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T&T Clark International Theological Commentary
Revelation 1-11 (ITC)
The Book of Revelation is the last book in the canon of the New Testament, and its only apocalyptic document, though there are short apocalyptic passages in various places in the gospels and the epistles. This first of two volumes on Revelation offers systematic and thorough interpretation of the book of Revelation. Revelation brings together the worlds of heaven, earth and hell in a final confrontation between the forces of good and evil. Its characters and images are both real and symbolic, spiritual and material, and it is frequently difficult to know the difference between them.
Revelation's cryptic nature has ensured that it would always be a source of controversy. This commentary focuses on the theological content, gleaning the best from both the classical and modern commentary traditions and showing the doctrinal development of Scriptural truths. Scholarship on the book of Revelation has nonetheless not only endured, but even captured the imagination of generations of Bible students, both professionals and laypeople alike. Through its focus on the message of the book through scholarly analysis, this International Theological Commentary reconnects to the ecclesial tradition of biblical commentary as an effort in ressourcement, though not slavish repetition.
Revelation's cryptic nature has ensured that it would always be a source of controversy. This commentary focuses on the theological content, gleaning the best from both the classical and modern commentary traditions and showing the doctrinal development of Scriptural truths. Scholarship on the book of Revelation has nonetheless not only endured, but even captured the imagination of generations of Bible students, both professionals and laypeople alike. Through its focus on the message of the book through scholarly analysis, this International Theological Commentary reconnects to the ecclesial tradition of biblical commentary as an effort in ressourcement, though not slavish repetition.
- GenresTheology
502 pages, Hardcover
First published July 19, 2016
17 people are currently reading
124 people want to read
About the author
Peter J. Leithart
130 books364 followersPeter Leithart received an A.B. in English and History from Hillsdale College in 1981, and a Master of Arts in Religion and a Master of Theology from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in 1986 and 1987. In 1998 he received his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in England. He has served in two pastorates: He was pastor of Reformed Heritage Presbyterian Church (now Trinity Presbyterian Church), Birmingham, Alabama from 1989 to 1995, and was founding pastor of Trinity Reformed Church, Moscow, Idaho, and served on the pastoral staff at Trinity from 2003-2013. From 1998 to 2013 he taught theology and literature at New St. Andrews College, Moscow, Idaho, where he continues to teach as an adjunct Senior Fellow. He now serves as President of Trinity House in Alabama, where is also resident Church Teacher at the local CREC church. He and his wife, Noel, have ten children and five grandchildren.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 29, 2018
Leithart is in some ways a second alma mater. Reading his book House for My Name sent me on a voyage of study that led me to James Jordan and led to a re-examination of virtually every book in the Bible, looking for literary artistry and deeper patterns in every verse. That said, this book pulls off the breaks and not in a good way.
Leithart wrote a book called Deep Exegesis, and in it he says a very many disturbing things, two being particularly bad clunkers. First, there are things predicted in passages, such as Hosea 11:1, which the prophet “could not have intended in any sense of the word intend.”(p. 36). So how is it a prophecy? Well, second, Leithart says, “The Apostles teach us to recognize that ‘how it turned out’ exposes dimensions of the original event or text that may not have been apparent, and perhaps were not even there, until it turned out as it did.” What the heck? So how can a prophecy only intend something after that something has happened? If someone walked up to you, claimed to fulfill a prophecy, and then said that he actually added stuff to the prophecy that wasn't there to begin with, you would call that person a charlatan, not a prophet. Now of course, there is a lot in the New Testament not disclosed in the Old Testament clearly, most prominently, the Incarnation, and there are some tough questions to deal with it, but theories of retroactive causality cannot solve those problems.
I've said all this before, but I still liked Deep Exegesis because the ways Leithart recommends reading Scripture are usually much saner than these statements would entail, and in fact Leithart often shows that the Old Testament intended a lot more than we think, which is actually something that is very grammatical-historical. But it turns out that you can only chop off so many branches that you stand on before, like Wile E. Coyote, you fall into the abyss, and that happened when Leithart chopped off authorial intent.
