Matthew, thank you for your gracious heart in overlooking my transgression.
Back to the issue we are discussing: it is telling that you claim Geerhardus Vos as providing “the leading features which constitute the idealist view” while he militates
against the “
consistent idealist” hermeneutic by his interpretation of specific texts, specifically the one I brought up re “the man of sin”. You do similarly with William Hendriksen, who is of my school and not yours, i.e., modified idealist and not consistent.
This is likely because both Hendriksen and Vos
are idealists
in the main (as are Beale, Poythress, DE Johnson, Azurdia, Riddlebarger, et al – myself included) but not
pure idealists, rather eclectic or modified idealists, all of which use the idealist basic paradigm of, among other things, recapitulation and parallelism, as well as typical and symbolic discernment instead of literal,
yet taking from other interpretive schools those methods that have valid but limited application, keeping them subservient to the primary idealist method. This is why you value and appreciate Hendriksen and Vos, but you dismiss them as inconsistent to their primary idealist approach when they vary from it.
Did they
not vary from it they would do violence to the crying need for nuanced interpretive skills in understanding Revelation.
This is how Vern Poythress, in his little gem of a book,
The Returning King: A Guide to the Book of Revelation, fleshes this approach out:
Combining the Insights of the Schools
All the schools except the historicist school have considerable merit. Can we somehow combine them? If we start with the idealist approach, it is relatively easy. The images in Revelation enjoy multiple fulfillments. They do so because they embody a general pattern. The arguments in favor of futurism show convincingly that Revelation is interested in the Second Coming and the immediately preceding final crisis (cf. 2 Thess. 2:1-12). But fulfillment in the final crisis does not eliminate earlier instances of the general pattern. We have both a general pattern and a particular embodiment of the pattern in the final crisis.
Likewise, the arguments in favor of preterism show convincingly that Revelation is interested in the seven churches and their historical situation. The symbols thus have a particular embodiment in the first century, and we ought to pay attention to this embodiment.
Finally we have a responsibility to apply the message of Revelation to our own situation, because we are somewhere in church history, somewhere in the interadvental period to which the book applies. Here is the grain of truth in the historicist approach.
We can sum up these insights in a single combined picture. The major symbols of Revelation represent a repeated pattern. This pattern has a realization in the first-century situation of the seven churches. It also has a realization in the final crisis. And it has its embodiment now. We pay special attention to the embodiment now, because we must apply the lessons of Revelation to where we are. (p. 37)
Perhaps it may be helpful to say we are the children of Milligan, much as the Biblical Counseling school at CCEF are the children of Jay Adams, while they differ from him in the direction they have taken while yet standing on his shoulders, as it were. For the sake of those looking in on our discussion, it may be helpful to know this interaction between Rev Winzer and myself regarding idealism properly began in
this thread, and then continued in
this one, while we continue afresh in the present.
