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hrenn113's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
bengresik's review
4.0
An excellent overview of a very confusing book. It doesn't resolve every challenge, but does help things to make a little more sense at times.
neilrcoulter's review
5.0
This year I’ve read through all eighteen volumes of N. T. Wright’s New Testament for Everyone series. I’d worked through several of them previously, as part of leading an evening Bible study, and I enjoy Wright’s gentle, pastoral, insightful leading through the basics of understanding what’s going on in each book of the New Testament. These aren’t in-depth, everything-you-could-possibly-want-to-know commentaries; rather, they’re intended for a lay readership that knows something of the Christian faith and would like to know a little more. Wright’s writing draws on his own personal experiences and other illustrations to bring the somewhat distant-past world of the NT writers into our contemporary sphere. In each section of each volume in the series, what’s important to Wright is not merely “What does this mean?” but also “How is this going to change the way you live each day?” It’s a wonderful approach.
And this final volume, looking at John’s Revelation, is my favorite book in the series. Revelation is a part of the Bible that has been so misinterpreted (with further misinterpretations building and building upon earlier ones), and it has such a reputation for being a bit frightening, complex, and impenetrable, that reading Wright’s comments is like opening a window and letting in the light and fresh air that should have been there all along. For me, it was like breathing a sigh of relief.
Wright suggests two images for our reading of Revelation that I found really helpful. The first is to think of Revelation as a kaleidoscope, where you can never quite grab onto something before it has split into several other shapes and colors, all of which help you understand the original thing you thought you’d understood just a little better. The point is not to grasp a specific, firm interpretation of each image in the book (and certainly not to make predictions about particular dates or locations), but to allow the kaleidoscopic prism of image upon image upon image to slowly reveal to you the story God is telling.
The second image is church bells in a cathedral. As they begin to play, you feel that you can pick out the tone of each individual bell. But then they keep playing . . . and as the sounds cover one another, and the echoing reverberations in the cathedral space cover the new sounds, you find that it’s no longer possible to isolate each bell for itself. Instead, you hear the full sound of many bells (many images, many parts of the story) washing over you majestically. When it concludes, you know that you’ve heard more by being overwhelmed by the combination than you would have by knowing just the sound of each bell on its own.
These images work not only for the book of Revelation alone, but in seeing Revelation as the culmination of the whole Bible. The colors and shapes of the kaleidoscope, the sounds of the bells—it’s all been slowly building from the beginning of the Bible until the conclusion of Revelation, the book in which everything is brought together in the most complex and yet clearest version of the full story yet. Reading Revelation with the rest of the Bible in mind, we see God and the story he’s been crafting in ways that make everything that came before fit into place in new, perfect ways.
Rather than write more about it, I’d rather just recommend that if you’re at all interested, you should pick up this book and let it guide you through the amazing final book of the New Testament. As I finished this read-through, I felt more encouraged than I ever have before about the majesty and glory in Revelation.
And this final volume, looking at John’s Revelation, is my favorite book in the series. Revelation is a part of the Bible that has been so misinterpreted (with further misinterpretations building and building upon earlier ones), and it has such a reputation for being a bit frightening, complex, and impenetrable, that reading Wright’s comments is like opening a window and letting in the light and fresh air that should have been there all along. For me, it was like breathing a sigh of relief.
Wright suggests two images for our reading of Revelation that I found really helpful. The first is to think of Revelation as a kaleidoscope, where you can never quite grab onto something before it has split into several other shapes and colors, all of which help you understand the original thing you thought you’d understood just a little better. The point is not to grasp a specific, firm interpretation of each image in the book (and certainly not to make predictions about particular dates or locations), but to allow the kaleidoscopic prism of image upon image upon image to slowly reveal to you the story God is telling.
The second image is church bells in a cathedral. As they begin to play, you feel that you can pick out the tone of each individual bell. But then they keep playing . . . and as the sounds cover one another, and the echoing reverberations in the cathedral space cover the new sounds, you find that it’s no longer possible to isolate each bell for itself. Instead, you hear the full sound of many bells (many images, many parts of the story) washing over you majestically. When it concludes, you know that you’ve heard more by being overwhelmed by the combination than you would have by knowing just the sound of each bell on its own.
These images work not only for the book of Revelation alone, but in seeing Revelation as the culmination of the whole Bible. The colors and shapes of the kaleidoscope, the sounds of the bells—it’s all been slowly building from the beginning of the Bible until the conclusion of Revelation, the book in which everything is brought together in the most complex and yet clearest version of the full story yet. Reading Revelation with the rest of the Bible in mind, we see God and the story he’s been crafting in ways that make everything that came before fit into place in new, perfect ways.
Rather than write more about it, I’d rather just recommend that if you’re at all interested, you should pick up this book and let it guide you through the amazing final book of the New Testament. As I finished this read-through, I felt more encouraged than I ever have before about the majesty and glory in Revelation.
hpuphd's review
3.0
I read this at the same time I read William Barclay’s two-volumes on Revelation (as background for a Bible study I attend). The formats are similar (a hunk of verses and then commentary), and though Barclay is often seen as a liberal and Wright as a conservative, these two writers did not differ on much of anything in their interpretations. Barclay (who devotes to Revelation two volumes) often sets forth numerous views of this or that passage before giving his own, a practice Wright mostly shuns. Barclay is much better at providing historical background and better at the devotional applications he brings out. Wright’s book has good points, but his fondness for beginning each section with some sort of dramatic or descriptive lead got wearisome. The challenge of discussing a book as esoteric as Revelation seems to require more scrutiny than he gives it.
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