The history of Judaism is essential to understanding the Jewish faith, which has a rich heritage of law, Christianity is the most widely practiced religion in the world, with more than 2 billion followers. The Christian faith centers on beliefs regarding the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
While it started with a small group of adherents, many historians regard Zoroastrianism is an ancient Persian religion that may have originated as early as 4, years ago. Zoroastrianism was the state religion of three Persian dynasties, until the Wicca is a modern-day, nature-based pagan religion. Though rituals and practices vary among people who identify as Wiccan, most observations include the festival celebrations of solstices and equinoxes, the honoring of a male god and a female goddess, and the incorporation of Live TV.
This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. Once Christianity became legitimate, and recognized by Constantine, then the Book of Revelation was a problem. Because one didn't want to insult the city of Rome or the Roman emperor. And it's very interesting the reinterpretation that occurred at that time.
Instead of being read as a dichotomy between God and Christ as ruling in heaven, and eventually on earth, and this evil Roman power on earth in the meantime, there came to be a compilation of the two. That the Roman emperor came to be seen as a representative of Christ. And Christ came to be understood as, as ruling on earth through the current political system. And partly because it helped him solve some other theological dilemmas that he was wrestling with in his own studies.
So around , it seems there were several councils that were being convened in his own region where debates And during this context of these councils the decision on which books to use in the New Testament as the authority, behind which all other Christian theology would be worked out, came up.
Augustine championed using the Book of Revelation within the New Testament, assuming, as others had, that it was actually written by the Apostle John, therefore carrying authority.
What Augustine does by helping put the Book of Revelation in the Bible really accomplishes two things. One, he provides what will become, at least eventually, the normative reinterpretation of the book by reading all of the symbolism in it as just that, symbolism and not literal history.
Now, that doesn't happen overnight, but his view is the one that will eventually carry the day throughout most of later Christian tradition. The second thing that he does in canonizing the Book of Revelation is they put it at the end of the New Testament, and this also has a very significant symbolic force.
Because at the end of the Book of Revelation, we have a strong warning, "You may not add to or take away from any thing in this book. But when you take that put it at the end of the New Testament, it has the double force of saying John's revelation of the end is sealed up but also this is the end of the New Testament, there will no longer be any future revelations from God that will stand alongside of the New Testament itself.
But doesn't putting this book right at the end suggest that the end of the world is yet to come? In Augustine's reinterpretation of the Book of Revelation what this actually does is to say that the symbolism, all the vivid elements that some people before had been taking literally, none of them were literal.
He did not believe in a literal thousand year reign. He did not believe in a literal figure that would come as a kind of Antichrist or any thing like that. What he says essentially is that all of that And the symbolic thousand years will come to end only when Christ returns at the end of the world and takes the kingdom away to heaven What finally forced Augustine to this much more spiritualising or symbolic interpretation of the Book of Revelation is not only that he was facing heresy and he was having difficulties with people who thought it was coming any day, but another major political event that occurred in the year when the Visigoths, under Alaric, actually sacked the city of Rome.
The city of Rome, that had been [thought of] since the days of Constantine as now being the protectors of the church, the ones who would make the church the kingdom on earth, had failed. And Augustine looks at the destruction of Rome kind of like the destruction of Jerusalem for an earlier generation and says, "How could this happen? The city of God is the church. And it's only that city that will be preserved inviolable until the end of time when Christ comes in judgment For Augustine, then, the city of God, the church, is the new Jerusalem on earth and anticipates the final new Jerusalem in heaven.
The crucial term in Augustine's interpretation is he sees, in the Book of Revelation itself, that there are two resurrections. The one resurrection that comes at the beginning of the thousand year reign and another resurrection when Christ comes again and establishes the new Jerusalem. For him, symbolically the thousand year kingdom on earth is the church, so when you're going into the church that's your spiritual resurrection into the kingdom.
But the second resurrection will be the one that comes at the end of the world, when Christ literally does come again and Augustine uses the sense of a final resurrection and a final judgment as we find it in the Book of Revelation, especially in chapter 21 , as the occasion we're talking about: Christ coming at the end of the world to judge the quick and the dead.
How important was Augustine's conclusion about the final judgment? For the rest of Christian history, this notion of a final judgment at the end of the world where Christ himself comes back to sit enthroned and read out judgment to the good as well as to the evil, will become the major expectation of all Christianity thereafter. And [the] Augustine synthesis really is the one that establishes that connection for later Christianity.
How has the Book of Revelation been interpreted through Christian history? The complexity of the structure of the book and the difficulty of interpreting it is something that many Christians have tried to deal with throughout the subsequent centuries. In part, it is maybe even more problematic because the expectations of John of an imminent overthrow of the Roman Empire within only three and a half years didn't come to pass.
The Roman Empire lasted for a great deal longer, so how do we understand this? How did Christians think about it, in the light of the fact that this claims to be a revelation from God himself given to John Essentially we can think about the different ways that this book has been interpreted in Christian history as breaking out into two basic categories.
First, symbolic interpretations [in which] all of the images, all of the elements in the story of John are merely symbols of the experiences of the Christian Church throughout its history, but with no specific implication for time. This is actually the view that will be taken by Saint Augustine, that there is nothing predicted in absolute historical terms anywhere in the Book of Revelation; it is all mere symbolism.
It is also one of the common modes of interpretation that is popular among many Christians today. The other mode of interpretation is what we might call a literalist mode, where it is assumed that at least some events in the Book of Revelation are literal historical events that have played themselves out in human history, or will do so.
There are basically three types of this literalist reading of the book. The first is what we might call the continuous historical literalism. It assumes that some events described in the Book of Revelation actually took place in John's day, but that other events will carry on in future history down to some later period of time, in fact, down even to the end of the world. And so they would look at, let's say, current events of their own day, whether it's in the period of the Crusades or in the period of the Protestant Reformation or even down into the nineteenth and twentieth century, as being fulfillment of what John predicted way back at the end of the first century.
This is a mode of interpretation that we find quite a lot in the Middle Ages and in the Reformation period. It's somewhat less used these days, but it is still around and it tends to look at, especially, the end of the world, as the kind of final event that's described in the Book of Revelation and also the thousand year reign, when Christ will rule, as another key and very literal experience.
Another mode of literalist interpretation is what is referred to as the futurist school. The futurist would say that nothing in the Book of Revelation past chapter 4 has yet been fulfilled. Everything is coming in the future, and most of it is in the final days before the eschaton itself, before the return of Christ and before the beginning of a literal thousand year reign on earth.
Many theologians also reject the idea the return of Christ can in any meaningful way be predicted. Jesus said in Matthew "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Viral video of 'strange figure' sparks claims 'aliens' are among us.
Bible prophecies: What does the Bible say about the end of the world? Bible prophecies: Do you believe Jesus Christ will return one day? Don't delay. Jesus awaits your decision. What does scripture say will happen in the End Days?
Living Christians will then be snatched or carried to the heavens in the blink of an eye. However, the Bible does not specify when this event will occur. Neither does the Bible specify how much time will pass between the Rapture and the Tribulation.
End of the world: What does the Bible say will happen at the end of the world? End of the world: Do you believe what the Bible says about the Rapture?
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