant R. Osborne
Professor of New Testament
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Product Details

• Title : Essays on Revelation: Appropriating Yesterday's Apocalypse in Today's World
• Author: Stevens, Gerald L.
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Publication Date: 2011
• ISBN: 9781498273206

About Gerald L. Stevens

Professor of New Testament and Greek, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.