Quotes about Revelation

The Word through whom all things were made is now the Word through whom all things are remade.

First-century Jews looked forward to a public event … in and through which their god would reveal to all the world that he was not just a local, tribal deity, but the creator and sovereign of all … The early Christians … looked back to an event in and through which, they claimed, Israel's god had done exactly that.

The mystery of Jesus Christ, for Paul, is that in him is revealed not only the glory of the one creator God but the true glory of humankind, lost at the fall.

Transcending "Revelation" All this alerts us to the fact that scripture is more than simply

Of course, there is a much older notion of "revelation," according to which God is continually revealing himself to and within the world he

A fully Christian view of the Bible includes the idea of God's self-revelation but, by setting it in a larger context, transforms it. Precisely because the God who reveals himself is the world's lover and judge, rather than its absentee landlord, that self-revelation is always to be understood within the category of God's mission to the world, God's saving

Passover takes precedence—it was, after all, the ultimate divine rescue operation and the ultimate revelation of God in action

Another part of the problem is that exegetes have for years simply not been trained in the political thinking of the ancient world, so that just as we have exported sixteenth-century theology back into ancient Galatia and made Paul's letter address our post-Reformation concerns in their own terms, we have exported modern political assumptions back into ancient Asia Minor and made Revelation, and Paul too for that matter, address our political anxieties in their own terms.

These questions need to be worked out in other contexts, but it would be unwise to leave the central chapters of Revelation with the impression that bestial regimes are only and always non-democratic tyrannies. They may be closer to home than we like to think. Perhaps this is why the western church, so comfortable now within its present world, is not persecuted.

Jesus is often seen as someone who can "teach" you to play the piano, so that you can perform Mozart and Beethoven. But Jesus was more like someone who had just invented an entirely new musical instrument, had written some stunning music for it, and was now "teaching" people to play the new music on the new instrument. Jesus was announcing that a whole new world was being born and he was "teaching" people how to live within that whole new world.

In particular, the story Revelation tells is the same story that all four gospels tell, though the church, which has done its best to hush up this fact about the gospels, has not usually recognized the similarity. The four canonical gospels (unlike the so-called gnostic 'gospels'!) tell the story of how Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's Messiah, conquered the power of evil through his death and became the lord of the world.

Saying "It's true for you" sounds fine and tolerant. But it only works because it's twisting the word "true" to mean, not "a true revelation of the way things are in the real world," but "something that is genuinely happening inside you.