“Who are those 144,000?” “Doesn’t the temple have to be rebuilt first?” “Who are those two witnesses?” “Are you pre-trib or post-trib?” “Do you think so and so might be the antichrist?” And so on and so on.

Whenever I am asked these sorts of questions out of the blue, I have to give something of a “canned disclaimer.” I suspect it is very anticlimactic to the inquirer, but so it must be.

How one interprets x passage or understands x concept will depend on what view is held on two issues: 1. The “prophetic-fulfillment-time” model (preterism, futurism, historicism, idealism) and 2. The millennium (amillennialism, premillennialism, postmillennialism). And even that is only scratching the surface.

I am fully aware that this may turn most people off from the discussion, but without such preliminary work, there is nothing left but the proverbial comparison of apples and oranges. We live in a Christian subculture in which total eschatologies are hashed out without so much as a crash course on biblical or systematic theology as a whole. However, a thoughtful eschatology will be a function of how one has divided up these more foundational disciplines.

By “dividing” eschatology, I am making use of the old King James rendering of 2 Timothy 2:15, 

“Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”

How does one rightly divide this doctrine of last things? I mentioned both biblical theology and systematic theology. At bare minimum this will demand that we know how to rightly interpret the relevant texts as to their literary form, and understand such passages in their overall place in the biblical canon and in the development of redemptive history. That is the biblical side of things. One will also need to understand how each truth relates to other truths. Such truths must be wholly consistent with each other, but then also properly situated in terms of which is more determinative for others. This is the systematic side. 

Biblical Theology, Hermeneutics, and Eschatology

Eschatology and prophecy are not logically coextensive concepts. Of course when we think of one, we think of the other. Strictly speaking, prophecy is both a mode of divine communication and a literary genre. A first good question when picking up the Bible is “What kind of a book is this?” Here I mean the individual books within the Bible. I also mean sets of books, such as Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon would belong to the wisdom, or poetic, genre. And then a more advanced study would show that there are different kinds of poetry among the poets.

There are genres within books as well. The Five Books of Moses contain narrative, law, genealogy, covenant treaty, and some early hints at prophecy and even a few poetic sections.

Now the word “prophecy” does not always mean “fore-telling,” but can refer to any Holy Spirit inspired revelation, so that the Scriptures themselves are called “prophecies” in 2 Peter 1:20, 21, Revelation 1:3, 19:10, 22:7, 10, 18, 19, or in the adjective form, prophetic writings or word in Romans 16:26 and 2 Peter 1:19. For the purposes of studying the genre relevant to study of eschatology, we will use “prophecy” mostly in its foretelling sense. 

A good definition of this kind of prophecy was offered by Thomas H. Horne, “a miracle of knowledge, a declaration or representation of something future, beyond human sagacity to discern or to calculate.”1

Prophecy takes up a large portion of the Scriptures and often shares space with other genres. It also takes on different modes—visions, dreams, oracles, parables, dramatizations, and other types.  

One statistical analysis lists the three books with the most amount of prophecy in the Old Testaments as Ezekiel with 821 verses of prophecy, Jeremiah with 812 prophetic verses, and Isaiah with 754. In the New Testament, Matthew contained 278, Revelation 256, and Luke with 250.2 This data may be surprising to many. But it gives us a glimpse of how prophetic texts cannot so easily be compartmentalized into concise, literal, didactic statements about future events.

It is a remarkable fact that so many Evangelicals have come to expect the most enigmatic form of biblical expression, the prophetic, to be the most transparent to our quick readings, and so began to call this expectation the “plain” or “literal” sense. Such a view neglects the obvious and somewhat uncontroversial point that much prophecy is poetic in terms of its literary structure, and symbolic in its object or event references.

On top of that is the difference between the apocalyptic and ordinary prophecy. These too are not exactly the same, a subject that we will come back to.

At this point, a misunderstanding may already exist. That the prophetic genre comes with these difficulties is not meant to suggest that we turn back. It is only to remind us to take seriously those principles of hermeneutics that we all agree to in any other area of biblical interpretation. For example, there is the analogy of faith. It says that we interpret Scripture in light of Scripture. If all of Scripture is consistent with itself, then no single text could ever contradict another. By itself that would still seem to leave us with innumerable puzzle pieces scattered around us. So the analogy of faith takes one more step. We interpret the less clear passages in light of the more clear. Now who gets to decide what is “clearer” than something else?

