Revelation Down To Earth

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 30 OCT 2000

In this strangely deflationary commentary, Walhout, a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, attempts to make Revelation applicable to the present. In the process, the text's strange and violent images become commonplace inconveniences. In Rev. 16, for example, an angel pours out a "bowl of God's wrath" onto the rivers and streams, which turn into blood as a judgment on those who have "shed the blood of your saints and prophets." Walhout's interpretation: "The rivers and springs represent the philosophies and policies we follow to gain a good life. If these policies require us to be... immoral... then the ultimate result will be disappointing." His thesis is that Revelation "reveals" that the church has been leading the world toward perfection, "so that the world will slowly be brought under the sway of Christ and away from the devil." The structure for his thesis is very orderly, but the text simply refuses to fit into his neat little boxes. Walhout's pastoral background may attract some conservative readers, but his interpretation will not; he radically reconfigures many traditional theological concepts, such as the Second Coming of Christ, hell, judgment and resurrection. While seeking real-life application for this enigmatic part of the Bible, Walhout has reduced the mysterious to the mundane, and traditional Christian hope to an astonishingly optimistic humanism.