Much of this book, especially the first two hundred pages is free association interpretation. It's literary symbolism run amok: every image of fire evokes a sacrifice, every image of water equals Gentiles, every feminine description means the church who is Christ who is the angels. While I appreciate how every time I get an image from Revelation Leithart gives me half a dozen Old Testament references, he offers no defense of why any particular passage should be in the background. What enables Leithart to get away with this is often the fact that none of this is crazy talk, and in fact the above is not inappropriate as a sort of poetic, Biblical imagery-inspired description of Jesus. However, the lack of methodological discipline basically means anything can mean anything as long as it sounds plausible to Leithart. And of course, such a hermeneutic is only safe when it's in the right hands; if it were to be adopted in matters of doctrine or practice, watch out.
Leithart at least recognizes from time to time that his many sequences of seven are rather forced. I don't think they fit like a glove, and they push people away from the text rather than towards it. We need more and SLOWER work here. We need careful scholars spending hundreds of years trying to figure this out, offering readings and picking up on details that have been observed in isolation and putting them together. Obviously, I think that we have discovered a great deal, perhaps in just the last few years (and incidentally this is the result of Protestant grammatical historical interpretation) and we should explore all the stuff that's obvious. But let's not jump ahead of ourselves.
In addition, the refusal to be disciplined in interpretation means that Leithart can smuggle in the idiosyncrasies of his own theology and, when questioned, can simply argue that he's letting Scripture speak for itself. Here are some examples of the kinds of things I'm talking about:
-So while it is true that worship is much more important than we thought (see below), and Leithart is to be commended for this, he continues to speak about "liturgy" and "eucharists." Again, there is something smuggled into the terms here, which will really hurt the readers that swallow the paradigm without realizing that the paradigm is not actually in the text. Also, he thinks that stoles are clothing from the eschaton.
-Early church fathers constantly get footnotes; Calvin and later Protestant exegetes generally are ignored for what should be obvious reasons.
-Constant "church as atonement" language, where Leithart pushes the boundaries by talking about how the church adds to Christ's work. Not heretical actually when you get down to it (Leithart qualifies by saying that we never add to Jesus' atoning work and says that it's all about bringing wrath on our enemies), but it's always worded in a troublesome way. It is probably part of the troublesome idea Leithart has that the visible church somehow is Jesus ooly-truly real body on earth; in other words, a high, overrealized ecclesiology.
-His Trinitarian theology is a mess. We had a public discussion with Peter Escalante about Leithart's problems here. Leithart wants to use personalistic language (despite the fact that the Bible uses it to refer to the father-son relationship no the Father-Spirit or Son-Spirit relationship) to describe the ad intra relationship, which is not bad, but he does so without explaining why he's not a tritheist and without reference to what the doctrine meant as developed by the Church Fathers and Medievals. He plays with Arianism and subordinationism at one point, talking about submission as though it were equivalent to Jesus being begotten (p. 73). I am very nervous about this kind of thing and I am going to be hopefully doing some research on Trinitarian theology and the proper boundaries in the next few months.
Still, despite all these problems--and they were serious enough that for a time I did not want to finish the book--I do want to commend Leithart's book for a bunch of things and state my agreement on some of the broad picture items.
The best thing about this book is that it scratches an itch I didn't know I had. In many ways, I'm a second generation preterist. It is a generation I predict that will revolt against postmillenialism soon, which will incidentally be all for the best. But I think preterism will succeed, and in particular I think that preterist readings of Revelation will succeed.
So premillenialism succeeded at making Revelation scary for me and for many kids (I know for a fact this is not the universal experience though), and it resulted in a lot of us rejecting the frantic endtimes stuff because (as one friend admitted to me) we want to have kids and a family. It was inconvenient that Jesus come again. Thus, Revelation was actually difficult to disassociate from dispensationalism and 9/11, etc for a long time. Even though I never believed in it, I was terrified by the vision.
