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| Essential 100 -- Picture language? | | Date Created: May 27, 2005, 09:11 AM |
100 — Friday May 27 — Revelation 21, 22
It's picture language. How easy it is to assume that this is hyperbole -- a description of events in space and time that is being exaggerated for effect. You know the kind of thing -- treating Revelation the way that Tom Wright treats Jesus' endtime language: Mark's Jesus used exaggerated language about the stars falling and rivers of blood and angels gathering the elect from every corner of the earth. But Wright thinks Jesus was merely speaking about the isolated destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD -- no literal stars, or angels or world-wide angelic harvest. (Wright thinks there will be a second coming but doesn't think Jesus spoke about it here.)
It'd be easy to extrapolate that modern demythologizing tendency to Revelation and assume that the seer is viewing the twentyfirst or twentysecond century when we humans have at last made poverty history and built spectacular gated communities beyond the ken of a first century peasant like John. He's seeing chrome and calling it burnished silver, seeing clear plastic and calling it glass, seeing glowing LCDs and thinking opals and sapphires and rubies.
For those naive first century people, the future had to be dumbed down. (So we're told.)
Me, I think it's more likely that Jesus and John understood and were dumbing down for our sake. I think it far from likely that we understand better than they do. I think it more likely that the reality is going to be more than our current language/understanding allows, rather than less. |
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