Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

INTRODUCTION
From beginning to end, St. John is intensely interested
in the ethical conduct of his readers:
Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of
the prophecy, and keep the things that are written in it. (1:3)
Blessed is he who stays awake and keeps his garments.
(16:15)
Blessed is he who keeps the words of the prophecy of this
book. (22:7)
Blessed are those who do His commandments. (22:14)
The Symbolism of Revelation
Prophecy has often been called “history written in
advance.” 64 As we have already seen, however,
prophecy is primarily a message from God’s emissaries
within the framework of the Covenant, addressed in
terms of the stipulations and sanctions set forth in
Biblical law. It is not simply “prediction.” Certainly, the
prophets did predict future events in history, but not in
the form of historical writing. Instead, the prophets
used symbols and figures borrowed from history, from
the surrounding culture, and from creation. Most errors
in interpreting the prophets stem from the neglect of
this principle. I once heard a pastor deliver a very
earnest and thrilling lecture on space stations and
interplanetary voyages, using Revelation 21:10 as his
text. Only in the modern age of space travel, he
observed, could the prophecy of the New Jerusalem be
fulfilled. It was, on the whole, a very enjoyable speech,
and a marvelous demonstration of the pastor’s wealth of
learning in the field of science fiction; but the
enchanted audience left the meeting at least as
ignorant of Scripture as they had been when it began.
The Bible is literature: It is divinely-inspired and
inerrant literature, but it is literature all the same. This
means that we must read it as literature. Some parts are
meant to be literally understood, and they are written
accordingly – as history, or theological propositions, or
whatever. But one would not expect to read the Psalms
or the Song of Solomon by the same literary standards
used for the Book of Romans. It would be like reading
Hamlet’s soliloquy “literally”: “ The slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune . . . to take arms against a sea of
troubles . . .” We cannot understand what the Bible
really (literally) means unless we appreciate its use of
literary styles. Would we understand the Twenty-third
Psalm properly if we were to take it “literally”? Would
it not, instead, look somewhat silly? In fact, if taken
literally, it would not be true: for I dare say that the Lord
doesn’t make every Christian to lie down in literal,
green pastures. But we don’t usually make such crude
mistakes in reading Biblical poetry. We know it is
written in a style that often makes use of symbolic
imagery. But we must realize that the same is true of the
prophets: They, also, spoke in figures and symbols,
drawing on a rich heritage of Biblical images that began
in the Garden of Eden. 65
Indeed, Paradise is where prophecy began. It is worth
noting that the very first promise of the coming
Redeemer was stated in highly symbolic terms. God
said to the Serpent:
I will put enmity
Between you and the woman
And between your seed and her Seed;
He shall crush your head,
And you shall strike His heel. (Gen. 3:15)
Obviously, this is not simply “history written in
advance.” It is a symbolic statement, very much of a
piece with the evocative, poetic language used
throughout the Bible, and especially in Revelation. In
fact, St. John plainly tells us in his opening sentence
that the Revelation is written in signs, in symbols. He
did not intend it to be read like a newspaper or a stock
market analysis. He expected his audience to respond
to his prophecy in terms of the Bible’s own system of
symbolism.
I repeat: the Bible’s own system of symbolism. The
meaning of a symbol is not whatever we choose to
make it; nor did St. John create the images of the Book
of Revelation out of his own imagination. He presents
Christ to his readers as a Lion and a Lamb, not because
he thinks those are pretty pictures, but because of the
connotations of lions and lambs already established in
the Bible. The Book of Revelation thus tells us from
the outset that its standard of interpretation is the Bible
itself. The book is crammed with allusions to the Old
Testament. Merrill Tenney says: “It is filled with references
to events and characters of the Old Testament,
and a great deal of its phraseology is taken directly from
the Old Testament books. Oddly enough, there is not
one direct citation in Revelation from the Old Testament
with a statement that it is quoted from a given
passage; but a count of the significant allusions which
are traceable both by verbal resemblance and by
contextual connection to the Hebrew canon number
three hundred and forty-eight. Of these approximately
ninety-five are repeated, so that the actual number of
different Old Testament passages that are mentioned
are nearly two hundred and fifty, or an average of more
than ten for each chapter in Revelation.” 66 Tenney’s
count of 348 clear Old Testament references breaks
down as follows: 57 from the Pentateuch, 235 from the
Prophets, and 56 more from the historical and poetical
books. 67
Tenney admits that his figures are conservative; one
might even say hidebound. Nevertheless, even using
his figures, it is obvious that the Book of Revelation
depends on the Old Testament much more than does
any other New Testament book. This fact alone should
warn us that we cannot begin to fathom its meaning
apart from a solid grasp of the Bible as a whole. The
64. One of the greatest popularizers of this view was the rationalistic Christian
apologist Joseph Butler, who claimed that “prophecy is nothing but the
history of events before they come to pass.” The Analogy of Religion, Natural
and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (Oxford: At the
University Press, [1736] 1835), p. 310.
65. See Chilton, Paradise Restored, pp. 15-63.
66. Merrill C. Tenney, Interpreting Revelation (Grand Rapids: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1957), p. 101.
67. Ibid, p. 104.
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