Short notes on the Socio-Political Milieu in the Book of Revelation

---I ran into a Newbold teacher with the name of Kayle B. De Waal, who is or was a South African.

---I saw his articles on the socio-political rhetorical aspects in the Book of Revelation. It is the focus of his interest.

---I have not read his articles.

---What is the socio-political rhetorics of any book of the Bible?

---The key in the hermeneutics of the rhetorics of the socio-political aspects of any book of the Bible is a respect for the genre you are dealing with.

---What this means is that there is poetry, prose and prophecy. There is wisdom literature. There is hymnals. There are even some recipes in the works of Moses!

---When you ask for rhetorics of a biblical Book in Adventism, you ask the following questions: Who’s rhetorics? Christ/Holy Spirit or man’s rhetorics?

---You ask the question whether the Holy Spirit is speaking and man is merely describing.

---You ask whether he is in vision [prophecy for Revelation] or just imagining things with self pop-ups?

---In Preterism it is 90% on the rhetorical skills of the author and 10% on prophecy. In Historicism of Adventism it is 10% on the rhetorical skills of the author and 90% on prophecy. Can you see the difference?

---So the Adventist professor teaching at our institutions the theology students and other students, need to know this. There cannot be a rhetorical makeover of theology of a book or the Book of Revelation. Correct?

---You must ask not how the author wrote or describe but what the content was purport to be by Christ giving the message of Revelation in the first place. Thus the Uriah Smith, R. Anderson et al messages of the Book of Revelation.

---If you focus on the day of the prophet for your science, you are in the area of the 10%. You have to prepare your lessons for the 90% of the Adventist message from Revelation for the students.

---Wellhausen was focused on the rhetorics of the biblical books in the 1890’s. His method? Use the atheist friend and scholar in Greek on Homer for the Bible. They must be the same. He said.

---What happened? He came to the honest conclusion that he is teaching pastors and that he cannot send them to a pulpit with this focus on Homeric rhetoric principles in the Bible.

---What did he do? He resigned and his letter is online in Wikipaedia.

---We have a task as professors of the Word of God and we are merely filling a space by the God Who places us in that position as Daniel said to Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 3:21. Correct?

---There is nothing wrong in having an interest in a topic but when you teach and prepare our students for the ministry, you need to know the Millerite Hermeneutical principles of prophetic interpretation very well. Those 14 principles in James White’s Biography of Miller. They have a long history of proper historicism exegetical rules. Correct?

---That is where truth lies. Not in preterism.