Yesterday I posted some thoughts on Ben Gladd’s Carson center article on Reading Revelation Responsibly. In the article Gladd addresses two objections to his “symbolic approach to Revelation.” The first is that the symbols in his approach end up lacking a referent. He demurs that the symbols refer to spiritual realties. The second is that “symbolic interpretation lacks hermeneutical controls.” He counters that the Old Testament provides the control on what the symbols mean.
Old Testament Evidence Against Idealism
I would argue that allowing the Old Testament to control our understanding of Revelation’s symbols invalidates the idealist approach that Gladd is advocating and validates the futurist approach. On what grounds is the symbolism of Revelation to of spiritual realities that persist throughout the inter-advent period? This should be tested against the Old Testament. Peter Leithart notes that the idealist approach is inconsistent with how the Old Testament uses the very symbolism that Revelation is drawing on from the Old Testament (Revelation, ITC, 1:12).
- “Isaiah describes Jerusalem, not some generic city of man, as Sodom, and so does Ezekiel.”
- “Daniel sees beasts coming from the sea, and the beasts are identifiable kingdoms.”
- “Daniel sees a goat racing over the land without touching the ground. It crashes into a ram with two horns and shatters the ram’s horns (Dan. 8:5–8). That is not a generic portrait of “conquest.” It is Alexander’s conquest of the Persians.”
This doesn’t weigh as much with me, but it is worth noting that this same pattern of symbols referring to concrete historical referents holds with the intertestamental apocalypses too (see Charles, Studies in the Apocalypse, 6). In fact, as best I can tell idealism seems to have emerged as an interpretive option in the 20th century.
On the one hand, it is akin to historicism (the dominant approach to Revelation throughout much of church history) in that it understands Revelation to cover the entire inter-advent period. Unlike historicism, however, it has so abstracted the meaning of the symbolism that it can’t be falsified the way the older historicism was. On the other hand, all three of the other approaches share the same approach to symbolism that the Old Testaement does. The older historicism rightly understood Daniel to be describing the kingdoms that existed from his day until Christ’s first advent, and it concluded that Revelation was describing the period from John’s day until Christ’s second advent. It was wrong, but it was not unreasonable. Preterism shows up around the Reformation (initially as a Roman Catholic attempt to defuse claims that the pope was the antichrist). Futurism shows up very early in the fathers, and it too follows the lead of the Old Testament in interpreting the symbols with the added advantage of recognizing the presence of Day of the Lord typology coming to fulfillment in Revelation.
Hermeneutical Controls and Speculation
One of the major problems of historicism was that it was too speculative. And more importantly, it took interpreter’s eyes off of Christ. Historicists wasted time trying to figure out whether the locusts in Revelation 9 referred to the rise of the Germanic Arian tribes (Alexander Minorita), to papal teachings regarding purgatory, merits, and masses for the dead (Johann Gerhard), or to the period between the Goths and the Turks (Thomas Goodwin, Jonathan Edwards).
Idealism sought to avoid this tangle by abstracting the symbols away from historical referents to spiritual realities. However, the idealist is still left having to figure out what the symbols means. Do the locusts symbolize temporal national judgments occurring throughout the inter-advent period (Beeke). Or do they symbolize judgments that will fall on persecutors of Christians (Fee). Or do they symbolize the “self-pity, anger, lust, jealousy and unhappiness” that God sends on some as a judgment (Schreiner). Beale is very detailed in his interpretation. The star = a fallen angel, identified as Apollyon, that is Satan, who in turn symbolizes sinful humanity under God’s judgment. The smoke signifies spiritual blindness, and the sting is “psychological suffering that will induce a desire for death, yet an unwillingness to commit suicide.”
The futurist, on the other hand, identify the locust judgment as an end-time day of the Lord judgment that is modeled on the Egyptian plagues and on the locust judgment of Joel 2 (Irenaeus, de Burgh, Ladd, Osborne, Fanning). The star is identified as an angel (Thomas, Osborne, Fanning). The smoke is either actual smoke (Thomas) or an allusion to Day of the Lord texts (Fanning). The sting refers to actual pain. Apollyon is a demon (Thomas, Fanning), and thus the locusts are in some sense demonic. There is some disagreement among futurists. Is the angel fallen or unfallen? Are the locusts demons in some kind of physical form or does that not need to be determined? But the range is narrower.
In sum, I think a futurist reading of Revelation has greater Old Testament warrant and greater historical warrant than idealism. In the end, it also ends up being less speculative and more grounded in the biblical text. I suspect that what most people are reacting to when they reject futurism in favor of idealism is not futurism at all but a kind of historicism present in pop dispensationalism.
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