Answer. One passage may be clearer than another in the following ways: (1) Either a more concise or more thorough statement of an idea. (2) An easier translation from the original language. (3) A more obvious immediate context. (4) A didactic or narrative genre (as opposed to the poetic or prophetic). (5) More frequently taught. (6) Concerning more necessary or universal realities. (7) More obviously commending godly behavior than ungodly behavior.

Along with this principle we must also observe inter-textuality in the broader canon. What is inter-textuality? It is the relationship between a text—its subject matter, or its truth—and similar texts, parallel uses of a word or concept, or simply the place of the events within different circles of context.

For example, What if John is heavily borrowing from the OT (especially Daniel, Ezekiel)? As another example, what if, as the final and ultimate Prophet of the Jews, Jesus tended to speak like a Jewish prophet? And what if one of the main features of their prophetic speech was a concept (which we will come to) called “prophetic perspective,” or, in laymen’s terms, dual fulfillment? Might that be a factor in how we read the Olivet Discourse? 

The Limits of the Grammatical-Historical Method

What is the grammatical-historical method? Simply put, this method seeks to understand the meaning of any text chiefly from the perspective of (a) what the original author meant and (b) in the most plain [literal] sense, unless a compelling reason exists to understand it otherwise. The word “historical” signifies that it was rooted in real historical events. The meaning must be understood in the context of the original author and audience. Among Protestants, this was a reaction to the medieval quadriga—the fourfold sense of the text—and its many fanciful allegorizations.

In evaluating this, we want to first examine what all is meant by the “original author.” Naturally this means the author in that real historical context. Yet if we hold to the divine inspiration of Scripture: Who is the real Original Author? To consider divine intention need not override human intention. We can speak, for example, of the diverse “agendas” of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and see that these were superintended by the Holy Spirit.

In a previous generation, Walter Kaiser represented the more wooden Protestant view of this method. For instance, he wrote,

“Another way of disparaging the biblical predictions is by emphasizing that the New Testament fulfillments are superior to and diverge immensely from what the Old Testament writers had intended or known. But to glorify the fulfillment at the expense of the prediction is to disparage testimony to the greatness of the living God. Every miracle of God, whether in word or deed, had as its object what … the people of Israel realized.”3 

Some biblical texts will demonstrate that the circle of full divine meaning and full human meaning cannot be logically coextensive:

“Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look” (1 Pet. 1:10-12).

Then there is Paul’s Spirit-inspired appropriation of the narrative of Sarah and Hagar as allegory in Galatians 4:24. Was Paul saying that these were not really two historical women? No, of course not—any more that he was saying that the Rock that “was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4) was not a literal rock in the wilderness. It was that too. I am only trying to give a first glimpse of how the choice between “literal” statements about things on the historical timeline and any fuller meaning of the same is a false dilemma.

The Concept of '“Full Meaning”

Let us put it like this. God means all that is true from any subset of the Scriptures. All that the human author means is wholly true, as he is inspired by the Holy Spirit (2 Tim. 3:16, 2 Pet. 1:20-21). Yet it simply does not follow that the human author must consciously mean all that God means by each truth in order for both circles (God’s whole meaning and the inspired author’s whole meaning) to be wholly true. Anyone who doesn’t get this down, sooner or later, is going to run into all sorts of difficulties in texts where additional layers of meaning ascribed by the Bible itself confound the plain sense of the immediate author in the original text. So Hosea 11:1 had already theologized on the exodus long before Matthew 2:15 would further theologize on Hosea 11:1.

Richard Pratt distinguishes between (1) original meaning, (2) biblical elaborations, and (3) legitimate applications. The first is mediated through original human author’s intention. The second is mediated through a pericope which is in a book of the Bible, which is in the whole Bible. The third is mediated through the original audience.

When one thinks through this, at least five problems with the mere grammatical-historical approach become evident: (1) distinguishing between an author’s conscious and unconscious intention; (2) distinguishing between meaning and significance, the former having a distinct subjective component; (3) distinguishing between meaning at the original historical level and original reading level; (4) The sense in which Christ is in the Old Testament; and (5) The many New Testament quotations of the Old—which often seem different in substance, or at least providing interpretations of them of which the Old Testament author seemed oblivious.

