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The Reasonable Appeal of the Book of Revelation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2011
Extract
In the popular mind, the Book of Revelation is doubtless the most difficult of all New Testament writings. Whether it deserves that reputation may well be doubted, for there are other books of the Bible in which scholars would probably say that the unsolved problems are more fundamental. But the Book of Revelation stands at the end of the collection, and few readers penetrate so far. It seems remote from modern habits of thought and expression. It lends itself for the most part less readily to the practical, if sometimes superficial, use of the ordinary reader.
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1919
References
1 A book in the form of a modern novel, published in 1908, entitled Lord of the World, written by a Roman Catholic, the late Mgr. R. H. Benson, is an instructive example of a modern apocalypse. In this imaginary picture is worked out the great issue, as Mgr. Benson conceives it, between the individualism of Christian religion on the one hand and the communism of secularism on the other. The result is first the purification of the Church through persecution, then the triumph of the forces of this world by virtue of their superior physical power—a gloomy view which might seem to contradict faith in a ruling God. But this is only the preliminary stage, the “woes” of the end of the present age. The consummation arrives, as in the old apocalypses, by the direct intervention of God, the end of this material world, and the introduction of the coming age in which, in a new world, not our own, the rule of God is complete. With rare literary skill and restraint the picture of the future is unfolded. We see again the old figure of Antichrist, but in modern dress, and have presented to us a modern development and interpretation of the whole machinery of apocalyptic thought. This striking book is a good commentary on the New Testament Apocalypse, for it shows the vitality of this type of literature and its aptness for the effective expression of a self-consistent view of the essential nature of the great underlying spiritual realities, good and bad, as they appear to a serious observer. Whatever one may think of Father Benson's doctrine, to the student of the New Testament and of the history of literature his book is of the greatest interest.
2 The same is true of the inquiries into the possible composite structure of the book which have much occupied critical scholars. The book as it stands is an artistically framed whole, and as such is the subject of the present article. The reader curious about these theories will find a guide in James Moffatt's Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament.