Prophetic Realism
Part 4 of an Introduction to Eschatology
The Problem of Relating Prophecy of Acts from Heaven to History
As with the first basic problem in eschatology, so with the second. Recall that the problem with the “millennial maze” was that it typically skips the more basic step of reckoning with the much clearer New Testament concept of the coming of the kingdom. So we called it the problem of matching the millennium to its kingdom reign. We will see the same need to take a step back here with models for “interpreting Revelation.”
Notice what I called this second problem instead of “the problem of interpreting Revelation.” No doubt that is a problem! But this is actually a more general theological problem. If you read the average book or article on the subject, it is communicated as merely an isolated interpretive problem, given literary genres and a few historical epochs. Not so. The problem of prophecy is really a species of how to relate the eternal God and his actions to the revelation he gives of its manifestations.
After all, what is the real difficulty in approaching Revelation for the reader of any level? Is it not how to relate the symbolic depictions of spiritual realities (and even numbers) with objects of nature, and which persons or events to match them up with in time—or whether to match them to objects in time at all?
Pick any example you like and you will not be able to put things any simpler. Make the 144,000 as “literal” as you wish and then tell me how you got there, and then I will show you how you borrowed from a myriad other texts (at best), none of which explicitly matched that number to your “literal” chosen roster. You were not wrong to borrow from other texts. You were wrong to pretend that this is not what you were doing. When we do this, we are using abstract reasoning. We are not simply retracing ink patterns. We do this with every doctrine that we derive from Scripture.
What we are told in the standard survey is that there are four ways to interpret Revelation—or really all of the New Testament prophecy concerning the coming of Christ’s kingdom following his First Advent. These four are 1. Idealism, 2. Historicism, 3. Preterism, and 4. Futurism. Of course there is also a fifth view that is sometimes called an “Eclectic” view borrowing from the other four views.
As concisely as one can summarize these: Idealism views Revelation as symbolic of a great spiritual war in the heavenlies, but does not tie any of these to concrete times, events, or persons. Historicism sees Revelation as giving the account of the entire history in between the Two Advents of Christ. Preterism sees Revelation as foretelling those things which must soon come to pass, that is, around 70 A.D. Futurism sees Revelation as foretelling the much more distant future, at least starting in Chapter 4 and running right up to the Lord’s return and other final events.
What I want to suggest is that these ought not be considered merely four different models in antithesis to each other. They ought to be seen as four aspects of one vision of reality.
That is not to endorse an “eclectic” model. As far as I can tell, the eclectic model makes the same faulty assumption that these are antithetical perspectives and seeks to mix and match from “the best” of them. That still assumes the anti-philosophical broken vision.
To rise above all of this, we will have to do some hard thinking about something that is actually an element of a larger way of looking at the Scriptures in general. It may seem rather abstract to us today, but it was a very normal way to view things from the earliest era of the church down through the Reformation era. In order to understand it, we will have to come to terms with a concept within classical philosophy.
This crucial first concept is called Realism. In layman’s terms, Realism is the conviction that ideas known as “universals” are real entities. Such universals include our ideas of beauty, goodness, justice, oneness, and truth. Plato and Aristotle first made this discussion famous in Western thought, and Christian thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas showed how these universals were really either divine attributes or divine ideas. There are things in the world that are more or less united because God is One. He is the source of unity. Or again we can speak of things “good” in this world and others “bad,” because there is a Good in the first place. God alone is good (Luke 18:9), with a “capital G,” so to speak.
What these classical philosophers were stumbling upon is what every Christian begins to know intuitively from their growth in the Scriptures. Unless God is God and has made himself known to us “in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20), well, then literally none of our words would make any sense. Explaining why this can get us into the deep end of the pool. But one of the simplest ways to grasp the concept is to take a simple object such as a rose or a ball. Such objects have color, texture, size, purposes, etc. But if we start to isolate any of those predicates or properties, what we will find is that they all exist independent of that particular rose or that particular flower. In fact, each of those properties—roundness, softness, redness, pleasantness, and so forth—really exists independent of its particular “showing up” in the thing we encounter in our world.
These thinkers taught our tradition that all particular things in the world are changeable, material, temporal, and so each of them depend, for their being and their meaning, on these more universal “ideas” (or what Plato would have called Forms) in order for us to make sense of them. To use two more abstract examples, could we call a war a “just war,” or a ruling by a judge a “just ruling,” unless there was a real thing called Justice to which particular wars and particular rulings corresponded more than other wars and rulings did?
A note to philosophy students: This is not the time to speak pedantically about how those following Plato gave us Extreme Realism, and those following Aristotle gave us Moderate Realism; and that Thomas’ vision, mostly following Aristotle, is the more mature vision—Yes, I am well aware, but at the moment, we are trying to simplify an already difficult concept for laypeople. So, if you would sit on the sideline for this one. And actually Aristotelian causal analysis will become important as we proceed, but one step at a time.
Now particulars in time are related to universals in eternity in the way that a flower is both beautiful and ugly. It is “full of beauty” when it is in full bloom. It “participates” in the being of beauty—or reflects or conforms to—that essence of beauty which momentarily describes its appearance; and yet it also becomes. At another moment it is deprived of that same beauty. Hence, all of the objects of creation (anything that is an effect) depends for its existence on God, and can become more or less the perfection of that which it was meant to be.
