Viktor Vasnetsov, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1887. Public domain.
Revelation 1 to 22 · Debate · Featured Study
The Four Schools of Revelation
The futurist, preterist, historicist and idealist readings of Revelation, with the holders of each, its case from the text and the hardest problem it carries.
Before you read a verse of Revelation you have already made a decision about when what you are reading happens.
This is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show His servants what must soon come to pass. He made it known by sending His angel to His servant John,
- The question
- Do the visions of Revelation 4 to 22 describe events still ahead, the events of John's own century, the course of church history, or the conflict of every age?
Before you read a verse of Revelation you have already made a decision about when what you are reading happens.
Summary
The futurist, preterist, historicist and idealist schools each place the visions of Revelation 4 to 22 at a different time.
- The futurist reads the visions as still ahead, as Irenaeus did in the second century.
- The preterist reads them as the events of John's own century, Nero and the fall of Jerusalem among them.
- The historicist reads them as a map of church history, the reading of the Reformers and of Matthew Henry.
- The idealist reads them as the conflict of God and evil in every age, the reading of Tyconius and Bede.
- Every school holds that Christ will judge evil and make a new heaven and a new earth.
The Texts Every School Reads
Four verses from Revelation 1, 4 and 22 set the time of the visions, and each school must account for them.
This is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show His servants what must soon come to pass. He made it known by sending His angel to His servant John,Every school has to say what soon means in the book's first sentence.
Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and obey what is written in it, because the time is near.This is the book's blessing on its reader, and every school reads the reason it gives as a claim about time.
After this I looked and saw a door standing open in heaven. And the voice I had previously heard speak to me like a trumpet was saying, “Come up here, and I will show you what must happen after these things.”The futurist school hinges its reading on the words after these things in this verse.
Then he told me, “Do not seal up the words of prophecy in this book, because the time is near.The book closes on the claim it opened with, and John is told to leave the words unsealed.
Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and obey what is written in it, because the time is near.This is the book's blessing on its reader, and every school reads the reason it gives as a claim about time.
After this I looked and saw a door standing open in heaven. And the voice I had previously heard speak to me like a trumpet was saying, “Come up here, and I will show you what must happen after these things.”The futurist school hinges its reading on the words after these things in this verse.
Then he told me, “Do not seal up the words of prophecy in this book, because the time is near.The book closes on the claim it opened with, and John is told to leave the words unsealed.
Revelation 22:10, Revelation 1:1
The Beast, the Thousand Years and Babylon
Each of the four schools answers the same three passages, Revelation 13, 20 and 17 to 18.
A table of three passages and four schools: each row gives one passage, its question and the answer each school gives.
| The text | Futurist | Preterist | Historicist | Idealist |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Beast, Revelation 13. Who is the beast out of the sea, and what is the mark? | A future personal antichrist, empowered by the dragon, heading a world order that compels worship and controls buying and selling. Inside futurism the geography is contested: a revived Roman framework (Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth, 1970; John Hagee, Jerusalem Countdown, 2006) or a Mid-East one (Joel Richardson, Mideast Beast, 2012). | Nero, and the imperial power embodied in him. The head wounded and healed is read against the rumour that Nero would return, and the number of the beast is read as his name. | The papacy, or the medieval church-state: the Reformers' identification, with the mark as its enforced allegiance and the two beasts as secular and church arms of one system. | The recurring face of state power claiming the worship owed to God, in Rome then and in every Rome since. The mark is allegiance made visible, in whatever century it is demanded. |