Along came the preterists, Chilton and Gary DeMar, who all insisted forcefully and persuasively that Matthew 25 was about the destruction of Jerusalem. This generation was a generation of arguers and contrarians, who had a lot of sharp things to say, but not a lot of devotional theology. For them Revelation had to be won rather than meditated on. There was never any time for application (I'm sure this could be falsified but if you look at most of Gary DeMar's stuff, the emphasis is more on being right than on patience in suffering. He also points out how victorious and triumphant this makes the church: our suffering is truly great, but it's effective. That's found in the rest of the New Testament but it's really summed up here. I needed a book that allowed Revelation to breathe freely as the message it is in the original setting.
Peter Leithart's book is useful because the skeleton, subtracted from the overwrought flabby fat of deep exegesis gone amok, is a very powerful theme: the suffering of the church is what unleashes the apocalypse. This brings me to the key readings that Leithart makes in this book that I heartily agree with:
-First, I think he is absolutely right about the oikoumene of Israel and Rome, something established with Israel in Babylon. In a significant footnote, he argues that the "man of sin" in Thessalonians is the Jews, who are restrained by the Romans, which is what we see in Acts, where the Jews try to kill Paul and other Apostles, but are restrained by Roman rulers. This comes to end around the time of Revelation when the two beasts (the sea and land beast, Nero and Jews) come together to persecute the Church, but the Jewish threat is the bigger one and the one that is most decisively dealt with.
-Second, there is a contrast between the New Jerusalem, the church, coming out of heaven, and the Old Jerusalem, which is described as Babylon, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Egypt. Since the Roman Empire lasted for several more centuries (and indeed persecuted Christians), it cannot be the central bad guy. That has to be the Jews.
-Third, the seven churches are warned in the opening letters to not give in to the twin temptations of Judaizing and pitching incense to the Emperor. The churches in Asia are full of Jews and the Imperial cult and so the command not to eat food offered to idols refers to Emperor worship (and perhaps to eating only Jewish foods).
-Fourth, the seven seals refers to the work of the early church. The four horsemen represent the going out of the gospel. Jesus rides the horse and the horses represent the gospel which brings disruption, division, and hardening in the Jews. The blood of the martyrs is spilled until the fifth seal when their prayers are placed on the altar of incense (the bronze altar in the outer courtyard), and they are told to wait until their suffering is filled up. The going out of the horses is linked with the going out of the church after the martyrdom of Stephen.
-Fifth, the seven trumpets represent intensified persecution and intensified tribulation in Israel. The famine predicted by Agabus in Acts for which Paul sought collections, and which might have had a more severe impact on Jews than on Christians since the Christians would have supported one another, some would have done better during famine than Jews. Further, Paul and the Christians travel the seas, and so their martyrdom makes the rivers bloody. The fall of the star which makes wormwood is the "demonic" persecution of the Jews. The Scorpions (or more oddly "Locorpions") are Judaizers. The rod that John takes up divides between compromised, apostate Christians and those who persevere; the Temple that he measures is the new covenant Temple with the Jews casting themselves out by trying to cast out Christians from the synagogues. The Temple that is trampled is the church. The weakest argument is the claim that the Hippolions are good angels, defending Christians from idolatry. It can't really explain why they are serpents and doesn't really show that they're different than the Locorpion attack. It really shows again the limits of this kind of interpretation, since almost anything can turn into anything and thus it is no more reliable in principle than any attempts to match Revelation up with current events or even with the course of history. But it's dealing with the first century in a more dynamic way and it's brave exegesis: pushing the suffering forward is something that no preterist (except perhaps Jordan) would have done before. No doubt Kenneth Gentry's commentary will describe this as a description of the fall of Jerusalem. The trouble is, again, what is the theological significance of emphasizing this? Why is this in the last book of the Bible? What is God teaching his Church? Surely there's more here than "the bad Jews' asses get kicked."
