Quotes About Revelation

Art is seeing the truth and revealing it, as beautifully and forcefully and honestly as you are able.

We were given the Scriptures to humble us into realizing that God is right, and the rest of us are just guessing.

Before we had stifled the cross into a symbol, before we had softened grace into a sentiment, before we had systematized the power and mystery of God's greatest revelation of Himself into a set of dogmas, we were the children that we must become again.

His son had joined the sleepers.

The gospel is not a summary of "the necessary truths of reason"; rather, it is a revelation that shatters and reshapes human reason in light of God's foolishness.

The gospel is not a summary of "the necessary truths of reason"; rather, it is a revelation that shatters and reshapes human reason in light of God's foolishness. The Word is known in contingent human form, and only there. That is the scandal of the gospel.

His task is to proclaim the fulfilment of what God had revealed to the prophets of the past. The whole book is saturated with allusions to Old Testament prophecy, though there are no formal quotations. As a prophet himself, John need not quote his predecessors, but he takes up and reinterprets their prophecies, much as the later writers in the Old Testament prophetic tradition themselves took up and reinterpreted earlier prophecies.

It seems that John not only writes in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, but understands himself to be writing at the climax of the tradition, when all the eschatological oracles of the prophets are about to be finally fulfilled, and so he interprets and gathers them up in his own prophetic revelation. What makes him a Christian prophet is that he does so in the light of the fulfilment already of Old Testament prophetic expectation in the victory of the Lamb, the Messiah Jesus.

The first is rarely noticed. John's work is highly unusual in the sheer prolific extent of its visual imagery. It is true that symbolic visions are typical of the genre. But in other apocalypses other forms of revelation are often as important or more important.

The whole of Revelation could be regarded as a vision of the fulfilment of the first three petitions of the Lord's Prayer: 'Your name be hallowed, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven' (Matt. 6:9–10). John and his readers lived in a world in which God's name was not hallowed, his will was not done, and evil ruled through the oppression and exploitation of the Roman system of power.

In the first place, John's work is a prophetic apocalypse in that it communicates a disclosure of a transcendent perspective on this world.

A second important sense in which Revelation stands in the tradition of the Jewish apocalypses is that it shares the question which concerned so many of the latter: who is Lord over the world?

Moreover, it unmasks this dominant construction of the world as an ideology of the powerful which serves to maintain their power. In its place, Revelation offers a different way of perceiving the world which leads people to resist and to challenge the effects of the dominant ideology.

The alternative vision of the world which Revelation claims to be orientated to the truth is strongly theocentric

The profoundest points of New Testament Christology occur when the inclusion of the exalted Christ in the divine identity entails the inclusion of the crucified Christ in the divine identity, and when the christological pattern of humiliation and exaltation is recognized as revelatory of God, indeed as the definitive revelation of who God is.

We can answer the question "Who is God?" only by attending to who God has revealed himself to be.

At the outset of Jesus's ministry God tore apart the curtain of the heavens in order to come down and be present and active in Jesus. At Jesus's death he tore apart the curtain in the temple in order to come out and be present and active through Jesus in the world at large.

the images of Revelation are symbols with evocative power inviting imaginative participation in the book's symbolic world. But they do not work merely by painting verbal pictures. Their precise literary composition is always essential to their meaning. In the first place, the astonishingly meticulous composition of the book creates a complex network of literary cross-references, parallels, contrasts, which inform the meaning of the parts and the whole.

As well as their pervasive allusion to the Old Testament, the images of Revelation also echo mythological images from its contemporary world.

The method and conceptuality of the theology of Revelation are relatively different from the rest of the New Testament, but once they are appreciated in their own right, Revelation can be seen to be not only one of the finest literary works in the New Testament, but also one of the greatest theological achievements of early Christianity. Moreover, the literary and theological greatness are not separable.

Perhaps enough has been said to indicate that the imagery of Revelation requires close and appropriate study if modern readers are to grasp much of its theological meaning. Misunderstandings of the nature of the imagery and the way it conveys meaning account for many misinterpretations of Revelation, even by careful and learned modern scholars.

Misinterpretations of Revelation often begin by misconceiving the kind of book it is.

Thus Revelation seems to be an apocalyptic prophecy in the form of a circular letter to seven churches in the Roman province of Asia.

That's what made it worse, in the end ... when he found out. Nixon had lied to him, personally.