Revelation 12-22 (ITC)

T&T Clark International Theological Commentary

by Peter J. Leithart, R. Michael Allen (Editor), Scott R. Swain (Editor)

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 second of two volumes on Revelation offers a systematic and thorough interpretation of the latter chapters of the book. 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 ensure 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 ITC reconnects to the ecclesial tradition of biblical commentary as an effort in ressourcement, though not slavish repetition.

Genres: Theology

512 pages, Hardcover

Published February 22, 2018

About the author

Peter 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.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

For better and for worse, Leithart is trying to be like the early church fathers (or what we think they were like). On the bad side, there is crazy, undisciplined exegesis, an emphasis on works, a love for the latest intellectual fads defended as though they were patently obvious from the Biblical text, and an overrealized eschatology and separatist view of the visible church. From a more sympathetic view, though, Leithart is also like them in that he is doing some truly groundbreaking work, asking questions that no one has asked, thanks to his preterism and some modern scholarship, and he is arguing for more careful distinctions in how we read the narrative of Revelation, seeing it as more linear and less cyclical than we usually do.

So for instance, on the negative side, to show I'm not caricaturing, in an in-text footnote, Leithart says, "This line of interpretation [of Revelation] reflects a law-gospel dichotomy, often attributed to Luther. In his Galatians commentary, Luther argues that the law-gospel contrast is absolute 'demanding and granting, receiving and offering, are exact opposites and cannot exist together. For that which is granted, I receive; but that which I grant, I do not receive but offer to someone else.' Elsewhere, he insists that the Gospel commands only the act of receiving ... There is a dialectical twist here, since Luther views the passive act of faith to be 'the supreme allegiance, the supreme obedience, and the supreme sacrifice'. ... Luther's handing of the law-gospel distinction is subtle, but there is reason to wonder whether the whole set up is misaligned." Seriously, you are going to throw that in a footnote? There's not time to defend that without several volumes with heavy scholarship behind them, unless it's patently obvious from the Biblical text (which it's certainly not if we've used this law-gospel distinction for 500 years in Lutheran, Reformed, and Evangelical traditions.) And isn't this supposed to be a Protestant commentary series? Incidentally, did Allen and Swain have much editorial control over this book? I would like to think they didn't have much power, but if they could have corralled Leithart in more, this commentary would be as strong as some of Leithart's other books.

That kind of thing is found throughout the book, and it makes what should have been Leithart's magnum opus, his mainstreaming into the world of scholarship, more a curiosity than the brilliant contextualization of Revelation I hoped for.

On top of that there are lots of pin-prick annoyances. He again toys with "theosis" arguing that his interpretation of the bride's deification should adjust our "Protestant sensibilities" and he of course can't resist saying that God's epithet "the one who is, was, and will be" refers to God "embracing" time, clearly a dig at certain views of time (which have been held for thousands of years by Christians). He says that Aristotle was "revised" by Aquinas (p. 380) to be more "eschatalogical" and in fact ALL history and ethics and ontology must be reinvented free from tyrannical assumptions (p. 394). He talks about asiety, but insists we need to talk about the Father never being without the Son or Spirit, as if they were eternally dependent. It's striking that Leithart but freely quotes church fathers and medievals, but rarely refers to classical Protestant interpreters. The devil is in the details, as they say.

And the exegesis itself is weirder than usual, even for Leithart. For instance, Leithart uses the day of atonement background to the dragon and woman passage in order to read in--get this--gender bending: the woman is in the place of the high priest and thus is a female priest cleansed from impurity of childbirth. He didn't have to go there. He also didn't have to camp out on Jesus' "feminine breasts" or the "virgin garments" of the martyrs (making them a feminine army as opposed to the overly masculine Roman hordes).

