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HopeSS: The Gospel from Patmos (Jan 5, ’19) — 3 Comments

1. Do we have prophetic prayer? If so,what is their Biblical foundation?another question: Do we have prophets in Church today?

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   • I am not sure what you mean by "prophetic prayer". Would you like to expand what you mean here?

     In the wider sense of the word "prophet", we do have prophets in the church today. It is worth remembering that prophets are not necessarily people who foretell the future. If you look at the 47 references to the word "prophesied" in the Bible, you will see that very few of them have anything to do with foretelling the future. Most appear, from their context, to be something to do with praising God. One prophet was described as prophesying with a harp; so maybe even singers and musicians were considered prophets.

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2. My eyes have been opened to alternative readings of the Apocalypse at least three times. I was raised within the SDA fold, and so believed at 20 that the correct interpretation lay somewhere between Ellen White’s, Uriah Smith’s, and Louis Were’s views. Then in my twenties I read Mattias Rissi’s “The Future of the World” and my eyes were dramatically opened to a new way to read it. In my 30’s I read R.H. Charles Critical Commentary for the first time and began to see the writing in a reconstructed, originary context. Within a decade or two I had read 20 more commentaries, including Adela Yarbro Collins’s “Crisis and Catharsis,” (1984) a sophisticated, ethical reading, and her later “The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation” (2001).
   Thanks to these and other scholars I am intellectually satisfied that the Apocalypse well deserves its place in Christian thought.
   Its just not the book I grew up with anymore.

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