As for a final big conflagration being part of the zeitgeist there are two responses to this: One, many historicists include such a final battle in the future–I have not made up my mind. Two, this view is only part of the zeitgeist of a segment of Christianity. I was also raised in the pentecostal churches and was told that their view was the wiew of all Bible loving Christians. When I started discussing things with other believers I discovered how much divergence there is on this book.

It is true that probably 90% of American Evangelical and Fundamentalist believers hold to the futurist dispensationalist view these numbers are changing with the growth of Praeterism and other interpretations. Besides this there are major segments who never accepted the ‘accepted view.’

Good to meet someone else who is searching. Take care; enjoy your Greek study and see you around.

So if you will excuse me sticking to Chapter 6, since that is where I am at, we see conquest, war, famine, death, persecution, and calamity. We can see this pattern in the Roman Empire post 96 AD, but it is also not too hard to see the same pattern being repeated in the last days, telescoped into a short time period. It’s even part of the zeitgeist now that people expect a big final conflagration and we have the technology to kill ourselves rapidly, and to impose a world dictatorship with total control. It even seems rather contrary now to turn around and say oh no the Book of Revelation is not talking about anything like that when half the non-believers already think it is!

Among historicists the traditional way to interpret these is to take them as prophetic year/days and instead of 1260 days you end up with 1260 years. I have never been totally square with the day/year theory. I have not rejected it and I have not accepted it, but am currently researching it for my own good. it is not necessary to have the day/year heory to be a historicist. However like most historicists I see these as multiple referencs to the same time period, and this time period, as usually interpreted, spans over 1200 years historically. My main problem with the day/year period is not its underlying assumptions–one year is prophetically protrayed as a day–since we see other samples of this in scripture. My problem with the theory is with the abuses that spring from trying to find the start date and use that to set an end date. These abuses totally discredited historicism, so now we have a country mostly lockstep with the “Left Behind” craze. You have no idea how many times I have been accused of heresy because I don’t go to LeHay or Scofield to get my eschatology.

Actually the six seals are not the most impressive. Look at the historicist interpretation of the locusts from the abyss and the armies of the east and I am sure you will at least see how well this view meshes with historical detail.