The idea of a text’s “full meaning” is an idea that I am deriving from a combination of the aforementioned threefold distinction by Pratt, the great work done by G. K. Beale on the New Testament authors’ use of the Old (the Hosea 11:1 / Matthew 2:15 example being one such use), and then some lectures from Robert Cara in which he summarized this as “one big meaning in which the meanings to the variety of audiences are organically related.”4 Meaning is a circle and then there is a meaning “dot” with that. The more wooden view of the grammatical-historical method sees only dot and thus remains shallow and unrealistic.

Let us never forget what the Bible itself has to say about this. It is not silent on method. The New Testament explains the Old. If the New tells you, “X is what those passages in the Old meant,” then that is what the Holy Spirit meant by them—even if there were other, more immediate meanings packed in for the original audience. What would be ruled out are contradictory meanings, but not multiple coherent meanings.

Literal Versus Figurative Interpretation

Circling back to that term—grammatical-historical method—we should also examine what we mean by “grammatical.” The word would seem to suggest a mature treatment of all of the normal rules of grammar, including the way that the language employs idioms and the unique ways that genres converge and often overlap, even in every day speech (like the phrase “every day speech,” for example!). 

As Protestantism moved from a classical metaphysical outlook to a modern materialist outlook, the concept of what is meant by “literal” took on that more “bits-and-pieces,” left to right, ordinary reporting of a science book and straight sequences only, which is never what anyone would have meant by “literal” before, and not the way that any human beings have ever spoken to each other or written. The new idea of “literal” is actually quite inhuman. When people so thoughtlessly use the word in the way that it has been, at the core of their idea is that the thing be treated as “real” and not “fake.” So the defender of the “literal” is convinced that they alone are understanding the biblical text as communicating what really happened and what will really happen. Anyone who “brings in” figures and other forms is trying to “explain away” the reality of the thing being talked about.

Surface impressions aside, literal meaning does not divorce authorial meaning from literary form. Sproul even suggested “ordinary meaning” as better terminology since the concept of the “literal” has been so warped. It simply begs the question to argue against this distinction: e.g. Whether the author intended to utilize poetry, allegory, narrative, didactic propositions, etc. to communicate the truth in question. No one is arguing that any of these verses are not communicating a “literal” (i.e. real) truth. We are insisting that we not skip the first question: What kind of speech is this? 

For example, what is a metaphor? Another biblical scholar’s description is helpful: “Metaphors begin with something non-figurative and make it figurative by using it to describe something beyond the scope of its normal meaning.”5

One example can be seen in the expression of the nations beating their “swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” (Isa. 2:4; cf. Mic. 4:3; Joel 3:10). Sam Storms asks of this,

“How literal is this prophetic utterance? Do the prophets mean to suggest that people in the end times will literally or physically reshape an actual sword into an actual plow or pruning hook?”6

Another few examples that will not be controversial concern prophecies of Christ Himself. When it says, “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit” (Isa. 11:1), does anyone think that this speaks of a literal tree stump, with its branch bearing fruit? Obviously not. Or about “The stone that the builders rejected” (Ps. 118:2), or else, “a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces” (Dan. 2:34). All parties recognize this stone as Christ, and further, that the parts of the body of this image represent different world empires. Really the issue comes down to selective application of a principle that we all have to abide by. There are perfectly good reasons to expect the same when we read of the “books” and “scrolls” and “trumpets” and “bowls” and a sword coming from His mouth (Rev. 11:15).

Another concept, perhaps more obscure at first, is a paradigm. These are events that (a) really happened and yet (b) are employed by later parts of Scripture as a pattern of one sort or another. In this context, the biblical prophets will use some of the most foundational events in the earliest parts of the Scripture as a kind of big metaphor for what will happen in the future.

One scholar lists the main examples of this as “(1) creation, (2) life in paradise, (3) the flood, (4) the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, (5) the Egyptian bondage, (6) the exodus, and (7) the wilderness wanderings.”7

In recognizing these as “paradigms,” one is not denying that they were literal events. Rather, God ordained each real event as more than just an event, but as setting a pattern. It is the same as we saw about Paul’s allegorization in Galatians 4 of the two women of Genesis 16.