At the same time, Leithart's take on the scene as a whole is more promising. He argues that the woman is Israel, who gives birth to Jesus, after years of labor. Jesus is the male child and his being lifted up into heaven is the "lifting up" of the Son of Man described in John and thus encompasses his whole death, resurrection, and ascension. The dragon's attempt to drown the woman seems to be the Judaizing heresy. Leithart sees a lot of Exodus here. (Still, he tries as hard as he can to sound edgy, talking about Jesus not being a complete man until he has a bride.)

In the key discussion of the two beasts, Leithart argues that the sea beast is given glory by the dragon, much as Jesus is given glory by the father, and makes all sorts of obvious but cool points about how it is an anti-christ--he is the one who has a death and resurrection (deadly wound healed) and he was, is not, but will be.

Again, I am a bit relieved to see that Leithart disagrees with James Jordan and sees the little horn of Daniel 7-11 as Anitochus Epiphanes, at least in part, rather than merely as the Herods/Jews. Even more persuasively, he argues that the sea beast that comes out of the sea is Nero's persecution which lasts for forty-two months. At the same time, he uses this passage as an opportunity to restate his claim in Babel and Beast that the most important political issue is how governments treat the saints (read clergy here). He argues that the beast that is killed and resurrected is Rome after the death of Julius Caesar.

At long last, the bowls are poured out and finally Leithart admits that the persecution draws to an end: night falls on Rome, Nero is killed, and all is chaos. Leithart makes the unusual, but perhaps persuasive argument that the harvest of grapes in the winepress of God's wrath is the blood of the martyrs, which is what is poured out in the seven bowls. This argument always made me nervous when I heard it outside the context, and Leithart didn't do himself any favors by translating thumos as "passion" (it's almost ALWAYS wrath in the NT). It felt like a dodge, and a pointless one since Leithart admits it's God's wrath on behalf of the martyrs. So I conclude it's a pretty decent interpretation, though a poorly argued one.

Then we get to the harlot, and what is especially interesting is that Leithart argues that the harlot who appears in the wilderness is the same woman described in chapter 12, who gave birth to the child! In other words, Israel gives birth to Jesus and the church, but then goes apostate. Leithart makes the interesting point that harlotry has Jezebel echoes (including in the prophets). His basic argument hangs on the notion that Rome cannot play the harlot, because they never were in covenantal relationship with Israel. He also leans heavily on Ezekiel echoes to argue that the harlot is Jerusalem, rather than Rome as it often is interpreted. He also points out that her jewels are priestly, and that in fact Jerusalem was the most important eastern province in the Roman Empire (Leithart in another book points out that in order to get corn from Egypt, Rome had to have Jerusalem). The clincher though is that she sits on the beast with seven heads and ten horns. The woman is on the beast; she is not the beast. Not only that, but the beast turns on her. This is obviously Rome who will fall upon Jerusalem.

Leithart also argues that the beast which was wounded and healed refers to the assassination of Caesar and rise of Augustus, not to Nero's assassination. He also is willing to entertain the notion that it has to do with the fire of Rome. But what about the heads that "have fallen" "are" and "will come"? Leithart argues that the fallen heads are Babylon, Persia, and the three phases of Greece. The sixth head is Rome, treated by Leithart as a continuation of Greece, and it is the protector of Israel and, indeed, the Church, as we see in Acts. The seventh head is Rome gone feral, the persecutor of the Church, Nero allied with the Jews. However, this still leaves us with the eighth head. So what does Leithart do?

"I have tried to observe the constraints I set for myself at the beginning of the commentary .... This does not mean that the sorts of events Revelation depicts end in A.D. 70. Bestial powers still rise from the sea; Rome itself turned returned to bestial form in short order, and stayed bestial for several centuries. Harlots continue to ride on the back of beasts, drinking the blood of saints. Christians were persecuted after the first century, and still are, often enough by their brothers. The Eucharistic people are still harvested, their blood still poured out on the world to create a clamor for vengeance."