-Finally, despite all my griping about Leithart turning this book into an opportunity to associate any two events in the Old Testament, regardless of how tenuous the connection, there is a lot of useful stuff. For instance, Leithart points out that the tribe of Dan is not mentioned among the 144,000 sealed and argues that Dan had basically failed. They are the "Judas" tribe. That's doing one's homework. He points to connections with the plagues, connections with the Exodus, connections with the prophets, connections with the New testament. Little things ,like the connection between Ezekiel cutting off one-third of his hair, burning another third, and scattering another third and the destruction of one-third of the people at various times are what make this book quite good at times. One of my favorites are the idea that the bitterness of the scroll in the belly of the prophet (Ezekiel, John) alludes the jealousy test, and the two witnesses being reminiscent of the two angels that visit Sodom and Gomorrah. It does not make the belly swell: the test of reading the book purifies, but it does not break. It's an experience in the right sense of the word.
So, should you buy this? If you're already into Leithart or really want to get a good preterist reading of Revelation, it might be worthy the many, many dollars you will have to give up. Otherwise, skip it; someone else will purify the dross. Indeed, it's odd that with Revelation already being so complex, Leithart felt he had to add to the complexity. He's at his best when he shows how it's surprisingly simple.
Leithart wrote a book called Deep Exegesis, and in it he says a very many disturbing things, two being particularly bad clunkers. First, there are things predicted in passages, such as Hosea 11:1, which the prophet “could not have intended in any sense of the word intend.”(p. 36). So how is it a prophecy? Well, second, Leithart says, “The Apostles teach us to recognize that ‘how it turned out’ exposes dimensions of the original event or text that may not have been apparent, and perhaps were not even there, until it turned out as it did.” What the heck? So how can a prophecy only intend something after that something has happened? If someone walked up to you, claimed to fulfill a prophecy, and then said that he actually added stuff to the prophecy that wasn't there to begin with, you would call that person a charlatan, not a prophet. Now of course, there is a lot in the New Testament not disclosed in the Old Testament clearly, most prominently, the Incarnation, and there are some tough questions to deal with it, but theories of retroactive causality cannot solve those problems.
I've said all this before, but I still liked Deep Exegesis because the ways Leithart recommends reading Scripture are usually much saner than these statements would entail, and in fact Leithart often shows that the Old Testament intended a lot more than we think, which is actually something that is very grammatical-historical. But it turns out that you can only chop off so many branches that you stand on before, like Wile E. Coyote, you fall into the abyss, and that happened when Leithart chopped off authorial intent.
Much of this book, especially the first two hundred pages is free association interpretation. It's literary symbolism run amok: every image of fire evokes a sacrifice, every image of water equals Gentiles, every feminine description means the church who is Christ who is the angels. While I appreciate how every time I get an image from Revelation Leithart gives me half a dozen Old Testament references, he offers no defense of why any particular passage should be in the background. What enables Leithart to get away with this is often the fact that none of this is crazy talk, and in fact the above is not inappropriate as a sort of poetic, Biblical imagery-inspired description of Jesus. However, the lack of methodological discipline basically means anything can mean anything as long as it sounds plausible to Leithart. And of course, such a hermeneutic is only safe when it's in the right hands; if it were to be adopted in matters of doctrine or practice, watch out.
Leithart at least recognizes from time to time that his many sequences of seven are rather forced. I don't think they fit like a glove, and they push people away from the text rather than towards it. We need more and SLOWER work here. We need careful scholars spending hundreds of years trying to figure this out, offering readings and picking up on details that have been observed in isolation and putting them together. Obviously, I think that we have discovered a great deal, perhaps in just the last few years (and incidentally this is the result of Protestant grammatical historical interpretation) and we should explore all the stuff that's obvious. But let's not jump ahead of ourselves.
