Post-Mill Interpretation of the Revelation

It is amazing to consider that so many have misinterpreted the book of Revelation (of John the Disciple of Christ). Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, Pat Robertson of Virginia Beach, Muhammad of Mecca and innumerable lunatics tattooed with the mark of the beast (666) as well as innumerable congregations full of saved evangelicals evidently got it wrong. The analysis and interpretation of literature-historical; prophetic literature, was probably not their strong suit. The first resurrection was that of being spiritually born again in the faith; most of the prophecies in the Revelation were fulfilled during the violent, troubling times experienced by first century Christians going through tribulation and persecution of the Roman Emperor Nero.

The Bible is a beautiful book in the sense of a beautiful mathematics or physics theory that has a wonderful structure. With the Revelation of John correctly interpreted the New Testament gospel of the Lord becomes more beautiful to in its marvelous fulfillment of prophecy and reshaping foundation for the course of mankind. With the spirit of the Acts of the Apostles John's Revelation provides and overview and binding foundation for understanding the continuing work of the Lord and Holy Spirit in human history beyond the sufferings, persecutions, tribulation and destruction of the temple in the first century. An age of the gentiles that would be fulfilled with the evangelization of the peoples of the world. The good news of the Lord could be carried to the people of the future-even unto the farthest reaches of humanity down the road and even into space I would think. Humanity and Christians in particular are not to cower under toadstools waiting for the sky to fall and rapture to remove them from impending Armageddon and the draconian power of the beast (that in a sense inevitably coheres residually within any human collective or government I suppose original sin being what it is).

Life in the temporal realm isn't eternal. There are fundamentally three ways of interpreting the Disciple John's book of the Revelation regarding when the Lord Jesus Christ will return to conclude human affairs and to judge the living quick and the dead that are popular today. This field of Christian theology is incidentally named eschatology.

Pre-mill,post-mill or amill; regardless of your stand I believe a Christian is saved if the Lord is their personal Savior. One should always be ready for the return of the Lord in the Second Coming.

Catholics are I believe generally amillenialists. They regard people that die as going to heaven directly (or hell or purgatory perhaps). Not being Roman Catholic I stipulate that I am not very well informed on the issue. Evangelicals Protestants tend to be premillennialists believing that the Revelation is a prophecy of events to come preponderantly. Post-millennialism is another point of view with the view that the Revelation largely described near term events that occurred in the first century A.D.

It does seem reasonable that John foresaw the future of the Jewish and Roman world and how it would effect Christians within the decade he was living in rather than just events about 2000 years distant. Nero began his persecutions of Christians in 64 a.d. and Christians (saints) went through a tribulation. Gentry goes over the evidence for a first century interpretative paradigm for the Revelation in detail.

If post-millennialism is correct it doesn't mean Christianity is obsolete-instead it confirms it's truth and prophetic accuracy. We are living in the age of the Gentiles. Instead of expect a sudden anti-Christ and Armageddon Christianity should grow and increase human peace, prosperity and knowledge of the Lord (perhaps with a priesthood of believers replacing the hierarchical priesthood). The second coming and final judgment could take an indefinite time even occurring after human settlement of Mars and distant galaxies, its hard to say for sure.

Kenneth Gentry's book 'The Beast of Revelation' identifies the Roman Emperor Nero as the particular beast referred to in John's book of the Revelation. Besides Nero as the particular person of the beast the Roman Empire is said to be the general actualization of the beast. I think that Gentry's analysis is quite convincing.

This is an informal commentary interacting with the ideas of Gentry's book written for my course on eschatology. The commentary is supposed to run to thirty pages and that seems quite a lot to write for a a non-expert in the field. Rather than providing a back-seat driving analysis of Gentry's ideas I'll try to adumbrate points of view that are relevant to the issue of Biblical eschatology and end times inspired by Gentry's analysis of the Revelation.

The Revelation may be viewed as a history book as well as a book of prophecy. That fact has implications for how one interprets its content. History books generally are written after the fact while prophecies are written before. If one is a secularist it might be a priori challenging to accept a date for the composition of the revelation before the events described within it as prophecy. Instead of an early date at or before the first year of Nero's reign e.g. 63 a.d. the option of accepting the credibility of the later date of 95 a.d. might be preferred with a certain neo-realistic bias.

It is difficult to say what reason John could have had for composing the events of the book of Revelation after the events described within it, although one might offer the point of view such as premillenialists have that the events described do not pertain to the first century events at all, or perhaps have a dual-purpose meaning of events then and in the future.