Not surprisingly, Leithart argues that the eighth head is, in essence, continuing persecuting Rome. This is quite persuasive to my mind (though the identification some of the particular heads with Assyria, Babylon and Greece is a bit forced), and it eventually leads Leithart to a historical question: if the beasts and harlot are both destroyed, then what even it John describing, since the Roman beast lasted another three hundred years? Leithart again argues handily that this refers to the end of the Jewish-Roman alliance and that, since Rome inherited the role of "covenantal guardian" to the people of Israel from Greece and Persia, then we can indeed see the casting out of the beasts as the end of guardian-nations-turned-Satanic. Again, I find his argument that the mourning of Jerusalem as for Tyre very persuasive, since the imagery does indeed have quite a bit of priestly, temple imagery (and since the Jews were often quite money-focused). He also argues that the birds that take over in Babylon refer to the Satanic alliance of Jews and Gentiles and that the call to "come out" refers to the separation of Christians from Judaism.

One of the more interesting insights this leads Leithart to is his claim that the early fathers constantly boasted about the fall of the Temple as a sign that God vindicated Jesus. At the same time, since Leithart sees the fall of the sea beast as the fall of Gentiles (and he links it with the fall of the star in Matthew's discourse, which always refers to Gentile powers), then he has to account for a political change as well. He offers a very moving description of the effect the martyrs had on politics, the way it unmasked the pax Romana, and the way martyrdom resisted oppression. I want to re-read that sections a few times. He ties this in by connecting their rule with the millennium (a very cool idea) and with the actual historical reality of the Church being a counter-political force (a very loaded idea, cf. Babel and Beast, Delivered from the Elements).

Again, I find it telling that though Leithart talks about the sufferings of the early church martyrs, and has loads of footnotes about modern Christians in China, the Middle East, and South America, none about the sufferings of the Protestant martyrs? I am perfectly aware that the story of Protestant persecution is more complicated and that both sides committed atrocities. But then again, if we looked more impartially at the early church/Roman conflicts and at all the persecution of Christians documented dramatically by Voice of the Martyrs, we would find loads of stuff that Christians did wrong to non-Christians. So, yes, I think that the heavenly Jerusalem, the currently invisible church, is a church that was especially alive during the Reformation and, yes, the Pope can be mapped onto all of this (as Spenser does with Una and Duessa in Faerie Queene).

Naturally, when Leithart gets to the millennium, he finds it more a description of where we are than of the future: the saints rule AMONG the nations. This has positives and negatives. On the one hand, I am very pleased by his boldness. It would have been easy for him to adopt a cowardly amillennial view in which the church keeps ruling by suffering, but never actually matures to enjoy any sort of political rule. Instead, Leithart comes out swinging for postmillennialism. Constantine is a great thing and it is what we should expect, and in fact he argues in ways echoing Doug Wilson that "heaven is not our home" and our children's children will be serving God. Although I can't quite see Leithart pointing like Douglas Wilson to capitalism or the triumphs of the modern west as results of the gospel (nor would I want him to, especially given the failures of the American right), he chose to stake out a braver, more optimistic eschatology than he could have, given this book. He also did so without ignoring the martyrs, either then or now. (He even supports Oliver Crisp's "optimistic particularism" in which the majority of the world's population is indeed saved.)

Still, on the other hand, this leads to an overrealized eschatology. The cube-city which is in chapters 21:9-22:5 is the visible church, whereas the heavenly Jerusalem is the final, eschatological church. As some of my friends predicted, he makes this argument: "Utopian as it may seem, [the vision] describes the condition of the church during the millennial age, the urban life to which the church aspires, as she strives to be what she will be" (p. 361). 'Utopian' is the key word. Again, lots of "Church as Polis" language with a perfunctory dismissal of this entailing "coercion" (pp. 393-394, with gestures to Milbank and MacIntyre). Impurity regulations are gone and thus "in the present, today, that curse is lifted" (402, emphasis in original). Strong repetition of "extra ecclesiam nulla salus est."

