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Professor offers insight on Revelation
By LINDA M. LINONIS
YOUNGSTOWN
If you’re looking for the date that the world will end, you won’t find it in Revelation, according to a biblical scholar who spoke at First Presbyterian Church on Tuesday.
Dr. Craig R. Koester, a professor and the Asher O. and Carrie Nasby chair of New Testament at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minn., said readers of that book of the Bible should read it “contextually and see how it flows in literally and historically.”
“Read Revelation as a whole, and see where it leads,” he told a public audience Tuesday evening gathered to hear his talk on “The Open Heaven and the Chaotic Earth: The Book of Revelation and Christian Worship.”
Revelation is considered “provocative and controversial,” he said. If you’re looking for the “end-date” of the world, he said, you won’t find it.
Koester, who has a doctorate from Union Theological Seminary in New York and master of divinity degree from Luther Seminary, said popular culture is “looking for answers” and “seeing if anything can be made to fit” verses in Revelation.
He said popular culture is fascinated with www.raptureready.com, which offers a “gauge of the end times.” Whatever question you might have about “the end,” the website provides an answer.
Koester said before such websites, there were people such as John Nelson Darby, who was known as an interpreter of biblical prophecy. While Colonial and federal eras in the United States projected optimism, Darby predicted life would get worse. Only then would Jesus return to usher in a new age, the speaker said. Darby might have originated the idea that Christ would remove Christians from the world before the tribulation that precedes the second coming of Christ.
Koester also cited the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909, Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” in 1970 and the “Left Behind” series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins about the world’s end, which all reference dispensationalism. That’s the belief that between creation and the final judgment, there will be seven distinct eras of God’s interaction with man.
Koester urged Revelation readers to view the book as one that reveals, not conceals. The book presents a “revolutionary idea” of Jesus as the center of the church. For early Christians, this was a unique idea and issue. Koester said the faith of early Christians set them apart from a wider non-Christian culture. The book, he said, takes readers “into the presence of the living God.”
Earlier Tuesday, Koester spoke to about 50 clergy and lay leaders at a seminar at First Presbyterian, 201 Wick Ave., addressing the topic, “The Book of Revelation and Popular Culture: Experiencing the Last Book of the Bible.”
His appearance was part of the David S. Schaff Lecture Series, previously established at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and which offers one address in Youngstown.
The educational program is open to people of all denominations.