Now what on earth does philosophical Realism have to do with eschatology? It is simply that the material particulars of the kingdom of Christ, advancing through time, are also, well—particulars. Particulars don’t become anything other than particulars simply because we are all emotionally revved up on the sensational and the mysterious. Eschatology is not the one thing that sticks out of metaphysical truth. Its objects must obey the same rules of temporal things relating to eternity as everything else in time does.
Realism Applied to Prophetic Perspective
Now once the Realism piece of the puzzle is in place, we can reintroduce ourselves to language that may be more familiar to students of biblical interpretation: that between type and antitype, shadows and substance, or in other words, relating promise to fulfillment.
Let’s start with the least controversial point: a type. We all know what a type is in the Bible. It is like a symbol or a shadow of something more substantial to come. Some are more obvious than others. The sacrificial lambs of the Old Covenant were types of Christ’s sacrifice to come. Jacob was a type of Israel. David was a type of Christ. Of course it helps when some passage in the New Testament explicitly says so, as when Paul says, “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor. 5:7). In all of these examples and many others that might be more difficult to see, we tend to see “types” as being back in the Old Testament, and so (because of the basic structure of the Bible) they are indeed mostly “back there.”
Now the book of Hebrews is a Holy Spirit-inspired clinic in types and their fulfillment. And it is not about some obscure subject with no profit to our souls. It unpacks a gospel typology. “More than any other New Testament writer,” says Greidanus, “the author of Hebrews is known for his use of typology. Although he uses the word ‘typos’ only once, he indicates types with other words such as copy or sketch (hypodeigma, 8:5; 9:23; antitypos, 9:24), shadow (skia, 8:5; 10:1), and symbol (parabole, 9:9).”1
Hebrews sees Christ as the substance of the Old Testament. In drawing this forth, its inspired author works from a particular understanding of type and antitype, or shadow and substance.
The real forerunner of modern biblical theology among the Reformed, Geerhardus Vos, was profound on this point. In his excellent little commentary The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews he sees 10:1 as a crucial passage: “the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities.”2 That expression, αὐτὴν τὴν εἰκόνα, may also rendered “the very image.” So if the Old was full of the copies, what can it mean that the New contains still images? Vos answers by considering how an artist first draws a sketch (skia) and then the final picture (eikoon).
Note that “both the sketch and the real picture are only representations of some real thing which lies beyond both of them. This real thing would then be the heavenly reality.”3 The upshot for Vos may strike some as too Platonic, though by this he only means that the author differs from the other Apostles in how they have the Old “shadowing” the New. Incidentally, there is even a diagram in Vos’ commentary which is very simple and clarifying. The first sketch and final picture are like the two points on the base of a triangle—easy enough to imagine—and then the ultimate reality above is, well, the top point of the triangle.
One more distinction is necessary to round out our concept.
Particular types and that which is more universal, which the types represent, is not just about a left-to-right narrative key. We must remember that all of these things are fundamentally “from him, and through him, and to him” (Rom. 11:36). They are theological things. All types and their fulfillments (antitypes) are particular manifestations on earth of things as they are in heaven. Of course, for many, the term “heaven” will also need to be re-examined, but if it helps, we can also say the same thing this way—the material particulars are exemplifying, or “playing out,” spiritual particulars, which themselves are manifesting those universals in God himself.
In the language of the Scholastics, there are two main kinds of theology: 1. archetypal, named after that classical word for “universals,” but which the Scholastics used to denote the “things of God” that were known in their infinite essence by God alone. Then there is that theology which is 2. ectypal, so named after those “things that have been made,” through which, Paul tells us, truths about God are clearly communicated through the created medium. So the essence is known through examples, ideas known through instances, or the form through the material. Now we are ready to put the broken pieces back together into one coherent picture.
Idealism corresponds to the archetypes above, Historicism to the ectypes below, Preterism to the types to the left, and Futurism to the antitypes to the right.
These are like the four points on a compass, except (obviously mixing metaphors) that, here, our “west,” “south,” and “east” actually have to come to an equilibrium, standing as level points on a historical timeline, with our “north” being what will look (suspiciously to some) like Plato’s realm of the forms, but which I prefer to think of as Augustine’s vision of the City of God. Within such a vision, these would no longer be “isms” at all.
In truth there are still two main classes of things: the archetypes above a line and then all of the ectypal instantiations. That is why preterism and futurism settle at two fixed points in the past and in the future, but why there are historicists in each generation that make much of their own generation. When the generation passes, that form of historicism is discarded as an interesting relic. Thus while the Pope may still be an antichrist of sorts, the hope of New England Puritans that the defeat of the French on the frontier of the 1750s was not in fact correct about the coming millennial kingdom.
All of this is to say that what we have been calling “Idealism” is really just the “north star” perspective on what might better be called “Prophetic Realism”—which is really just regular realism applied to the interpretive matters of symbols in eschatology. Now with the demise of the classical Realist vision, these four points spun away from each other as a fractured universe, issuing forth into four competing visions of eschatology, and ways of interpreting the book of Revelation in particular. In point of fact, these four are not to be regarded as four “options” for the way things are or will be, but rather four different aspects of what is in the course all things, whether past, present, or future, and always bringing about on earth the kingdom as it is in heaven.
(To be continued)
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1. Sidney Greidanus, Preaching Christ from the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 219.
2. Geerhardus Vos, The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), 55.
3. Vos, The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 55.
