What is the idealist approach to Revelation?

Question 10139.

The idealist view treats Revelation not as a description of particular events, past or future, but as a symbolic portrayal of the ongoing conflict between good and evil that runs through the whole of history. Sometimes called the spiritual or symbolic approach, it is probably the most widely held reading in academic circles today.

It has genuine strengths, and I want to acknowledge them before explaining why I cannot adopt it.

What the idealist view teaches

On the idealist view, the beast is not a particular man but the principle of oppressive state power in every age. Babylon is not a city but the seductive worldliness of any culture. The seals, trumpets and bowls are not a sequence of events but repeated depictions of the same reality from different angles.

The message of the book, so read, is that the Lamb reigns, that persecution is temporary, and that the enemies of God will not have the last word. Those things are true, and they are indeed in Revelation.

Most idealists do retain a future return of Jesus and a final judgement. The idealist view is therefore not a denial of orthodoxy; it is a claim about genre.

Where it came from

Its ancestry runs back to the allegorical school at Alexandria, and to Origen in particular, whose method of finding a deeper spiritual meaning beneath the surface of the text shaped centuries of interpretation.

Augustine gave it lasting influence by reading the thousand years of Revelation 20 as the present church age, which effectively removed any future earthly kingdom from the picture. Once the Millennium was spiritualised, the rest of the book followed easily.

The modern idealist view owes a good deal to a reaction against the excesses of both historicism and popular futurism, and I have some sympathy with the reaction even while I reject the conclusion.

What it gets right

Three things, and they are not small. It recognises that Revelation is written in the apocalyptic idiom, drenched in Old Testament imagery, and that the symbols are doing real work rather than functioning as a code to be cracked.

It recognises that the book was written to comfort suffering churches, and that any reading which makes it useless to its first readers has a problem to answer.

And it recognises that the principles in Revelation apply in every generation. Every era has its beast, every culture its Babylon, and believers in Rome, in Soviet camps and in northern Nigeria have all found this book speaking directly to them.

Where I think it fails

The decisive problem is that Revelation calls itself prophecy, not allegory. The word appears in the first chapter and again in the last, and prophecy in Scripture concerns what God will actually do.

The idealist view also struggles with the sheer specificity of the text. Why 144,000 from named tribes? Why forty-two months, stated three different ways? Why a river, a mountain, a valley, named nations and measured dimensions? Timeless principles do not usually require measurements.

Read Revelation 22:6, where the angel says these words are trustworthy and true, and that God sent His angel to show His servants what must soon take place. Take place is the language of events.

The argument from the first coming again

The same objection I raise against preterism applies here. The prophecies of the first coming were fulfilled in specific, datable, physical events involving named places and identifiable people.

Micah said Bethlehem and it was Bethlehem. Zechariah said thirty pieces of silver and it was thirty pieces of silver. If that is how prophecy behaved the first time, the idealist view owes us an account of why it should behave so differently the second.

The Greek word John uses of his own book, propheteia, is the same word used of the Old Testament oracles that were fulfilled literally in Jesus.

The cost to Israel

Because the idealist view spiritualises the details, it has no place for the literal fulfilment of God’s covenant promises to Israel concerning land, throne and kingdom. Those promises become pictures of spiritual realities enjoyed by the church.

I regard that as a serious loss and a serious risk. A God who fulfils His unconditional promises symbolically, to a different party from the one He made them to, is not the God Paul describes in Romans 11.

My article on replacement theology works through that concern in detail.

Symbol and substance together

The choice on offer is a false one, and that is worth saying clearly. A literal reading does not require us to deny that Revelation is symbolic, and a symbolic reading need not require us to deny that the symbols point to real events.

The Lamb standing as though slain is unmistakably a symbol, and it refers to something that actually happened outside Jerusalem on a particular Friday. Symbols in Scripture usually have referents, and the idealist view tends to keep the symbol while letting the referent evaporate.

That is the heart of my disagreement. Not that idealists see symbols, but that they stop there.

The pastoral effect

A book of timeless principles cannot produce expectancy. You cannot watch for a principle, and you cannot be comforted at a funeral by the assurance that good will eventually triumph over evil in a general sort of way.

What comforts the bereaved is that the dead in Christ will rise, at a moment, at a shout, in a real event. The idealist view has the resources to affirm that, and its method tends to work against it.

Recapitulation and the structure of the book

One feature of the idealist view deserves separate attention, because it is shared with amillennial readings generally. It is the principle of recapitulation, the idea that the seals, trumpets and bowls are not consecutive but parallel, each covering the whole church age from a different angle.

There is something to it. Revelation does circle back, and it does show the same conflict from heaven’s side and from earth’s side. But the judgements escalate in a way that parallel accounts would not, moving from a quarter of the earth to a third and then to all of it.

Escalation implies sequence, and sequence implies events rather than perspectives. That is where the idealist view has to work hardest, and in my judgement it does not work hard enough.

Genre is not the whole answer

Much of the case for the idealist view rests on classifying Revelation as apocalyptic literature and then reading it by the conventions of that genre, in which vivid imagery conveys spiritual truth without referring to particular events.

The difficulty is that Revelation identifies itself as three things at once. It is an apocalypse, it is a prophecy, and it is a letter addressed to seven named congregations in seven real towns you can still visit. A purely apocalyptic reading honours one description and quietly sets aside the other two.

Daniel supplies the test case. Daniel is apocalyptic by any definition, and his visions of successive empires were fulfilled with startling historical precision. Genre did not prevent literal fulfilment there, and I see no reason why it should here.

Where the four views actually differ

It helps to see the whole field at once. Preterism says the fulfilment is behind us, historicism says it is spread across the centuries, futurism says it lies ahead, and the idealist view says the question of when is the wrong question to ask.

That last position is the most modest and the most slippery. By declining to make a claim that history could test, the idealist view can never be shown to be wrong, which sounds like a strength and is closer to a weakness.

Prophecy that cannot be falsified cannot be verified either, and Scripture repeatedly appeals to fulfilled prediction as evidence that God has spoken. Read Isaiah 46:9-10 and notice that God stakes His identity on declaring the end from the beginning.

Reading well without over-reading

None of this licenses the opposite error. I have heard men identify locusts as attack helicopters and the mark of the beast as whatever technology was newest that year, and that sort of thing has driven thoughtful people straight into the arms of the idealist view.

The discipline is simple to state and hard to keep. Let John explain his own symbols where he does. Where he does not, describe what the text says and resist the urge to name it. The book will still be there when the events arrive, and then we shall see.

Where it usually leads

In practice the idealist view travels with amillennialism, since a symbolic reading of the visions naturally produces a symbolic reading of the thousand years. The two positions support each other, and few people hold one without drifting towards the other.

That is why the discussion matters more than a debate about literary genre might suggest. My article on amillennialism takes up the millennial question directly, and the two articles are best read together.

So, now what?

Take from the idealists what they have got right. Read Revelation for the character of God and the courage it gives, and let it speak to whatever pressure you are under this week, because it was written for exactly that.

But do not let the symbols dissolve the promises. The Lamb who was slain is a real person, the throne is a real throne, and the day He returns will have a date on it that God already knows. Are you reading Revelation as literature, or as news?

“Write therefore the things that you have seen, those that are and those that are to take place after this.” (Revelation 1:19)