• Play:
  
  Session 5

1. Introduction

   • If you ask the wrong questions, then you will get the wrong answers.
   • So…How do we know what questions to ask? Genre!

2. All about Genre

   • What is Genre?

   • Who Cares About Genre?

     • Genre works as a governing tool for the reader to know how to read what they are reading.
     • The primary importance for understanding a genre, then, is to be able to ask the right questions of the particular text, because the genre dictates the appropriate questions (cf. Who won the game? Have the Tigers been captured? etc.)

   • How Do I Learn Genres?

3. What are the Genres of the Book of Revelation?

   • Revelation actually is governed by three different genres:

     • Epistolary Genre

       • Rev. 1:4-5a; 22:21

       • Why is this important for interpretation?

         • The message must first have made sense to the 7 churches in Asia Minor.

       • KEY QUESTIONS: Who is writing to whom? Why is the person writing to them? How does this book apply to the original audience?

     • Prophetic Genre

       • Revelation 1:3; 22:7, 10, 18

       • Why is this important for Interpretation?

         • More than merely prediction, Revelation is a clarion call for God’s people to both “stand firm” in the face of opposition and for those who have compromised with the opposition to “repent.”

           • Why?

             • Because of who God is—the sovereign ruler over all creation and history
             • And what God desires—the return to a garden where the curse is in reverse

       • KEY QUESTIONS: What is this prophecy revealing about who God is? What is this prophecy revealing about what God desires? What is this prophecy revealing about what God demands from us?

     • Apocalyptic Genre

       • What is it?

         • Apocalyptic Literature = A revelation of transcendent realities often communicated by other-worldly beings with a great amount of symbolic language to comfort and exhort an oppressed people.

       • How do we know?

         • Revelation 1:1
         • John’s use of symbolic language (Rev. 1:20; 12:9; 19:8b)

       • KEY QUESTIONS: What does this symbol point to? A principle? A reality? Where are these symbols used in the Old Testament? How would these symbols effect the original audience?

   • Revelation is a Christian Prophetic-Apocalyptic Letter.