| The Thousand Years, Revelation 20. What are the thousand years, and where do they sit relative to the return? | A literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth after the return of chapter 19. Satan is bound, the martyrs are raised in a first resurrection, the nations are ruled from Jerusalem, and a final rebellion follows when the dragon is released. | The present age between the two comings. The binding of Satan is dated from the cross and Pentecost, and the reign is the reign of the departed saints with Christ; partial preterists ordinarily read this text as amillennial. | The school is divided on this text. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown (1871) expected a future reign, while Matthew Henry's commentary read the reign as begun within the church's history, one reason the school's timetables diverge so widely. | A symbolic number for the fullness of Christ's present reign with the saints who have died: the kingdom already begun, and a period no calendar marks. |
| Babylon the Great, Revelation 17 to 18. What city is the prostitute on the scarlet beast? | An end-time apostate world system of religion, commerce and power, often paired with a revived Rome or a literally rebuilt Babylon. The merchants' lament of chapter 18 is read as an economic collapse still ahead. | Rome, which the preterist finds in the seven mountains on which the woman sits (Revelation 17:9). Rome was the persecutor of the saints, whose fall the book announces. Some preterists, David Chilton in The Days of Vengeance (1987) among them, read Babylon as apostate Jerusalem, the city that killed the prophets. | Papal Rome: the woman riding the beast read as the church-state that corrupted the gospel and drank the blood of the saints. This identification is the school's most famous and most contested claim. | Every civilisation that seduces with luxury and kills the faithful. Babylon is a type that recurs, the angle Jonathan Cahn works in when The Harbinger (2011) traces an ancient pattern of judgment recurring in a modern nation. |
The Four Lenses
Each school has a thesis about when the visions happen and a strongest case from the text.
The futurist school1 paragraph
The futurist school holds that from chapter 4 onward the visions describe events still ahead of us. It takes the book's own prophetic claims at face value. The scale of what is described has no first-century match: a third of mankind killed, every eye seeing Him, a city coming down out of heaven. The ante-Nicene church, closest to John in time and language, expected a literal reign on earth. Justin Martyr reads the book this way in his Dialogue with Trypho, chapters 80 to 81 (about AD 160), and Irenaeus in Against Heresies, Book 5, chapters 32 to 36 (about AD 180).
The preterist school1 paragraph
The preterist school holds that the visions largely describe the seer's own century: Nero, the fall of Jerusalem and pagan Rome. It refuses to make a letter written to seven pressured congregations mean nothing to them. It takes the words of nearness in Revelation 1:1, Revelation 1:3 and Revelation 22:10 in their plain sense, and it finds the worship of the beast in the imperial cult of John's day. Adam Clarke, in his Commentary on the Bible (1832), reads Revelation 22:10 as concerning the present times of John's first readers.
The historicist school1 paragraph
The historicist school reads the book as an unrolling map of church history, from John's day to the consummation. It takes the sequence of seals, trumpets and bowls as a real sequence. It also answers a pastoral question the other readings can leave aside: what was this prophecy for during the fifteen centuries between the seven churches and the end? On this reading the book has been narrating the church's actual road the whole time. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the book this way in their Commentary Critical and Explanatory (1871).
The idealist school1 paragraph
The idealist school reads the symbols as the timeless conflict of God and evil, without dates. It matches how symbols actually behave, and it explains the book's structure, where the same conflict is shown again from rising angles. It also accounts for the plain fact that this book has spoken with power to the persecuted church in every century, which a coded timetable for one generation could not. Augustine reads the thousand years this way in The City of God, Book 20 (AD 426).
The site's tradition is Wesleyan-Pentecostal, and on this book it is futurist. With the futurist school it expects a literal tribulation, a personal antichrist, a bodily return, a thousand-year reign, a real judgment and a real new creation. Beside the futurist case it reads chapters 19, 20 and 21 as a sequence, with the return before the reign and the reign before the new creation. Scripture leaves this question open to more than one reading, and the site gives no verdict between the four schools.
GRANTED TO THE PRETERIST
The futurist reads the letters of chapters 2 and 3 first as letters to churches John knew, before reading anything in the book as still ahead.
GRANTED TO THE IDEALIST
The dragon's war on the saints reaches the martyrs of every age, and the futurist still waits for a last form of that war.
