Reddit reviews A Brief Commentary on the book of Revelation

>Seriously, if that is true, you guys are doing a terrible job. Kind of kidding.

I wholeheartedly agree, not kidding. The Church might have the true doctrine, but it has a long way to go when it comes to reaching outside the traditional cultural boundaries of the Church. Sometime between the Schism and the Ottoman/Western Captivity, we lost the missionary spirit that characterized the first millenium of Christianity.

>Growing up in Catholic religion classes, I had similar arguments made about Revelation and Rome as well as the "it's all symbolic" handwave to explain everything away and it seemed to make sense until I read Revelation. It may indeed contain symbolic language, but even if that is so it does not match the destruction of Rome, Israel or anything historic.

Do you think I haven't read Revelation? It makes sense to me. It seems pretty obvious to me that it is not just describing literally what will happen in the future when Christ returns.

>Bending over backwards still doesn't make it fit. Reigning over the earth for example, just look around at the earth. If this is the reigning described in Revelation that we place forward into the Millianal kingdom, there is something wrong. Jesus is not ruling the earth with a rod of iron.

The Revelation is very hard to understand, and it is the only book in the entire Bible (Old and New Testaments) that the Orthodox do not read liturgically in some capacity. I find Orthodox scholarship on the Revelation to be very edifying and I suggest you check some of it out. Hey, this one is even free on Amazon! The fact that not everybody is a Christian or whatever doesn't matter. Theologically, the Kingdom is here, since we make the Kingdom present in every Liturgy. The words that begin every Eucharistic service in the Orthodox Church--"Blessed is the Kingdom, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen."--denote that we are entering the heavenly Liturgy which the angels serve continuously before God. The fact that some are not in the Kingdom is irrelevant to the fact that the Kingdom of Heaven is made present (anamnesis or "remembering") every single day in Orthodox churches and monasteries around the world.

>Or the plagues/bowls/trumpets - there is nothing in history that meets the description that God lays out for John. So is God exaggerating or being inaccurate or did it not happen yet?

I don't claim to have all the answers. I'm sure there are Orthodox homilies that argue that it has all been fulfilled. A lot of the more esoteric stuff is also taken by Orthodox to be references to liturgy--and make no mistake the Apostles celebrated liturgical Eucharists.

>People may not agree with the reading of the Scripture, but it comes from the place of trying to accurately understand what does not fit in the Preterist viewpoint, not a misunderstanding.

I'm not questioning anybody's motives. But as I am an Orthodox Christian, you have to understand that I do believe that most of the world's Christians have got something wrong, even if they are 99% correct.

>BTW - the description of a lost distinction is simply inaccurate. The protestant viewpoint, mostly, has the dead without Christ raised at the end of Revelation with the Great White Throne judgment.

I have never heard a Protestant talk about Hades and Gehenna. The prevailing view seems to be that the "saved" go to Heaven when they die, the "unsaved" go to Hell, and the Second Coming is only for those who are still alive (Rapture/Tribulation/Millenial Kingdom as opposed to the Eternal Kingdom). The eschatology I have heard from every Protestant I have conversed with, except a couple Protestant "proselytes" who spend more time in Orthodox churches than their own, is utterly at odds with the eschatology espoused by the Church. I can't blame anybody for this; the Latin authors began to use inferus/infernus ("Hell") for both Hades and Gehenna very early on, and the Latin Fathers began to lose the distinction as early as the 5th century.