Some have pointed out that the churches and Christians of the time might have found John's prophecy somewhat superfluous if they did not relate to the pressing issues of the time such as the Neronic persecutions and martyrdoms of Christians by Nero or immanent dangers to Jerusalem by the Roman Army. John might have found events of the first century a kind of coincidental template for describing future events-yet if so he would have needed to view the near-term events prophetically as well as the distant future events in order to note their similarities and congruence of format. Yet it might have been the angels that provided the right coincidental data in order to make John's Revelation insights of prophecy useful to Christians then and now. Historians with an entirely secular viewpoint would dismiss that possibility as irrelevant. I would imagine that it is easier for Christian theologians to accept a Revelation prophetic paradigm that was immediately relevant to first century Christians rather than a later date that requires a more convoluted explanation. If John's Revelation was written before the events that were rather near-term with such accuracy it would be difficult not to accept the fact that it was genuine prophecy rather than coincidence or dead-reckoning political analysis of the highest quality and accuracy.

Political predictions of future events of from one to 17 years distant generally involving the highest levels of an imperial government and the existence of the Jewish nation were just not easy in the first century. Few think tanks had such access to the highest levels of the Roman Government, or would have if such had existed. There were additional accurate predictions regarding the success and growth rate of the Christian faith would have been unlikely in the first century. The Delphic Oracle did not provide such accuracy.

I have looked ahead to Gentry's other book 'He Shall Have Dominion' and learned a More of Gentry's agenda. The present work seems to be the opening Movement of a grand post-Millennial symphony of eschatology. After checking out that post-Millennial symphony I must say that I like its sound. The interpretation has the beauty of the General Theory of Relativity or Wegener's Theory of Plate Tectonics and continental drift to explain why the shoreline littorals of West Africa and Eastern South America seem to match up with a yin-yang aspect.

Natural philosophies such as continental drift, Buddhism,Taoism and evolution are in some respects compatible with Christianity yet are fundamentally irrelevant. Christianity is More like supernatural philosophy revealed by God. I ought to note that the 6^th heresy of Buddhism is belief in God. I believe that is an historical anachronism originating in an era when all of the nations of the world besides Israel were pagan. The Buddha hadn't a supernatural revelation and instead adumbrated a Natural philosophy somewhat like the Universe is a holograph produced by higher dimensions and hence illusory. Keeping his focus on the natural belief in God was proscribed. A Modern scientific Buddhist Might be able to acknowledge that if a superior civilization of the future or from higher dimensions could create particle entanglement or an Event horizon with an apparent Universe sheltering sentient beings in it, why not God?

Alternatively the evidence Gentry presents though convincing reminds me of the televised O.J. Simpson trial were using basically the same evidence two different camps presented two different versions of what occurred. That is a routine occurrence in criminal and civil trials in a democratic society with an adversarial legal system. A juror would need to examine each point of view and decide for themselves what if anything is true.

In the case of cosmology theories there are numerous conflicting as well as complementary points of view about given physical phenomena used as evidence to support a given trendy hypothesis. These days theories of everything that were popular in the 70s and 80s seem to have fallen out of fashion as the frontiers of cosmology through astrophysics and theory roll back the frontiers of the observable and the possible. In some respects like Socrates who decided that he knew that he knew nothing-a kind of precursor antipode of Descartes' cogito ergo sum-cosmological theorists realize that they likely will never have absolute certainty about physical reality that may be embedded in higher dimensions and just one of an infinite number of Universes or how it could be sustained by superior civilizations or God. A certain measure of faith is required to select a given theory as the best of all available models knowing that it is incomplete and something of a process philosophy or process cosmology of a temporary nature likely to be surpassed. Christians too must select the better interpretation of the Revelation available knowing that it may be only partly accurate hopefully to a large extent.

The Apostle John was a prisoner for a time on an island near Ephesus. It is believed that he wrote the Revelation while at that island. At least he received the Revelation while at the isle of Patmos although perhaps he had scribes write it down after release or possible before release via intermediaries. That is rather difficult to say at this point in time. Julius Caesar had a lieutenant write the second half of his book on the Roman Civil war and the Spanish war yet the exact details of the composition for even such a famous figure are rather or entirely vague today and so it may be for John and his school of followers at Ephesus.

When John wrote the Revelation is a subject of more contention among scholars. There are early and late dates two of which seem possible. There are other dates speculating that John did not actually write the book at all but followers did later in the second century that I will dismiss. Irenaeus and others commented on the Revelation as early as the early second century at that supports the idea of an earlier writing construction. Of course there are more scholarly points available to support the first century construction of the Revelation. I will not cite those points in this paper presently. Berkhof's 'Introduction to the New Testament' has a chapter on John that points out elements of the time and place of composition fir example.