GRANTED TO THE HISTORICIST
The plagues run as one ordered sequence of God's plan, completed in the seven last plagues, and the futurist reads them in that order.
The Evidence the Schools Dispute
The preterist, futurist and idealist schools each read the same verses as evidence for their own reading.
The words of nearness1 table or figure, 1 paragraph
The Greek phrase behind soon in Revelation 1:1 and Revelation 22:6 is en tachei, from tachos, a brief space of time. Where Christ says He is coming soon, in Revelation 22:7, Revelation 22:12 and Revelation 22:20, the word is the adverb tachy, which can mean soon or suddenly. In Revelation 1:3 and Revelation 22:10 the word is engys, near, in the line the time is near. These words carry more weight than any others in the whole debate.
A table of three schools and how each reads the words of nearness.
| The school | How it reads them |
|---|---|
| Preterist | The events were near to the first readers because they were about to happen to them. |
| Futurist | Tachy and en tachei mean swiftly. The day of the LORD is always near in Isaiah and Joel, and once the events begin they run fast. |
| Idealist | The nearness is the church's permanent posture and has no date: every generation stands under an end that could break in on it. |
The number of the beast1 table or figure, 1 quotation, 1 verse, 1 paragraph
Revelation 13:18 openly invites a calculation and calls the number the number of a man. Neron Kaisar written in Hebrew letters sums to 666, and without its final letter it sums to 616. That shorter number is the reading of some manuscripts, and Irenaeus already knew the variant and rejected it.
Here is a call for wisdom: Let the one who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and that number is 666.A table of three schools and how each reads the number of the beast.
| The school | How it reads the number |
|---|---|
| Preterist | The strongest single piece of evidence for the school: a solution the original readers could have worked out, and a manuscript variant that tracks the spelling. |
| Futurist | The Nero calculation is accepted as the best historical solution, but it does not settle the identity of a beast the book places at the end. The first century gives an application, and the end gives the fulfilment. |
| Idealist | 666 is human number three times falling short of the divine seven, a portrait of humanity playing God and a name no one is meant to decode. |
“And there is therefore in this beast, when he comes, a recapitulation made of all sorts of iniquity and of every deceit, in order that all apostate power, flowing into and being shut up in him, may be sent into the furnace of fire. Fittingly, therefore, shall his name possess the number six hundred and sixty-six, since he sums up in his own person all the commixture of wickedness which took place previous to the deluge, due to the apostasy of the angels.”
Irenaeus · Against Heresies 5.29.2 · on Revelation 13:18Patristic
The Date of Writing
Three early witnesses name Domitian as the emperor when John wrote.
Irenaeus reports that the vision was seen toward the end of Domitian's reign, about AD 95 (Against Heresies, Book 5, chapter 30). Victorinus of Pettau, who died about AD 304, counts the five fallen kings of Revelation 17:10 from Galba to Titus. He names Domitian as the emperor under whom the book was written. The competing early date, about AD 65 to 68 under Nero, rests on evidence inside the book.
“John, the apostle whom Jesus most loved, the son of Zebedee and brother of James... In the fourteenth year then after Nero Domitian having raised a second persecution he was banished to the island of Patmos, and wrote the Apocalypse, on which Justin Martyr and Irenæus afterwards wrote commentaries.”
Jerome · De Viris Illustribus (On Illustrious Men), Section 9 · on Revelation 1:1Patristic
Then I was given a measuring rod like a staff and was told, “Go and measure the temple of God and the altar, and count the number of worshipers there. But exclude the courtyard outside the temple. Do not measure it, because it has been given over to the nations, and they will trample the holy city for 42 months.The early date reads the temple measured here as the temple still standing in Jerusalem when John wrote.
