Here are several ways to think about the apocalyptic texts (especially Revelation) that are found between the bonded-leather bindings of your Bible:
- Road maps for the future? If you see Daniel, Revelation, and other apocalyptic texts mostly as road maps for the future, you are probably taking what’s known as a futurist view.
- History textbooks about the past, present, and future? If you think apocalyptic texts prophetically provide information about a long period of history— perhaps the history of Christianity or some other significant epoch—that’s a historicist approach.
- Allegories for all times and places? If all the visions seem to you to be allegories of struggles of God’s people in every age, that’s closer to an idealist view.
- Long-lost newspapers from the past? If you see the biblical apocalypses as books that mostly tell about current events from the times when the texts were written—something like a lavishly-written newspaper report—that’s called a preterist perspective.
Keep in mind that none of these four approaches completely excludes the others. Partly because the biblical writers mixed literary genres, nearly every interpreter of the end times draws from more than one of these approaches when reading biblical apocalypses and end-times prophecies.
