But yet, the early church reluctantly accepted the book as part of the New Testament, indicating perhaps that it saw something else of value in Revelations. There seems to be a contradiction. And philosopher Ayn Rand warns us that there’s no such thing, one or the other of the premises must be wrong. In our case, the simplifying assumption would be to consider the Book of Revelations not so much as prophetic text as an overall parable of good and evil meant to instill a necessary amount of fear of god in a world where Christian believers were surrounded by the temptations of Greco-Roman hedonistic paganism. And as we’ll see, the church had the same views of Revelations.
There were many vague attempts at tempering the seductive effects of Revelation’s powerful imagery and robust machinations. The Christian church declared in the fourth century that “a good Christian must not commit the error of reading Revelation carnally—that is taking John’s visions of the end-times literally, but instead must read [Revelations] spiritually “, in an attempt to force believers to see the Revelation as a metaphoric work of allegory, rather than a literal prophetic time bomb. (Kirsch, 116) The Christian Cleric Tyconius taught that the “terrible and glorious images and incidents in Revelation…must be understood as symbolic expressions of an ongoing struggle between good and evil rather than a literal account of things to come”. (Kirsch, 118) Right here we have not only an attempt to “tame the apocalyptic tradition” but also a sort of heavy artillery argument against those that would proclaim Revelation as truth, and go on to base radicalized notions of religious fundamentalism off of what should and can ONLY be, a parable.(Kirsch, 116)
I particularly enjoyed the Ayn Rand reference – it’s somewhat refreshing to see an objectivist take on Kirsch’s work as a whole, but even more so on the doomsday issue with regards to Revelation specifically. Kudos. But, do you truly believe the work to be babble?
No, No i meant that the canonization of the Book of Revelations has made it harder for the general audience (or rather, general religious audience) to disregard it (as babble), not that i particularly thought it was babble…
Do we have another objectivist in the house? I didn’t think anyone would pick up on the minute Rand reference….
Does empiricism have anything to do with objectivism? Based on a cursory glance, the two seem to coexist. Just wondering, because the concept is intriguing to me. I do think that the canonization of Revelation inevitably changed its impact as a text. I keep coming back to the perplexing nature of “canon” in religion because texts like Revelation are so incredibly difficult to standardize or interpret collectively. I suppose in some ways, a group of people agreeing completely on a book’s intention and meaning is quite dangerous – in the instance of the Branch Davidians, for example, who seemed to be in a quite steadfast agreement on the text. Engaging in discourse is a much healthier route to pursue that joining a cult, in my opinion.