We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

A Guide to the Book of Revelation

Are you ready for the Rapture? Jesus is coming on Oct 28, 1992(!)

Marc Nozell via Compfight

Kurt Willems posted this excellent guide for reading the Book of Revelation as it was intended to be read. As Kurt points out, this is the most misunderstood and misinterpreted book of the Bible. If you were weaned on A Thief in the Night or the Left Behind series of books, this will be refreshing information for you.

From Kurt’s blog:

Revelation is a book that continues to be used as “trump card” against Christian nonviolence as it posits a future tribulation and war in which Christ comes back to lead people into a battle, one that apparently contradicts everything he taught during his earthly ministry. And of course there’s the baggage of the “Left Behind” series that imagines a rapture followed by the rise of an “anti-Christ” and a literal 7-year tribulation which fuels a mentality that the book is mostly about what will happen and how to escape that fate. I want to suggest that most of what you have been taught about Revelation, especially if you watched the cheesy Christian movies or grew up in conservative/fundamentalist expressions of evangelicalism, is wrong.

Related Reading

The Cruciform Way of the Lamb

In this video, Greg offers insight into how to read the Bible with the cross at the center of the revelation of God, thereby reframing how we interpret the violent and nationalistic passages of the Old Testament. Travis Reed from The Work of the People did a series of interviews with Greg a while ago and…

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

Check out Shane Claiborne’s excellent piece on the problem of violence posted yesterday on Huffington Post. Money quote: “Christian theologians have said Jesus teaches a ‘third way’ to interact with evil. We see a Jesus who abhors both passivity and violence and teaches us a new way forward that is neither submission nor assault, neither…

The Final Battle in Revelation

I will conclude this series on the violent imagery in Revelation by addressing the infamous eschatological battle scene found in 19:11-21, for it is this graphically violent section of Revelation that is most frequently appealed to by those who argue against the claim that Jesus reveals an enemy-loving, non-violent God that is unconditionally opposed to…

The Heresy of “Just War”

Since the time when the Jesus-looking kingdom movement was transformed into the Caesar-looking “militant and triumphant” Church, there has been a tradition of Christians by-passing the enemy-loving, non-violent teachings of the NT and instead appealing to the precedent of divinely-sanctioned nationalism and violence in the OT whenever they felt the need to justify engaging in…

Podcast: If Violence is Wrong, Why Passively Allow Others to Use It?

Greg discusses dealing with the violence of loved ones. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0166_.mp3

Is Islam Inherently Violent? – Further Thoughts

Greg originally posted some thoughts on Islam here. In this video, he discusses some responses he received, and further thoughts on a Kingdom posture toward Muslims.