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
Does Romans 13 Condone Government Violence? (podcast)
Greg deconstructs problematic interpretations of Romans 13. Episode 649 http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0649.mp3
Does the Author of Hebrews Condone Capital Punishment? A Response to Paul Copan (#12)
In his critique of Crucifixion of the Warrior God (CWG), Paul Copan argues that several New Testament authors condone capital punishment as directly willed by God. The most challenging for my thesis, in my estimation, is Hebrews 10:26-29, which reads: For if we willfully persist in sin after having received the knowledge of the truth,…
Sermon: Blood and Water
In this sermon clip, Greg Boyd talks about how question in baptism and communion have cause division in the church throughout history. In the rest of the sermon he discusses why baptism and Communion are important sacraments to the Christian community. Greg also shows us how the Anabaptists understood these sacraments and how Woodland Hills…
The Politics of Jesus
Many are so conditioned by the mindset of the world that they can’t even envision an alternative way of affecting society and politics other than by playing the political game as it is done by the established governmental system. Some thus conclude that, since Jesus didn’t try to overhaul the political systems of his day…
The Challenge of Malala to the Church
http://youtu.be/f506lCk6Tos I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but it’s Malala Yousafzai appearing on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. At the age of 14 Malala was shot in the face at point blank range by the Taliban while riding to school on a bus, all because she wouldn’t stop speaking up for the right of…
Did Jesus Instruct Us to Arm Ourselves?
Over the past few posts, I’ve been dealing with the passages that are frequently used to argue how Jesus condoned violence. One of these takes place just after the last supper and just before Jesus and his disciples were going to travel to the Mount of Olives to pray. To prepare his disciples, Jesus tells them;…
