Conquering with Christ: A Commentary on the Book of Revelation

by Ian A. Fair

This commentary seeks to bridge the gap between advanced scholarly commentaries that are available. Where necessary the author has engaged the original Greek of Revelation but in a way that those who do not read Greek can understand the insights the original language provides. The commentary sets the message of Revelation in the context of the first-century churches in Asia, but also seeks to identify the theological principles that are relevant for the church in the twenty-first century.

446 pages, Paperback

First published September 20, 2011

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one started out promisingly and really turned into a slog. There is no way a commentary on Revelation should be this hard to read; one gets the sense that even the author lost interest halfway through, not to mention the editor. The rate of typos, redundancies and stylistic inconsistencies increases as the book goes on, culminating in no fewer than two instances where whole blocks of text are accidentally repeated verbatim.

It would be one thing if this sloppiness was confined to the book's infrastructure, but unfortunately the content is not much better. Fair's argument, stated ad nauseum, is that Revelation is dealing primarily with issues affecting the first-century church, and its colorful prophecies should be interpreted through the lens of Roman persecution and the ultimate message that martyrs will be fully justified as conquerors with Christ over the twin beasts of Roman political and religious rule. That's an excellent thesis, but Fair supports it by citing mainly the same four or five sources over and over while never seriously engaging those who think otherwise. There is a lot of argument by assertion – such and such a verse should not be read in a premillennial dispensationalist way – but little else. This is especially true in the way Fair treats the universalist passages later in Revelation. Again, he does not seriously engage the scholarship of those with whom he disagrees; he simply dismisses the view, restates his own position, moves on.

Full disclosure: I took a Revelation class from Fair my senior year of college, and I found him to be an incredibly unhelpful and arrogant professor who simply had no time for arguments from an alternate hermeneutic lens. As it turns out, I now agree with him more than I disagree, but this book still holds traces of that arrogance. Sure, actually addressing the arguments of the "Left Behind" crowd would have significantly increased the size of the book, but since it already feels like it's about twice as long as it should be, maybe such attention to dissenting voices would have improved it.