To his credit, Leithart tackles the disparity between this high vision and reality on pages 403-409. While he points to some of the real contributions the church has had in real time and history, he does sacralize the visible church to a great extent (and by extension, visible believers' contributions, which is revealed in his call for a redoing of ontology, ethics, and history, p. 394). Indeed, he cites Wells who talks about the sufficiency of God, and locates it tellingly in the church, in worship, and in the Eucharist. Leithart is enchanted by these things rather than by private prayer, for instance, because they are for him, to put it bluntly, idols. This needs to be noted, and forcibly. I really do appreciate how Leithart points out that this books follows a worship service pattern, and how the 24 angels are replaced by the 24 tribes/apostles, but it's all filtered through a set of very particular concepts in a way I grew very tired of. Every reference to wine refers to "Eucharist" (which gives an impression of something more sophisticated than the plain old Lord's Supper). Every reference to worship is directed towards the importance of liturgy, which translates as "high liturgy" (often artificially conflated with "ancient worship"). Sunday worship, offered by the saints together, is somehow more worship than individual daily worship (which might be something we neglect, partially because we cannot sing).

On the other hand, Leithart holds the ground on hell and offers a good explanation of how the Bible is not agrarian over and against the city. He also makes good on being a partial preterist and exegetes chapter 22 as referring to the future, and by implication that Satan's last gasp is in the future (though he is interestingly silent about that question, more interested in the ascents and descents of Revelation than in the particulars of the future that we don't know).

The ending is really good and really helpful and summarizing things quite handily, but the discussion afterward had many of the same problems as I have already described them. So how does one approach this. There are innumerable treasures and mines here for us to glean, but what struck me more than ever was the lack of breaks and the continual bias, which felt even more troubling since Leithart continues to import his own very untraditional theology into the text. It's one thing to try to re-exegete the entire Bible and to offer a novel interpretation of one of its most complicated and confusing books. It is another thing to try to revise Protestant soteriology and ecclesiology. Doing those at the same time is not same, and is doubly dangerous because if you happen to be right about your exegesis, people will be tempted to think that you have, in fact, stumbled across the paradigm that interprets the Bible in all sorts of ways that nobody has ever since, then they will also think that you have discovered the right theological paradigm too.

I do not want to right this and I'm not posting it to facebook. If I was less involved, I might just forget and move on, but I feel like I need to say what I see. Oddly enough, this book made me want to read Revelation instead of this commentary. Which is a good thing, all in all.

[Josh Shelton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful commentary filled with gems from many unexpected sources.

[Mitch Bedzyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This commentary is paradigm-shifting and probably one of my favorite books I’ve ever read. It has not only helped deepen my understanding of Revelation but of NT eschatology as a whole. Leithart is an absolute genius. His interpretive conclusions might seem a little strange or stretched at times, but that’s only because we probably haven’t read the text as much as he has!

The typological-preterist approach presented by Leithart is the best and most satisfying way I have found to make the most sense out of all the competing views of this book. His approach gives you the most bang for your prophetic buck.

[Glenn Crouch · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Matthew Rawlings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a traditional commentary but a must read for committed students of Revelation. As always, Leithart is thoughtful AND thought provoking.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too many words and ideas with too little organization.

[K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a magisterial work. It is vintage Leithart, which means it contains fascinating insights and asides on nearly every page. If the commentary has a flaw, this is perhaps it--I frequently felt lost among the trees and unable to see the forest. As the commentary goes on, however, Leithart provides more and more summaries of the overall shape of the book, with an extremely helpful conclusion. I suspect some of my issues came from my inability to distinguish the small printed notes (which Leithart indicates may be skipped) from the main text with my screen reader. In light of that, I am giving it five stars, and assuming I would have enjoyed it even more absent that small problem. I hope he one day condenses the commentary as G. K. Beale did his, because the larger church deserves it.

[Terry Feix · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.