What the Spirit says to the Churches – A Key to John’s Apocalypse – Vintage Book

Description

‘Of all the strange literary forms to be found in the Bible, that of the Apocalypse is probably the most unusual and the furthest removed from the mentality of a man living in the twentieth century’. Father Richards, undaunted by this, his own statement of the problems involved, succeeds in dispelling the obscurity of the Apocalypse. He writes with a vitality, simplicity and common-sense that come only from a mastery of his subject matter, for while the author’s profound scholarship and research are the basis of the whole study, he never allows them to lead him into pedantry or academic conjecture. The structure of the Apocalypse emerges as the key to its understanding. Here the structure is analysed and shown to be framed upon the repetition of one constant theme. The mode of the repetition is poetic, but not, as the author is at pains to point out, essentially visual. In his analysis Father Richards ‘dismantles’ the scriptural text without ever destroying it. The reader is not left with a collection of unrelated details, glosses and scholarly opinions but with a coherent view of the book as a whole. The author’s success in unravelling the literary form and structure if the text enables him to achieve the considerable task of demonstrating its relevance for the modern reader. The Apocalypse ceases to be a crystal ball for the reading of religious horoscopes or a manual for predicting and identifying the troubles of the world; it becomes for us what its writer intended it to be – an affirmation of the Christian’s faith, trust and victory in the face of evil, irrespective of times and places.

Hubert Richards studied for the priesthood at the English College in Rome, and took his degree in Sacred Scripture at the Biblicum in 1949. He spent fifteen years as professor of Scripture in the Westminster diocesan seminary, and is now principle of Corpus Christi Catechetical Centre in London. Father Richards’ other books include God Speaks to us and Christ in our world. He was also in collaboration with the editor of the English edition of the Jerusalem Bible.