In addition, the refusal to be disciplined in interpretation means that Leithart can smuggle in the idiosyncrasies of his own theology and, when questioned, can simply argue that he's letting Scripture speak for itself. Here are some examples of the kinds of things I'm talking about:
-So while it is true that worship is much more important than we thought (see below), and Leithart is to be commended for this, he continues to speak about "liturgy" and "eucharists." Again, there is something smuggled into the terms here, which will really hurt the readers that swallow the paradigm without realizing that the paradigm is not actually in the text. Also, he thinks that stoles are clothing from the eschaton.
-Early church fathers constantly get footnotes; Calvin and later Protestant exegetes generally are ignored for what should be obvious reasons.
-Constant "church as atonement" language, where Leithart pushes the boundaries by talking about how the church adds to Christ's work. Not heretical actually when you get down to it (Leithart qualifies by saying that we never add to Jesus' atoning work and says that it's all about bringing wrath on our enemies), but it's always worded in a troublesome way. It is probably part of the troublesome idea Leithart has that the visible church somehow is Jesus ooly-truly real body on earth; in other words, a high, overrealized ecclesiology.
-His Trinitarian theology is a mess. We had a public discussion with Peter Escalante about Leithart's problems here. Leithart wants to use personalistic language (despite the fact that the Bible uses it to refer to the father-son relationship no the Father-Spirit or Son-Spirit relationship) to describe the ad intra relationship, which is not bad, but he does so without explaining why he's not a tritheist and without reference to what the doctrine meant as developed by the Church Fathers and Medievals. He plays with Arianism and subordinationism at one point, talking about submission as though it were equivalent to Jesus being begotten (p. 73). I am very nervous about this kind of thing and I am going to be hopefully doing some research on Trinitarian theology and the proper boundaries in the next few months.
Still, despite all these problems--and they were serious enough that for a time I did not want to finish the book--I do want to commend Leithart's book for a bunch of things and state my agreement on some of the broad picture items.
The best thing about this book is that it scratches an itch I didn't know I had. In many ways, I'm a second generation preterist. It is a generation I predict that will revolt against postmillenialism soon, which will incidentally be all for the best. But I think preterism will succeed, and in particular I think that preterist readings of Revelation will succeed.
So premillenialism succeeded at making Revelation scary for me and for many kids (I know for a fact this is not the universal experience though), and it resulted in a lot of us rejecting the frantic endtimes stuff because (as one friend admitted to me) we want to have kids and a family. It was inconvenient that Jesus come again. Thus, Revelation was actually difficult to disassociate from dispensationalism and 9/11, etc for a long time. Even though I never believed in it, I was terrified by the vision.
Along came the preterists, Chilton and Gary DeMar, who all insisted forcefully and persuasively that Matthew 25 was about the destruction of Jerusalem. This generation was a generation of arguers and contrarians, who had a lot of sharp things to say, but not a lot of devotional theology. For them Revelation had to be won rather than meditated on. There was never any time for application (I'm sure this could be falsified but if you look at most of Gary DeMar's stuff, the emphasis is more on being right than on patience in suffering. He also points out how victorious and triumphant this makes the church: our suffering is truly great, but it's effective. That's found in the rest of the New Testament but it's really summed up here. I needed a book that allowed Revelation to breathe freely as the message it is in the original setting.
Peter Leithart's book is useful because the skeleton, subtracted from the overwrought flabby fat of deep exegesis gone amok, is a very powerful theme: the suffering of the church is what unleashes the apocalypse. This brings me to the key readings that Leithart makes in this book that I heartily agree with:
-First, I think he is absolutely right about the oikoumene of Israel and Rome, something established with Israel in Babylon. In a significant footnote, he argues that the "man of sin" in Thessalonians is the Jews, who are restrained by the Romans, which is what we see in Acts, where the Jews try to kill Paul and other Apostles, but are restrained by Roman rulers. This comes to end around the time of Revelation when the two beasts (the sea and land beast, Nero and Jews) come together to persecute the Church, but the Jewish threat is the bigger one and the one that is most decisively dealt with.
