Book of Revelation - Interpretations

Interpretations

Revelation has a wide variety of interpretations, ranging from the simple message that we should have faith that God will prevail (symbolic interpretation), to complex end time scenarios (futurist interpretation), to the views of critics who deny any spiritual value to Revelation at all.

In the early Christian era, Christians generally understood the book to predict future events, especially an upcoming millennium of paradise on earth. In the late classical and medieval eras, the Church disavowed the millennium as a literal thousand-year kingdom. With the Protestant Reformation, opponents of Roman Catholicism adopted a historicist interpretation, in which the predicted apocalypse is believed to be playing out in church history. A Jesuit scholar countered with preterism, the belief that Revelation predicted events that actually occurred as predicted in the 1st century, such as the Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire under the Emperors Nero and Domitian. In the 19th century, futurism (belief that the predictions refer to future events) largely replaced historicism among conservative Protestants.