Revised and expanded version of the author's dissertation (PhD)--Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The Reverend Clarence Larkin was one of the most widely influential thinkers on end-times prophecies of the early twentieth century, and his writings remain vital to appreciating the apocalyptic Christian thought that today enjoys widespread popularity. This 1919 book serves as a study guide for the Book of Revelation, the Bible's prophetic final chapter. Larkin explains the concepts of the Beast and the False Prophet, the Seven Seals and the Seven Trumpets, and the importance of the Book of Daniel in understanding the Rapture. Charts and illustrations depict the "Pale Horse Rider," "Daniel's Four Wild Beasts," "Egyptian Plagues Compared," and more. Also available from Cosimo Classics: Larkin's The Spirit World, Rightly Dividing the Word, and The Second Coming of Christ. American Baptist pastor and author CLARENCE LARKIN (1850-1924) was born in Pennsylvania, and later set up his ministry there. He wrote extensively and popularly on a wide range of Biblical and theological matters.

John Paul Heil presents an original analysis of the theme of worship in the book of Revelation guided by a new illustration of its comprehensive chiastic structure. The worship that Revelation exhorts and enables is in the divine Spirit of prophetic witness against all forms of idolatrous worship on earth in favor of a true, heavenly, and universal worship of the Lord God and the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lamb, for an eternal and heavenly life. The audience begins this worship in the eucharistic supper into which Revelation leads them by inviting them to respond to the promise of Jesus, "Yes, I am coming soon," with "Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!" They thereby affirm and welcome the coming of the Lord Jesus, the exalted sacrificial Lamb, to the eucharistic supper that anticipates his final coming and the divine grace, the gift of eternal life, of the Lord Jesus that is intended to be the destiny of all--"The grace of the Lord Jesus with all!"

The Book of Revelation can be read in various ways. Where interpretation opts not to venture beyond Revelation or approach the book as a forecast of end-time events, it typically favours either going behind the text, in search of a socio-historical context of origin to which it might refer, or else standing in front of the text and investigating the book’s reception history, or its present relevance and impact. Comparatively little interpretative work has been undertaken inside the text, exploring the mechanics of how Revelation ‘works’, still less how its complex parts might fit together into a meaningful whole. Gordon Campbell considers Revelation to be a coherent narrative composition that draws its hearer or reader into its text-world. In Reading Revelation: A Thematic Approach, Campbell gives an innovative account of Revelation’s sophisticated thematic content. Mindful of Revelation's narrative verve, or its architecture en mouvement (as Jacques Ellul once put it), Campbell plots a series of thematic trajectories through the book. On this reading, parody and parallelism fundamentally shape the whole narrative. As a first-ever integrated account of Revelation’s macro-themes, Reading Revelation makes an important contribution to Revelation scholarship. In its light, the book may justifiably be seen as the ‘crowning achievement’ of the Scriptures.

Could the cry “Come out of her My people” (Rev 18:4) not be needed more today than it was when John penned the Apocalypse? The book of Revelation begins and ends with the affirmation that God is the world’s true Lord, not Caesar. In telling this story, John lays out for us the fact that Christ’s kingdom is not like the kingdoms of the world. The kingdoms of the world rule by force and at the expense of the masses and for the benefit of those in power. Jesus’s kingdom, however, comes through love. In Christ’s kingdom, power is demonstrated by laying down one’s life for one’s enemies. Jesus, of course, demonstrated this kind of love on the cross, and he calls us to do the same. We have nothing to fear. After all, Jesus was dead and now he is alive and he has the keys to Death and Hades. Unfortunately, many interpreters have come to believe that the devastation and destruction depicted in the book of Revelation—in particular, in the accounts of the Seven Seals and the Seven Bowls—are God’s end-times wrath. But have we ever stopped to consider that this portrait of God is fundamentally at odds with the gospel? And with Jesus’s call for us to love one another even as he loved us? The book of Revelation tells a different story.

This book argues that the throne motif constitutes the major interpretive key to the complex structure and theology of the book of Revelation. In the first part of the book, Gallusz examines the throne motif in the Old Testament, Jewish literature and Graeco-Roman sources. He moves on to devote significant attention to the throne of God texts of Revelation and particularly to the analysis of the throne-room vision (chs. 4&5), which is foundational for the development of the throne motif. Gallusz reveals how Revelation utilizes the throne motif as the central principle for conveying a theological message, since it appears as the focus of the author from the outset to the climax of the drama. The book concludes with an investigation into the rhetorical impact of the motif and its contribution to the theology of Revelation. Gallusz finally shows that the throne, what it actually represents, is of critical significance both to Revelation's theism and to God's dealing with the problem of evil in the course of human history.

Die Reihe Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZNW) ist eine der ältesten und renommiertesten internationalen Buchreihen zur neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft. Seit 1923 publiziert sie wegweisende Forschungsarbeiten zum frühen Christentum und angrenzenden Themengebieten. Die Reihe ist historisch-kritisch verankert und steht neuen methodischen Ansätzen, die unser Verständnis des Neuen Testaments befördern, gleichfalls offen gegenüber.