The presence of the past

Here's a slightly edited answer I gave to an email correspondent:

*****************************************************************

1.For the record, I'm an amil and modified idealist, a la Beale, Poythress.

2.I agree with you that typology, with its multiple "teasers" or cameo appearances, is one key element in the interpretation of Biblical prophecy (or, more broadly, the promise/fulfillment scheme in Scripture).

3.As to the "worldwide" scale of the catastrophe (in OT prophecy), we might simply chalk that up to poetic hyperbole.

At the same time, though, there's a danger of retrojecting *our* very modern, mental picture of the globe onto OT prophecy. We have a different sense of scale.

4.By the same token, I think the "foreshortened" perspective is, to some extent, an unconscious artifact of modern scholars who anachronistically fill in the gaps with their retrospective knowledge of history. They don't see the events the way the seer saw them. The seer is seeing isolated visions of the future—not a dense, historical continuum of dated events, week-by-week and year-by-year.

It's the modern scholar who is collapsing "now" and "then." Because the modern scholar, with the benefit of hindsight, sees spaces between these events, when he reads these prophecies, where the spacing is absent, he assumes that the seer is leaving out the intervening events.

In a sense, that's true, but the seer was never asserting that one thing follows right after another. Rather, the seer is simply an observer and scrivener of divine visions. He's describing and transcribing what the Lord revealed to his imagination. Glimpses of the future.

It isn't meant to be either continuous or discontinuous. The seer doesn't generally know when these events will happen along a timeline. He just knows that they are future to him.

We read OT prophecy very differently because our reading is backward-looking rather than forward-looking. So we put dates on these events, as well as dates on the intervening events. What the seer sees as future, the historian sees as past.

Hence, when a modern scholar reads OT prophecy, he unconsciously reads it through his own eyes rather than the eyes of, say, an 8C BC prophet. So, for him, this is all scrunched together.

But it's not as if the seer was affirming that this is all that's going to happen between now and then. He's just jotting down what he sees in his visions, without any awareness, one way or the other, of how much time lies in-between. That’s not his intention. His intention is to faithfully say what he saw.

5.The seer experiences the future as present in the sense that visionary revelation involves an alternate state of consciousness. To be in that mental state is to be oblivious to the actual present.

All the seer is aware of, at that point, are the visions impinging on his consciousness. So, for him, the future is momentarily present—psychologically speaking.

In that respect, his prophecy is historically accurate, but accurate in the sense that it’s an accurate description of his inner state of mind. Of how he was processing these visions.

And, of course, the visions do refer to extramental events to come. They are truly predictive. But while the one corresponds to the other, we need to distinguish between the psychological process and the historical process. Between the visionary sequence and the historical sequence.

The vision is psychologically present, but historically future. Yet, in recording the vision, that distinction is not going to be drawn—because that is not how he experienced the event, and he’s recording his experience rather than reporting an event. A series of futuristic visions was never meant to be isometric with the future. Prophecy isn’t chronology.

6.Finally, OT prophecy forms a body of stock imagery, like a literary tradition, which is picked up in the NT. This is a second-level application or adaptation of OT prophecy to current or future events.

So we need to make allowance for its idiomatic and derivative character. This is the dialect in which NT speakers and NT writers express the future. It isn’t meant to be strictly representational. For it’s allusive of the past (e.g. OT prophecy) as well as oriented towards the future. It holds both past and future in balance. Not literal, but literary.

Of course, it’s pointing to literal events, but not like a photograph of the future. Rather, the futuristic descriptions are meant to evoke past events as well as future events, using traditional imagery to trigger associations with God’s providential guidance of his people in the days of yore. Thus, we should trust the promise of the future due to the provision of the past.