Personally I prefer the early construction date that Gentry advocates too rather than the later circa 95 a.d. composition paradigm. I would think that Peter and John would have been young men-perhaps 20 or so when Jesus introduced himself around 30 a.d. for the momentous three year mission, and John in the year 60 a.d. would have been 50 years old-quite a ripe time for writing a creative, challenging, prophetic book like the revelation. Thirty-five years later in 95 a.d. John would have been 85 more or less and found the production of such a work more challenging I would think. His intellectual energy might not have been as great as at age 50 either.

A baptist minister once told me that John's Revelation was like a newspaper in its day. Gentry believes the messages are coded necessarily because of the element of actual persecution by the Imperial Roman authorities. Like today in the U.S.A. there can be immediate repercussions for calling a state governor or the President the anti-Christ in print-though for Jews and other first-century Christians the act of seeming to rebel against Nero brought more severe retribution.

The Apostle John must have known the ecclesiastical state of affairs of the church in relation to the Roman imperial opinion rather well. The Apostle Paul had been imprisoned and released before a second arrest and Peter had moved to Rome and experienced the problems encountered by Christians from Jewish and Roman persecution first-hand. John moved to Ephesus from Judea at some point before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 a.d. and may have encountered immediate difficulties from Jewish and pagan authorities. Nero and preceding Roman emperors of the Julian line were worshiped as god's by state decree. The Lord Jesus Christ's appearance as the actual Son of God contravened that silly, superfluous and vain direction emulated today a little by the very rich and broadcast media and select performance artists that would like to erase the presence of the real God from the minds of humanity with atheist propaganda and elevate themselves to a position of practical socially empowered deification. The Roman state and Jews seeking to suppress Christian church increase may have sought to imprison or execute John immediately upon his arrival in Ephesus.

Thus it is reasonable to suppose that John reaching Ephesus and starting the process of edification of his fellow Christians and recoding his ideas with scribal help along with missiological activity perhaps with additional letters to churches and meetings with Christians may have simultaneously experienced an increasing effort to repress his ministry of the word of God and the evangelization of Eurasia with the good new of Jesus Christ. Eventually that surge to repress the word of God provided through the ministry of the Apostle John enhanced with the three and a half year Neronic persecuction of Christians in the 7^th decade of the first century would have developed to such a point as to send the Apostle into prison exile at Patmos.

Gentry's thesis on the Revelation is basically partial preterism. Many of the events written of in the Revelation have already occurred. I am taking much time reading Gentry's book because it cold in an unheated Alaskan hut and there aren't power lines or a road in to town with a difficult trail through forest and slippery logging slash and a four mile walk on a non-maintained sometimes snow-covered access road to a town and a library where I can recharge batteries for reading and writing (the alpha smart works well to conserve battery power for writing in sub-freezing temperatures).

I believe that John may have left Judea as early as the 50s and become well established in Ephesus before the 60s. One might wonder when or why Peter left Jerusalem where he led the church. He journeyed to Rome eventually. The Lord's brother James was thrown from the Temple Mount and martyred. Though not fleeing martyrdom at some point peter may have found Rome a better place to organize and increase the development of the mission of spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ. Like John Peter may have sensed the coming destruction of Jerusalem by Roman authority. Caiaphas the head of the Jewish religious authority that sought the execution of Jesus mentioned the sacrifice of the Lord as being better than sacrificing the entire nation to the imperial authority. A rival king-even with a kingdom not of this world was too much of a vulnerability as a potential avenue Rome might rubblize Jerusalem for the religious high command to tolerate.

Gentry considers in some detail the issue of the role and presence of Christians that were Jews attending synagogue in Jerusalem in order to date the composition of the Revelation that has a certain Hebraic tone to it that seemed to disappear after the destruction of Jerusalem. It is important to Gentry's position that the Revelation was written prior to the destruction of the temple in a.d. 70. It is notable that many today still wonder about the role of Jews in the present and future or who the real Jews are. The Revelation and the epistles of Paul each address that point at least in a context that is appropriate for the more specific character of a post-mill paradigm for the writing of the Revelation.

Jesus of course said that he would have gathered the Jews and tended them as well as a mother hen tends her chicks yet realized that they were not to be saved by the Lord and would instead be destroyed eventually by the Roman authority. Well, it would have been nice to take the Jewish Mosaic established temple priesthood into the era of the New Covenant with the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Lord was spiritually willing than none be lost yet it was not meant to be.