So it makes even more sense that regular patterns of nature and human experience be used by prophets to speak of future events in ways that their contemporaries would understand. The point would never be to tell them, in excruciating detail, what it will literally be like, since the thing will not occur in their day anyway. Of the promises of earthly power and prosperity, Bavinck says, “But into those sensuous earthly forms prophecy puts everlasting content. In that shell is an imperishable core that, sometimes in the Old Testament itself, breaks through.”8 When a parent tries to explain to a child both the joys and the challenges of adulthood, one must put it in language and in concepts that the child will understand, and yet it is no less truthful on that account.

A Closing Word About Rightly Dividing with Systematic Theology

As with biblical theology, so with one’s dogmatics, there is a general necessity of consistency. This is really the same principle of reason as in the analogy of faith, except now in the realm of doctrine. Keith Mathison explains:

“When studying any doctrine of Scripture, it is wise to move from the known to the unknown. This is especially true when we study a doctrine as controversial as biblical eschatology. We must seek to discover what the doctrines upon which there is a measure of agreement imply or demand of our eschatology. In other words, our eschatology must be consistent with our doctrines of God, Scripture, Christ, man, salvation, and the church.”9

Yet even consistency is not enough—there is a hierarchy. In the early centuries of the church, the produce of consistency and hierarchy among theologians and especially those already encapsulated in credal statements was called the rule of faith.

As we should read Scripture in light of Scripture, so we should test our own summaries in the light of those vast summarizations across church history. But we must be honest here. Historical pedigree is a difficult thing with this doctrine especially. As Gentry points out, the systematization of eschatology is still less than one hundred years old.10 This is something we would do well to consider. The church has always done eschatology. However, it was generally seen as the end goal of theology, the end goal of anthropology, the end goal of Christology, and so forth. 

It is only in the modern Western church, and often especially among the Reformed, that we see entrenched positions defined by one’s view of the millennium or when all the prophecies are fulfilled. That should give us some pause to consider whether or not these divides may not be at least partly artificial. 

When we put together our biblical and systematic first principles, we can arrive at a more comprehensive approach. By this time, one will have already formed various opinions. That is inevitable. The point was not to pretend that we can have a bias-free approach. 

To offer the example of one author on the subject, Storms offered five principles that ought to shape our conclusions in eschatology. These may be considered principles that emerge once one has done some study of both biblical and systematic theology.

1. Jesus Christ and his Church are the focal and terminating point of all prophecy (e.g. Jesus fulfills the Temple, Israel’s feasts, our Sabbath rest, and is the true Vine).11

2. Whereas the Old Testament saw the consummation of God's redemptive purposes in one act, the New Testament authors portray it as coming in two phases.12

3. The “New Testament serves, as it were, as the ‘lexicon’ of the Old Testament’s eschatological expectation.”13

4. The Bible depicts the unexperienced future in modes of the experienced; thus our interpretive task is to enter the world of the original audience’s experience. 

5. Rightly handling typology: the unity of type and antitype, the consummation of type in the antitype, etc.14

________________________

1. Thomas H. Horne, quoted in Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Back Toward the Future: Hints for Interpreting Biblical Prophecy (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1989), 20.

2. J. Barton Payne, cited in Kaiser, Back Toward the Future, 20.

3. Kaiser, Back Toward the Future, 23.

4. Robert Cara & Richard Belcher, Lecture Notes for Advanced Biblical Exegesis (Reformed Theological Seminary, 2019), 11-12.

5. D. Brent Sandy, Plowshares and Pruning Hooks: Rethinking the Language of Biblical Prophecy and Apocalyptic (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 62.

6. Sam Storms, Kingdom Come: The Amillennial Alternative (Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2013), 32.

7. Kaiser, Back Toward the Future, 52.

8. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, IV:654.

9. Keith Mathison, Postmillennialism: An Eschatology of Hope (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1999), 163.

10. Gentry, He Shall Have Dominion, 5 — Klieforth, Berkhof, Feinberg, Erickson are all cited by Gentry as observing the doctrine’s underdevelopment (5-7).

11. Storms, Kingdom Come, 16-27.

12. Storms, Kingdom Come, 28.

13. Garlington, quoted in Storms, Kingdom Come, 30.

14. Storms, Kingdom Come, 37-41.