• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Revelation/Apocalypse/Last Judgment: Thoughts?

Vortigern99

Sorcerer Supreme
V
Joined
Mar 7, 2009
Messages
7,905
Location
Austin, Texas
I'm looking to discuss the Book of Revelation with skeptics and believers. First I'd like to ask our resident Christians how they and/or their ecclesiastic authorities interpret the events and personages of the final book of the Bible.

Specifically: Do you think any/all of Revelation has already happened? Is happening now? Will happen in the future? Or is it purely symbolic of an on-going, interior reality? A struggle of good vs. evil waged within the soul of every human being?

Skeptics, I'd like to request your best and most withering criticisms of the book.

(And for those wondering, I'm agnostic.)
 
For the most hilarious presentation of the Apocalypse see http://www.thebricktestament.com/revelation/ which is a Lego version of that holy work. Revelation requires no more profound analysis, being as it seems, the ravings of a madman.

ETA Personally, I'm an atheist. If I am an agnostic instead, I don't know that I'm one.
 
Last edited:
I read a book called "Revelation, the history of the world's most dangerous book" and the author went fairly extensively into the history of the thing. The book was mostly about how subsequent societies interpreted the thing...
Anyway, the author made a good case that Revelation was actually not in any way intended to be prophetic. Rather, it was a rant about things going on at the time, in code.

The author was mightily annoyed at the large number of false prophets wandering around, and that Christianity was still so divided, and that so many Christians were straying from the "true" teachings... And so it was one big long rant about how screwed up things were and what was likely to happen as a result.
Nothing more.
However, as we see above, people still see this as some sort of actual guide to the End Times.
Which is fascinating as the "end times" JC would have been talking about was something different entirely.
 
Craig B said:
For the most hilarious presentation of the Apocalypse see http://www.thebricktestament.com/revelation/ which is a Lego version of that holy work. Revelation requires no more profound analysis, being as it seems, the ravings of a madman.

ETA Personally, I'm an atheist. If I am an agnostic instead, I don't know that I'm one.
Click to expand...

This link is incredibly perversely amusing. The frame with the cute bear holding a dude's arm in its mouth, while a monkey threatens a guy with a knife, has got me giggling quite in spite of myself.

As a poetic vision I find Revelation enthralling, nightmarish; realized in Lego figures it's an absurdist comedy to rival Python.
 
Vortigern99 said:
This link is incredibly perversely amusing. The frame with the cute bear holding a dude's arm in its mouth, while a monkey threatens a guy with a knife, has got me giggling quite in spite of myself.

As a poetic vision I find Revelation enthralling, nightmarish; realized in Lego figures it's an absurdist comedy to rival Python.
Click to expand...

BIG props for the shelf of idols, and the dialogue...
 
Vortigern99 said:
I'm looking to discuss the Book of Revelation with skeptics and believers. First I'd like to ask our resident Christians how they and/or their ecclesiastic authorities interpret the events and personages of the final book of the Bible.

Specifically: Do you think any/all of Revelation has already happened? Is happening now? Will happen in the future? Or is it purely symbolic of an on-going, interior reality? A struggle of good vs. evil waged within the soul of every human being?

Skeptics, I'd like to request your best and most withering criticisms of the book.

(And for those wondering, I'm agnostic.)
Click to expand...

I think it is a bunch of story written after somebody ate too many mushrooms or bad bread with wheat "ergot". As such it will never happen and none of it happened.

I also happen to think that the story presented as such make god look like an insane genocidial ****** (by the way mods, the word formed with "bottom backside part of human starting with a"+hat is not censored :p i replaced it manually by *) which decide to kill everybody except a few like for the flood, and the beast try to more or less stand up to the insanae guy.

The good guy is the beast it is all in the bible and christian have worshipped the bad guy from the start.
 
Last edited:
Thanks so much for the link!
I especially liked
And coming out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet, I saw three evil spirits like frogs.
Click to expand...
 
Specifically: Do you think any/all of Revelation has already happened? Is happening now? Will happen in the future? Or is it purely symbolic of an on-going, interior reality? A struggle of good vs. evil waged within the soul of every human being?
Click to expand...