A table of three schools and what each makes of the date of writing.
| The school | What it makes of the date |
|---|---|
| Preterist | It requires the early date. If Revelation was written after AD 70, it cannot be prophesying Jerusalem's fall. |
| Futurist | It does not depend on the date either way, and the traditional late date, resting on the strongest external testimony, removes the preterist's foundation. |
| Historicist | It is comfortable with the late date, because the map of church history starts from John's own moment. |
How the Four Schools Came Down
Nine dated marks trace the four schools from the second century to the twentieth.
From Irenaeus to Bedesix marks, about AD 180 to the eighth century
A table of six dated marks from the second century to the eighth, each row naming the school it belongs to.
| When | School | What |
|---|---|---|
| About AD 180 | Futurist | Irenaeus, in Against Heresies, Book 5, weighs names for the number of the beast and declines to fix on one. |
| Third century | Idealist | Origen of Alexandria reads the figures of Scripture for their spiritual sense, the root from which the idealist reading grew. |
| Before AD 304 | Idealist | Victorinus of Pettau writes the earliest commentary on the book that survives, and he reads the Spirit as returning in later chapters to things shown before. |
| About AD 390 | Idealist | Tyconius writes a commentary on the Apocalypse that reads its figures as the church and its enemies. |
| AD 426 | Idealist | Augustine carries the idealist reading into the Latin West, where it shaped the church's reading for a thousand years. |
| Early eighth century | Idealist | Bede's commentary reads the book as telling the same things again from the birth of the Lord, more broadly each time. |
From the Reformers to Darbythree marks, the fourteenth century to the twentieth
A table of three dated marks from the fourteenth century to the twentieth, each row naming the school it belongs to.
| When | School | What |
|---|---|---|
| Fourteenth to sixteenth centuries | Historicist | Wycliffe and Luther read the beast and Babylon as the papacy. The historicist reading of the Reformers and the Puritans was dominant in Protestantism into the nineteenth century. |
| Seventeenth century | Preterist | The Jesuit Luis de Alcázar develops the preterist reading as a system in his commentary on the Apocalypse of 1614. It is alive today chiefly in its partial form. |
| Nineteenth and twentieth centuries | Futurist | John Nelson Darby and the dispensational stream after him systematise the futurist school, setting the rapture of the church before the tribulation and keeping Israel and the church distinct. |
What the Text Leaves Unsaid
Every school answers four questions that the book itself leaves open.
Revelation gives seven mountains and seven kings in chapter 17 and leaves the reader to count them, naming no emperor, pope or city. It leaves open whether the thousand years of chapter 20 are counted on a calendar, and whether its three series of seven judgments follow one another or retell one period. Nowhere does the book name the school by which it should be read.
What All Four Hold
Every school holds five things about Christ, evil, the end and the church's calling until then.
CHRIST IS LORD OF HISTORY
Every school places the outcome of history at the throne John saw in heaven, where Jesus Christ reigns.
HE WILL RETURN
Every school expects Him to come back bodily, personally and visibly.
EVIL IS JUDGED
The devil is thrown into the lake of fire with the beast and the false prophet, and their work is finished.
A NEW CREATION
At the end stand a new heaven and a new earth, and God dwells with men.
THE CHURCH'S CALLING
Every school teaches that in the meantime the church conquers by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of its testimony, without loving life so as to shy away from death.
Evil is judged, A new creation, The church's calling
Each of the four schools has been held by believers who died for the name of Jesus.
How the Commentators Read It
Five commentators, from the second century to the nineteenth, read the chapters the schools divide over.
died 202 · Irenaeus
Against Heresies Book V
The quotation1 quotation
“Of this Jerusalem the former one is an image-that Jerusalem of the former earth in which the righteous are disciplined beforehand for incorruption and prepared for salvation. And of this tabernacle Moses received the pattern in the mount; and nothing is capable of being allegorized, but all things are stedfast, and true, and substantial, having been made by God for righteous men's enjoyment. For as it is God truly who raises up man, so also does man truly rise from the dead, and not allegorically, as I have shown repeatedly.”