God doesn't like divorce and wouldn't do that Himself. I prefer the better presentation that God has evolved the relationship to include Jews and Christians of faith as the bride of Christ. The Jews were the necessary ground for growth or emergence of the Christian church in a secondary kind of way after Christ of course. They would not just be jettisoned as soon as they gave birth to Christianity like a spent baby mama so the new chick could hop in the sack.

Paul (Romans 2:17-29) and John (i.e. Revelation 7:4-8) speak of Christians as the spiritually true Jews. Instead of a purely material, racial Jewish identity were Christians. The Lord once replied to a statement that his mother and brothers were waiting outside to him asked 'who are my mother and brothers' rhetorically. He explained that those who new him as savior and followed him are his mother and brothers.

Jesus wanted to save Jerusalem yet as they were a religious-led national Israel failing to adapt to the presence of the Lord and straying too far from the heart of God with formalism and legalism the correction given was to evolve beyond legalism to personalism and personal relationship to God as The Son of Man whom everyone could know personally. That wasn't a divorce; it was a consummation spiritually speaking of the relationship between mankind and God. It was always probably necessary for God to include all of humanity in the realm of His personal acquaintance through the Lord Jesus Christ-not simply via the introductory period of Jews in a nation following His laws amidst a planet full of pagan lunatics and killers in hot pursuit of capital.

As one of the reasons given in support of a first century context for interpreting the Revelation Gentry gives the information that the futurist, dispensationalist way of interpreting the Revelation creates a persistent Christian despair about the present accompanied by a rationalization that this world is doomed and given over to the deus a machina of wickedness under the dark powers of Evil and that Christians can look forward to the rapture taking them out of the society of despond.. Of course one does not require a Christian eschatology that interprets the Revelation within a dispensationalist, futurist paradigm in order to have a pessimistic outlook on world events and life in general. In fact atheists continuously cite the evil and wickedness in the world as reasons against the existence of God. For many atheists any possible Universe created by God must be as Sugar Mountain with barkers and colored balloons but no sort of accidens (not to misuse that Aristotelian term but the error works rather well in this context).

R.A. Torrey was a dispensationalist and well-meaning Christian writer. Gentry is another and thus it seems evident that it is possible to have different ideas about what the book of Revelation means and when it was written. I believe that the fact that there are consequences to taking one of the two positions mentioned here are significant though.

Gentry thinks that Christians with a gloomy dispensationalist viewpoint awaiting a skyhook from Jesus to extract them out of the turmoils and persecutions of the world become socially indolent or disengaged from social constructive actions to a certain extent. That is they fail to live up to their potential and responsibilities as citizens of a democracy making improvements to the world. One wonders what the position of the Puritans was on dispensationalism and futurism versus convenantalism and preterism?

Apparently the realistic immanentalism of John's prophecies written to the churches of the day (the seven churches and other Christians in the Revelation was lost to those living past the time of the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem and slaughter by a Roman legion of as many as half a million Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem circa 70 a.d.. That is by the second century the real context for interpretation of the Revelation was lost preponderantly. Maybe Martin Luther's observation that the Revelation 'had a lot of straw' (as in too much for making good bricks) was a sort of accurate insight in regard to making the Revelation a futurist book out of a prophecy largely intended, or immediately purposed to warn and correct, exhort, comfort and explain to very challenging Christians soon to undergo extreme persecutions what their status was and what the outcome would be. Even so the Revelation does not implicitly exclude within Gentry's paradigm a dual-purpose futurist paradigm of inaugurated eschatology. There is difficulty in making certain uncertain terms with uncertain contexts of initial use.

Mohammedan eschatology seems founded in a futurist sort of misunderstanding of the Revelation. Mohammad's father had been keeper of the Spirit House-Kaaba-at Mecca with its vast assembly representing pagan religions. When he was made an orphan and cast out of the good graces of the pagan shrine in time he developed a revolutionary syncretistic monotheism to take back his heritage and of course make the Kaaba a shrine for one God with Mohammad as his exclusive prophet. Mohammad must have surveyed the available religious material as best as he could from Jewish and Christian sources and with the help of his older wife hashed out a revolutionary personal monotheism different enough that it could not be construed as representing the oppressive Byzantine Orthodox variety of Christianity that had dominated much of the ancient world in the day as a theocratic device. For Mohammad the Revelation was futurist and the Jews were Christ killers as they were to many of those of the dark and middle ages in Europe. Thus in Mohammedan eschatology Jesus will return to wreak vengeance upon the Jews and Muslims will help in a Holy Jihad against Jews comprising Armageddon. It is interesting how wrong interpretation of literature can have lasting consequences.