As Bikewer suggests, this presupposes that the only believers' stance is that the book is future-describing, rather than apocalyptic (from an alternate title of the book, which may be a hint), that is, present-describing, the author's present, telling what is going on at the time by means of a story set in the author's remote future or past or both, back and forth.

It is easy enough to find living believers who take the apocalyptic view of the Apocalypse.

The Book of Revelation cannot be adequately understood except against the historical background that occasioned its writing. Like Daniel and other apocalypses, it was composed as resistance literature to meet a crisis. The book itself suggests that the crisis was ruthless persecution of the early church by the Roman authorities; the harlot Babylon symbolizes pagan Rome, the city on seven hills (17:9). The book is, then, an exhortation and admonition to Christians of the first century to stand firm in the faith and to avoid compromise with paganism, despite the threat of adversity and martyrdom; they are to await patiently the fulfillment of God’s mighty promises.
Click to expand...

http://www.usccb.org/bible/scripture.cfm?bk=Revelation&ch=

And, of course, there are non-believers who take the same view of the book, people who can take literature as literature. In that view, a creation of this richness seems wasted on readers of whatever religious persuasion who adopt its surface conceit literally, as if the work were a church newsletter about coming events. For such readers, Moby Dick must seem to be a tale about labor relations in the Nineteenth Century American whaling industry.

Speaking of which, here's a Lego version of that book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egDbGqXNjT8
 
Last edited:
What eight bits said. Also, it's impossible to understand Revelation except against a rich Jewish tradition of apocalyptic writing, which probably began during the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE and intensified up through the Hellenistic period (see the book of Daniel, second century BCE). The prophetic promises of return from exile into a perfect new world ruled over by a Davidic Messiah-like character seem to have become eschatological (ie, pertaining to the end of the current world, rather than a mere political change within it) almost as soon as they were written. See Ezekiel, or Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55) to see the sort of thing: the Judeans were going to return in triumphant procession through the desert to a new super-Temple and state of perfect peace and all the nations would come and worship there ... whereas in fact, while there was a return from exile, it was probably rather small-scale and the returnees found it difficult (Ezra, Nehemiah). Furthermore, Judea was almost never independent again; so by the first century CE, when it was under Roman imperial rule, Jews were expecting such a restoration as an eschatological, rather than historical, event.

Revelation is just one of a whole genre of apocalyptic visions of the time; there are several others in the intertestamental, apocryphal, and other roughly contemporary Jewish writings (Apocalypses of Baruch, Elijah, and a whole host of other pseudonymous figures, Psalms of Solomon, 4 Ezra, and many others). Nearly all the famous aspects of Revelation, including the Son of Man, the martyrs in white washing their robes, other transfigured characters in heaven, angels, rulers, the large-scale battle at the end of time, and so on, are shared with these other writings.

So no, Christians (like me) don't need to think of Revelation as a unique, weird sort of prediction of something that will directly happen or that has happened. Rather it's a piece of literature which is of a clearly recognizable genre and relates to events that were happening in the first century CE. The writer has interpreted these events according to the categories and myths he understood from his own Jewish background.
 
Last edited:
I always laugh when I hear someone try to use Revelation as some sort of predictor of the future, because it's clear they've never read it. All you need to do is read the first few verses...

The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, 2 who testifies to everything he saw—that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. 3 Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.
Click to expand...

Steve S
 
Revelation never makes any sense to me. When I read about Revelation, about the historical and literary context, that all makes sense, but when I go back and try to tackle Revelation itself, it still comes off as some dude who's licked a few too many brightly colored toads.
 
Bikewer said:
I read a book called "Revelation, the history of the world's most dangerous book" and the author went fairly extensively into the history of the thing. The book was mostly about how subsequent societies interpreted the thing...
Anyway, the author made a good case that Revelation was actually not in any way intended to be prophetic. Rather, it was a rant about things going on at the time, in code.