Irenaeus · Against Heresies Book V · on Revelation 21:5Patristic
died 390 · Ticonius
COMMENTARY ON THE APOCALYPSE 8:7
Tyconius on the burned trees
The quotation1 quotation
“A third of the earth and the trees and all the grass is said to be burned up. The ‘earth’ represents everything terrestrial, while persons who wave about through unfaithfulness are depicted as ‘trees.’ For those blown about by ‘every wind of doctrine’ are mentioned …”
Ticonius · Commentary on the Apocalypse 8:7 · on Revelation 8:7Patristic
1662 to 1714 · Matthew Henry
Commentary on the Whole Bible
The quotation1 quotation
“The power of Satan was broken in part by the setting up of the gospel kingdom in the world; it was further reduced by the empire's becoming Christian; it was yet further broken by the downfall of the mystical Babylon; but still this serpent had many heads, and, when one is wounded, another has life remaining in it.”
Matthew Henry · Commentary on the Whole Bible · on Revelation 20:2Puritan
1662 to 1714 · Matthew Henry
Commentary on the Whole Bible
The quotation1 quotation
“Those who suffer with Christ shall reign with Christ; they shall reign with him in his spiritual and heavenly kingdom, in a glorious conformity to him in wisdom, righteousness, and holiness, beyond what had been known before in the world. This is called the first resurrection, which none but those who have served Christ and suffered for him shall be favoured with.”
Matthew Henry · Commentary on the Whole Bible · on Revelation 20:4 to 6Puritan
1703 to 1791 · John Wesley
Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament
The quotation1 quotation
“These thousand years bring a new, full, and lasting immunity from all outward and inward evils, the authors of which are now removed, and an affluence of all blessings. But such time the church has never yet seen. Therefore it is still to come.”
John Wesley · Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament · on Revelation 20:3Evangelical
1802 to 1910 · Jamieson, Fausset & Brown
Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
The quotation1 quotation
“As Jerusalem used the world power to crucify her Saviour, and then was destroyed by that very power, Rome; so the Church, having apostatized to the world, shall have judgment executed on her first by the world power, the beast and his allies; and these afterwards shall have judgment executed on them by Christ Himself in person.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown · Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible · on Revelation 17:16Reformed
Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry, John Wesley, Jamieson, Fausset & Brown
The Four Schools Weighed
Every school has one problem in the text that its own holders find hardest to answer.
A table of the four schools: who has held each and the tradition it belongs to.
| School | Held by | Tradition |
|---|---|---|
| Futurist | Irenaeus; J. A. Seiss; E. W. Bullinger; Chuck Missler; Hal Lindsey; John Walvoord | The ante-Nicene church; the dispensational stream |
| Preterist | Adam Clarke, in part; R. C. Sproul; Harold R. Eberle, in its partial form | Partial preterism in the Reformed and the charismatic churches |
| Historicist | John Wycliffe; Martin Luther; Matthew Henry, leaning this way; Jamieson, Fausset and Brown | The Reformers and the Puritans |
| Idealist | Tyconius; Augustine; Bede; and on chapter 20 the amillennial reading that Sproul leans toward | The Latin West; much modern amillennial scholarship |
The futurist school's hardest problem1 paragraph
The futurist school has to carry the weight of the words of nearness. A book that says the time is near and what must soon come to pass has now been waiting nineteen centuries, and the futurist owes an account of that language which does not empty it.
The preterist school's hardest problem1 paragraph
The book does not end where AD 70 ends: there is no new heaven, no resurrection of the dead and no city descending in that year. Partial preterism concedes this and keeps the return and the new creation future; full preterism must spiritualise the bodily return itself, which Sproul, the school's ablest modern advocate, calls heresy.
The historicist school's hardest problem1 paragraph
The historicist identifications keep failing. Every generation of historicists has redrawn the map so that it ends in its own lifetime. Each redrawing has had to be abandoned by the next, a pattern damaging enough that the school has largely emptied.