Jesus didn't hold a grudge against the Jews not only because he was himself Jewish-although Bobby Fischer seemed to hate the Jews though his mother was evidently a full bloodied tribal Jew. Jesus advocated forgiveness-even seven times seventy times forgiveness and is an improbable choice to portray as returning to wreak vengeance on the Jews. At the last judgment in fact all that one needs to do to be saved is to have had faith in Jesus as Lord and to accept his grace and atonement for one's sin. Then a kind of default choice lets a de facto self-judgment by the lost correct the lost with eternal punishment. Since Jesus is the only way-the soul bridge to God and eternal life with the Lord, any other course leaves one in the wilderness of perdition and doom in any possible Universe-a tough choice to make.

Gentry's book seems to focus very much on the identity of the beast and providing support for a first century interpretation of the Revelation. That's fine yet it is a little limiting on vision for what the Revelation is an means to post-temple era Christians.

Some Christians have a natural antipathy toward a partial preterist interpretation of the Revelation inasmuch as accepting its veracity would tend to indicate that even though the prophecy was 100% accurate more or less, its fulfillment means that a greater error occurred in Christian teleology/prophecy such that though everything else happened Jesus Christ didn't return and thus the prophecy of the Lord were falsified. Such a logically unnecessary proposition depends on interpreting John's writing in such a way that the meaning of the return and 'coming in the clouds' have particular meaning-values too. On the latter point Gentry provides evidence for supporting a meaning of 'coming in the clouds' within a Biblical context as meaning a time of social uncertainty when God intervenes to change things. I think it likely that the use of modern definitions for ancient ideas have sometimes made inaccuracy in understanding by Biblical interpreters occur. Gentry points out there are five meanings of the Greek word he or 'ge' used in the Revelation 80 times and two used prevalently means 'land' interchangeably with 'Earth'. That has implications for the interpretation of certain cosmological inferences and construction of interpretive paradigms for cosmology by modern expositors.

Even so it is incumbent upon interpreters of the Revelation to sort through and determine what elements of the book might have futurist relevance post-Temple destruction and to the present and/or future.

Seemingly the seven hills of Rome representing the generic rather than particularization of the beast could represent worldly government in general in a sort of City of God versus City of Man context. Humanity seems to pursue a developed social abstraction of a generalized human being as a kind of social goal. In the U.S.A. under the corrupting sway of an anti-democracy elitist broadcast media owned by a corporate plutocratic invisible empire the pragmatic ideal of a brainwashed mass-man without anti-corporatist or individual private interests seems to be the actualization in reduced form of the political goal of Thomas Hobbes philosophical treatise on the ideal (British) government of the absolute dictator personifying the will of the people. I suppose the idea of Nero and Rome as the beast of Revelation might be the first formal expression of that ideal evil empire in writing, although some might regard Plato's Republic and its triumvirate of philosopher-kings as a fascist precursor of the Great Satan mirroring the condition of the abstract will of the people that the people are in return conditioned to be (at the will of the dictator. The late dictator Saddam Hussein was a more recent example of the form as are/is the string of post-second world war North Korean Communist dictators).

Karl Barth in his 'History of Christian Thought' noted what the philosopher Ortega y Gasset later described as 'the revolt of the masses' against elite rule in Europe. Barth was applying the concept to an earlier period of transition leading to the French Revolution wherein the ordinary became rulers inverting the concept of elite rule. Karl Marx of course envisioned the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact in modern America within the paradigm of atheist led scientism with anti-Christian values and even creeping purges of Christianity from the U.S.A. along with national economic sovereignty the modern media is a mooning colony conditioner of mass social identity toward the revolutionary transition of Hobbes' all in one absolute dictator to one Satanic presence in all subjects rather than citizens). It is believed I would think that off-market economic interests have antipathetic potential toward the collective financial networks of globalism in which all must play or be marginalized. The house always wins in Las Vegas and the same situation prevails with preferred networks of concentrated wealth and power.

If John's Revelation was fulfilled entirely in it's day of the first century with the Neronic persecutions and the following destruction of the Temple it is important not to dismiss the book capriciously from future meaning or lasting examples of human conduct and ways of being that can be learned and avoided or corrected.

Just as one ought to learn the ethics of the Lord it is worth drawing additional inferences from the life and times of the Lord and Apostles about things not to do such as stoning adulterers or crucifying persons critical of government incompetence and the corruption of politicians and other officials of interest.

It could be that I should have taken an aphoristic structural approach in this paper being rather inexpert on the primary subject.