Why is the Book of Revelation claimed by every era?
One of the (many) great paradoxes of the Book of Revelation is that, at one and the same time, it is experienced as both very difficult to interpret, yet also very easy. This explains the very different reactions to it as a biblical text; those who instinctively sense that it is difficult to interpret find it quote opaque, and so tend to avoid it. But there are others who seem very confident that it is very easy to understand, and more specifically very easy to see how it is predicting the events of our own day. As I have previously explored, it turns out that Christian readers in almost every age have felt the same—that the text is specifically and uniquely about the events of their own day!
How can a text offer both possibilities to different readers? There are lots of reasons for this, connected with both the context in which the book is written, and the way John makes use of language in it. The first is that it is intricately connected with its historical context in ways which fundamentally affect the way we interpret it. (For a fuller exploration of all these issues, see my commentary on Revelation in the Tyndale series here.)
Perhaps the best-known example of this is the question of what it means to be ‘lukewarm’ in the message to the ekklesia in Laodicea in Rev 3.15–16. It is usually assumed that to be ‘hot’ is to be fervent (a good thing) and to be ‘cold’ is to be indifferent to faith (a bad thing). So how could the risen Christ prefer us to be cold than to be ‘lukewarm’ (usually assumed to mean being neither one nor the other—Anglican in fact!). But in its historical context, hot and cold are both good things to be.
