Why is the Revelation to John important?
When we come to assess the importance of the Revelation to John the first thing that has to be said is that its importance does not relate in any way to literal predictions about the future, either of its own time or as may relate to our own time. How important the writing was in its own time and specific circumstances is impossible to say. Certainly the church faced the twin crises described above and in time it addressed and overcame both challenges and survived, to become in succeeding centuries the religion of the empire displacing paganism. Whether John’s writing had any impact in his own day we cannot know. What is more immediate to us, however, is the importance of this document to contemporary life especially as we reject spurious ‘biblical prophecy’. The first section of John’s book is an analysis of the church of his day. The first message we may take from the writing is a call similarly to analyse clearly and critically the life of our contemporary Christian community, affir
