Letters and Opening Visions
Reverend Elliott considered if John's letters to the seven churches in Asia Minor were in themselves prophetic. He set out a table of different systems which advocated this view and found the discrepancies were so massive as to convince him there could be no prophetic intention in the letters themselves. The letters were a record of the things that are, not of the things that shall be. To this end, he suggested that the opening vision section (beginning Chapter 4) did not impart new information. The idea was to recall familiar prophecies: Isaiah 6:1, Ezekiel 1: 4 & 20, and Exodus 24: 9 & 10.
Read more about this topic: Horae Apocalypticae
Famous quotes containing the words letters, opening and/or visions:
“Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose.... In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires....”
—Elizabeth Hardwick (b. 1916)
“His leanings were strictly lyrical, descriptions of nature and emotions came to him with surprising facility, but on the other hand he had a lot of trouble with routine items, such as, for instance, the opening and closing of doors, or shaking hands when there were numerous characters in a room, and one person or two persons saluted many people.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Anyone with a real taste for solitude who indulges that taste encounters the dangers of any other drug-taker. The habit grows. You become an addict.... Absorbed in the visions of solitude, human beings are only interruptions. What voice can equal the voices of solitude? What sights equal the movement of a single day’s tide of light across the floor boards of one room? What drama be as continuously absorbing as the interior one?”
—Jessamyn West (1902–1984)