The author was mightily annoyed at the large number of false prophets wandering around, and that Christianity was still so divided, and that so many Christians were straying from the "true" teachings... And so it was one big long rant about how screwed up things were and what was likely to happen as a result.
Nothing more.
However, as we see above, people still see this as some sort of actual guide to the End Times.
Which is fascinating as the "end times" JC would have been talking about was something different entirely.
Click to expand...

Yes, I see that. The preterist perspective (from praeter, past or beyond), which arose as part of the counter-Reformation, holds that the events described in Revelation have already taken place. Initially this interpretation was a gambit by the Catholic Church to deflect Protestant accusations that it, the Church, was symbolically "Babylon" and the Pope "the Beast".

It bears noting that the book you read is one out of hundreds (or thousands?) written on the subject, plus scads of essays and commentaries offered by numerous organizations, individuals and authorities over the centuries. I like this interpretation, but it would seem damn convenient to accept uncritically that the single book you happened to have read on the topic happens to have it right.
 
Aepervius said:
I think it is a bunch of story written after somebody ate too many mushrooms or bad bread with wheat "ergot". As such it will never happen and none of it happened.
Click to expand...

Well, poetic visions can arise without the use of hallucinogenics. I'm not suggesting the book is valid or correct, but it's lurid nightmarish quality can be accounted for via other explanations than mushrooms, ergot or toad-licking.

Aepervius said:
I also happen to think that the story presented as such make god look like an insane genocidial ****** ...which decide to kill everybody except a few like for the flood, and the beast try to more or less stand up to the insanae guy.

The good guy is the beast it is all in the bible and christian have worshipped the bad guy from the start.
Click to expand...

I agree with the first part, as did DH Lawrence among others. God's promise in Genesis to never again destroy humanity is clearly scuppered here in favor of the horrifying torture and murder of nearly everyone on the planet by the most ghoulish, painful means imaginable.

But I will ardently disagree that the Beast is somehow a "good guy" alternative. People who refuse to worship the Beast are hideously murdered as well. This hardly represents some beneficent deity worthy of our worship.
 
eight bits said:
Specifically: Do you think any/all of Revelation has already happened? Is happening now? Will happen in the future? Or is it purely symbolic of an on-going, interior reality? A struggle of good vs. evil waged within the soul of every human being?
Click to expand...

As Bikewer suggests, this presupposes that the only believers' stance is that the book is future-describing, rather than apocalyptic (from an alternate title of the book, which may be a hint), that is, present-describing, the author's present, telling what is going on at the time by means of a story set in the author's remote future or past or both, back and forth.

It is easy enough to find living believers who take the apocalyptic view of the Apocalypse.
Click to expand...

Yes, I personally find that interpretation the most compelling. Please note that the first question I ask believers in the OP, and in the above quote, is "Do you think any/all of Revelation has already happened?" For the record, I've made no presuppositions as you've claimed above.

eight bits said:
http://www.usccb.org/bible/scripture.cfm?bk=Revelation&ch=

And, of course, there are non-believers who take the same view of the book, people who can take literature as literature. In that view, a creation of this richness seems wasted on readers of whatever religious persuasion who adopt its surface conceit literally, as if the work were a church newsletter about coming events. For such readers, Moby Dick must seem to be a tale about labor relations in the Nineteenth Century American whaling industry.
Click to expand...

Well said! As an agnostic who believes not a word of it, I find Revelation to be vastly entertaining and visionary... as horror fiction, as nightmare poetry. It certainly contains the richest imagery of any biblical book.

eight bits said:
Speaking of which, here's a Lego version of that book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egDbGqXNjT8
Click to expand...

In the first response to the OP, CraigB offered a link to The Brick Testament site, which offers thousands of still images of Lego recreations of all the books of the Bible, many with wry or sarcastic commentary in the form of word balloons. Is the linked video an animated version of that, or something else entirely?
 
Vortigern99 said:
<snip>As an agnostic who believes not a word of it, I find Revelation to be vastly entertaining and visionary... as horror fiction, as nightmare poetry. It certainly contains the richest imagery of any biblical book.
Click to expand...

Ah, that's where we differ. As someone who believes not a word of it, I find Revelation soul-crushingly dull as horror fiction, as nightmare poetry.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom