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
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.
Category: General
Tags: Book of Revelation, Kurt Willems, Left Behind, Non-Violence, Rapture, Revelation
Related Reading
Sermons: A Vision of Beauty
In this short sermon clip, Greg Boyd discusses how God, science, and nature can work together to tell us the story of our universe. In the full sermon, Greg begins the series on Revelation and shows us three things to keep in mind when reading the book of Revelation. You can view the full sermon…
Responding to Critics On A Pacifist View of the Syrian Crisis
On September 3rd, I wrote a post entitled What I – a Pacifist – Would Say to Obama About the Syrian Crisis in response to a number of questions I was getting, and judging from the “shares” and Twitter activity, this essay seems to have struck a chord. Not surprisingly, it also generated some criticism, for…
Divine Accommodation in the Early Church
One of the basic points made in The Crucifixion of the Warrior God is that the Old Testament reveals how God adjusts his revelation and instructions to accommodate the weakness of his covenant people. This is actually not a new observation as is reflected in a variety of ways throughout Church history. For example, in…
Why Would God Spit Out the Warm and Not the Cold? (podcast)
Greg argues that both hot water and cold water are good. Episode 529 http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0529.mp3
What is the right way to interpret Revelation?
Few biblical topics have captured the imagination of contemporary evangelicals like the book of Revelation. The recent unprecedented success of the Left Behind series is evidence of this popular fascination. Many evangelicals don’t realize that the futuristic interpretation of Revelation advocated in this popular series is only one of several interpretations evangelicals espouse. Here’s the…
Why Didn’t Jesus Denounce Military Service?
A common objection to the claim that Jesus and the authors of the New Testament were opposed to all forms of violence is that neither Jesus nor anyone else speaks out against it. When soldiers asked John the Baptist what they should do in response to his message, for example, he told them not to…