-Second, there is a contrast between the New Jerusalem, the church, coming out of heaven, and the Old Jerusalem, which is described as Babylon, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Egypt. Since the Roman Empire lasted for several more centuries (and indeed persecuted Christians), it cannot be the central bad guy. That has to be the Jews.
-Third, the seven churches are warned in the opening letters to not give in to the twin temptations of Judaizing and pitching incense to the Emperor. The churches in Asia are full of Jews and the Imperial cult and so the command not to eat food offered to idols refers to Emperor worship (and perhaps to eating only Jewish foods).
-Fourth, the seven seals refers to the work of the early church. The four horsemen represent the going out of the gospel. Jesus rides the horse and the horses represent the gospel which brings disruption, division, and hardening in the Jews. The blood of the martyrs is spilled until the fifth seal when their prayers are placed on the altar of incense (the bronze altar in the outer courtyard), and they are told to wait until their suffering is filled up. The going out of the horses is linked with the going out of the church after the martyrdom of Stephen.
-Fifth, the seven trumpets represent intensified persecution and intensified tribulation in Israel. The famine predicted by Agabus in Acts for which Paul sought collections, and which might have had a more severe impact on Jews than on Christians since the Christians would have supported one another, some would have done better during famine than Jews. Further, Paul and the Christians travel the seas, and so their martyrdom makes the rivers bloody. The fall of the star which makes wormwood is the "demonic" persecution of the Jews. The Scorpions (or more oddly "Locorpions") are Judaizers. The rod that John takes up divides between compromised, apostate Christians and those who persevere; the Temple that he measures is the new covenant Temple with the Jews casting themselves out by trying to cast out Christians from the synagogues. The Temple that is trampled is the church. The weakest argument is the claim that the Hippolions are good angels, defending Christians from idolatry. It can't really explain why they are serpents and doesn't really show that they're different than the Locorpion attack. It really shows again the limits of this kind of interpretation, since almost anything can turn into anything and thus it is no more reliable in principle than any attempts to match Revelation up with current events or even with the course of history. But it's dealing with the first century in a more dynamic way and it's brave exegesis: pushing the suffering forward is something that no preterist (except perhaps Jordan) would have done before. No doubt Kenneth Gentry's commentary will describe this as a description of the fall of Jerusalem. The trouble is, again, what is the theological significance of emphasizing this? Why is this in the last book of the Bible? What is God teaching his Church? Surely there's more here than "the bad Jews' asses get kicked."
-Finally, despite all my griping about Leithart turning this book into an opportunity to associate any two events in the Old Testament, regardless of how tenuous the connection, there is a lot of useful stuff. For instance, Leithart points out that the tribe of Dan is not mentioned among the 144,000 sealed and argues that Dan had basically failed. They are the "Judas" tribe. That's doing one's homework. He points to connections with the plagues, connections with the Exodus, connections with the prophets, connections with the New testament. Little things ,like the connection between Ezekiel cutting off one-third of his hair, burning another third, and scattering another third and the destruction of one-third of the people at various times are what make this book quite good at times. One of my favorites are the idea that the bitterness of the scroll in the belly of the prophet (Ezekiel, John) alludes the jealousy test, and the two witnesses being reminiscent of the two angels that visit Sodom and Gomorrah. It does not make the belly swell: the test of reading the book purifies, but it does not break. It's an experience in the right sense of the word.
So, should you buy this? If you're already into Leithart or really want to get a good preterist reading of Revelation, it might be worthy the many, many dollars you will have to give up. Otherwise, skip it; someone else will purify the dross. Indeed, it's odd that with Revelation already being so complex, Leithart felt he had to add to the complexity. He's at his best when he shows how it's surprisingly simple.
