Symbolizing Reality

At the beginning of his Silence and Praise, Ryan Hansen summarizes several of the recent approaches to understanding the cosmology of the book of Revelation. The most popular today borrows from the sociology of knowledge to suggest that John’s writing creates a “symbolic universe” or “worldview” for his readers.

Hansen rightly argues that “the symbolic universe solution cannot account for the sense in John’s text that he does seem to want to say something true about material reality. His language strains against its limit, but there is a sense in which the cosmic catastrophe on display is more than symbolic, as is the material reality of the new creation.”

He elaborates further on: “[John] does expect himself and his audience to experience the new creation materially. . . . John’s cosmological language above all seeks to say something real and meaningful about the world, materially, physically, and symbolically. . . . When John talks about the destruction of the cosmos he is not talking about some other cosmos besides the one in which the Philadelphians and Laodiceans live. When John presents his vision of the new creation he is not talking about a reality completely severed from the real world of the people of Smyrna and Pergamum. There is both continuity and discontinuity. And yet, his presentation of the world seeks to construct the space in which they live in a certain way in order to move his audience to action. The way he presents his picture of the cosmos is intended to persuade. This requires a conception that allows interpreters to hold these two necessities together.”