The idealist school's hardest problem1 paragraph
The futurist and preterist schools both object that a prophecy read as true of every age foretells no particular event. The book calls its visions what must soon come to pass, and it ends with a real city, a real resurrection and a real return, endings that resist dissolving into principle.
The order of the return, the reign and the rapture is taught in full on the pages on the millennium and the rapture.
Books to Read Next
These eight works include at least one from each school.
Against Heresies, Book 5
Irenaeus of Lyons · about AD 180
The last chapters of Against Heresies are the fullest account of the end that the second century left.
The City of God, Book 20
Augustine of Hippo · AD 426
Augustine gathers the texts of the last judgment from both Testaments and reads Revelation 20 to 22 beside them.
Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Revelation
Matthew Henry · 1710
Henry reads the book's battles across the course of church history, in the devotional voice of the Puritans.
The Apocalypse: Lectures on the Book of Revelation
J. A. Seiss · 1865
Seiss gives a full futurist and premillennial commentary, chapter by chapter.
The Last Days According to Jesus
R. C. Sproul · 1998
Sproul reads the Olivet Discourse and the words of nearness as fulfilled in AD 70.
In print: find it wherever books are sold.
Learn the Bible in 24 Hours
Chuck Missler · 2002
Missler's survey of the whole Bible reads its prophecy in the futurist and pre-tribulation way.
In print: find it wherever books are sold.
Victorious Eschatology: A Partial Preterist View
Harold R. Eberle and Martin Trench · 2006
The book argues a partial preterism in which most of Revelation was fulfilled in the first century and the church's victory in history is still to come.
In print: find it wherever books are sold.
Commentary on the Apocalypse
Bede · early eighth century
Bede draws on Tyconius and Augustine, and his commentary was read across the medieval West.
Come, Lord Jesus
Revelation 22:20 is the last prayer of the Bible.
However a reader dates the visions, the book asks the same two things of every reader. It asks them to keep what is written in it, as its first blessing says, and to wait for Christ in the words of its last verse. The Lamb who was slain is the Lord of every century these schools describe, and the reader who keeps faith with Him until He comes has read the book rightly, whatever school they hold.
He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- Strong's Greek dictionary, G5034 tachos, G5035 tachy, G1451 engys.
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 5, on Revelation 21:5.
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 5, on Revelation 17:12.
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.29.2, on Revelation 13:18.
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.30.1 and 5.30.3.
- Victorinus of Pettau, Commentary on the Apocalypse, on Revelation 17:10.
- Victorinus of Pettau, Commentary on the Apocalypse, on Revelation 11:8.
- Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 9.
- Tyconius, Commentary on the Apocalypse, on Revelation 8:7.
- Bede, Commentary on the Apocalypse, on Revelation 11:18.
- Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, 1710, on Revelation 20:4.
- David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance, 1987.
- Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth, 1970.
- John Hagee, Jerusalem Countdown, 2006.
- Jonathan Cahn, The Harbinger, 2011.
- Luis de Alcázar, Vestigatio arcani sensus in Apocalypsi, 1614.
- Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, 1710, on Revelation 20:2.
- Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible, 1832, on Revelation 22:10.
- John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, 1755, on Revelation 20:3.
- Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory, 1871, on Revelation 17:10.
- Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible, 1832, on Revelation 11:2.
- Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory, 1871, on Revelation 17:16.
- Harold R. Eberle and Martin Trench, Victorious Eschatology: A Partial Preterist View, 2006.
- Joel Richardson, The Islamic Antichrist, 2006, and Mideast Beast, 2012.
- Chuck Missler, Learn the Bible in 24 Hours (2002)
- R. C. Sproul, The Last Days According to Jesus, 1998.
- J. A. Seiss, The Apocalypse: Lectures on the Book of Revelation, 1865.
- E. W. Bullinger, The Apocalypse, or The Day of the Lord.
- Augustine, The City of God, Book 20, AD 426.
- Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 80 to 81.
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