January 12, 2022
Probably the most Leithart of Leithart's books: beautiful, creative, frustrating, confusing. A wild ride. I most enjoyed his deep engagement in the OT—individual allusions but also bigger scriptural patterns—his appreciation of early interpreters, and his pushback on idealist readings. Least enjoyed the abundance of chiasms and long rabbit trails. Ironically, his commentary helped reinforce (and nuance) my largely futurist interpretation
February 20, 2021
Was there stuff to appreciate here? Yes. Did I like it? Not really: I thought it was ok. Not convinced by the paradigm, not enjoying the hermeneutic. Exasperated more often than enlightened - but moments of both. So if 2 stars means 'it was ok', 2 stars. Others will disagree!
May 30, 2018
This commentary takes a theological approach to the book of Revelation. It should not be the first commentary on Revelation you read but will be one of the best. Leithart takes a nuanced Preterist position with a heavy emphasis on typology. This allows him to build a bridge with the Historicist and Idealist approaches and to a lesser extent the Futurist.
August 30, 2023
Note: This is a combined review of Volumes 1 and 2
I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed going through the Book of Revelation with Leithart. I especially liked his argument for a pre-70 AD date for the book, and the suggestion of seeing Revelation as the Gospel of John part 2 - sort of like Luke/Acts. This develops nicely with his handling of the 5th chapter of Revelation. Since the Gospel of John doesn’t have the Ascension, we see that in Rev 5 - but unlike Luke/Acts, we see it from the heavenly realm. I would say that the handling of Revelation 5 was a highlight for me - and I’ve already used material from there in preaching ;-)
While I agree with much that the Author presents, there are also many items that I need more thought on - and need to do more investigation. But that does make this a good commentary. This is also a commentary that has been designed to be read not just referenced, as the author does develop his approach over the chapters. Plus he makes good reference to other Authors including historical ones.
It is well referenced and well indexed.
These 2 volumes are worth having for any preacher or serious student of the New Testament.
I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed going through the Book of Revelation with Leithart. I especially liked his argument for a pre-70 AD date for the book, and the suggestion of seeing Revelation as the Gospel of John part 2 - sort of like Luke/Acts. This develops nicely with his handling of the 5th chapter of Revelation. Since the Gospel of John doesn’t have the Ascension, we see that in Rev 5 - but unlike Luke/Acts, we see it from the heavenly realm. I would say that the handling of Revelation 5 was a highlight for me - and I’ve already used material from there in preaching ;-)
While I agree with much that the Author presents, there are also many items that I need more thought on - and need to do more investigation. But that does make this a good commentary. This is also a commentary that has been designed to be read not just referenced, as the author does develop his approach over the chapters. Plus he makes good reference to other Authors including historical ones.
It is well referenced and well indexed.
These 2 volumes are worth having for any preacher or serious student of the New Testament.
October 15, 2023
This 2 volume work was a joy to read. Leithart takes some less common stances on several passages, like assuming that Babylon is Jerusalem. I detect the influence of George Caird throughout the set. I wouldn't have this as your ONLY book on Revelation - but it makes a good addition if you can afford it!
April 14, 2024
This is a must have commentary for students of Revelation. Many will find it frustrating because it is not a traditional commentary (hence, a "theological commentary"). I do not always agree with Leithart. At times, I find his connections to be a stretch. However, they are always interesting. Highly recommended.
March 5, 2018
More to come. Vintage Leithart, good and bad. If one has listened to James Jordan’s lectures, you will be familiar with some of the material. Not at all for the general reader; turn to Jordan for a more accessible treatment along similar lines.
June 6, 2018
A very unique, deep, and balanced commentary. It has noticeable shortcomings for sure, but it’s still a treasure trove of biblical and theological wisdom.
January 6, 2024
Too much. Give me more.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews