Religion

5 Pages 1188 Words

No part of the Bible and its interpretation is more controversial than the book of Revelation. The book of Revelation is the last profound book in the New Testament. It conveys the significant purpose of Christianity by describing God’s plan for the world and his final judgment of the people by reinforcing the importance of faith and the concept of Christianity as a whole. This book was written by John in 95 or 96 AD. What is, what has been, and what is to come is the central focus of the content in Revelation.
Literalist fundamentalists read Revelation’s multivalent visions as predictions of doom and threat, of punishment for the many and salvation for the elect few. Scholarly scientific readings seek to translate the book’s ambiguity into one-to-one meanings and to transpose its language of symbol and myth into description and facts. In Elisabeth Schûssler Fiorenza’s The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgment, a third way of reading Revelation is depicted. The collection of essays in this book seeks to intervene in scholarly as well as popular discourses on the apocalypse from a liberationist feminist perspective.
The first two parts of the book discuss the kind of theological-historical perspective and ecclesial situation that determines the form-content configuration of Revelation. The first section attempts to assess the theological commonality to and differences from Jewish apocalypticism. Fiorenza focuses of the problem that although Revelation claims to be a genuinely Christian book and has found its way into the Christian canon, it is often judged to be more Jewish than Christian and not to have achieved the “heights” of genuinely early Christian theology. In the second part of the book, Fiorenza seeks to assess whether and how much Revelation shares in the theological structure of the Fourth Gospel. Fiorenza proposes that a careful analysis of Revelation would suggest that Pauline, Johannine, and C...