The Spirit in the Book of Revelation

Abstract

This piece offers a review and assessment of scholarly trends in the study of the role of the Spirit in the book of Revelation focusing on five major sections. The identity of “the seven Spirits” of God as either angelic beings or the singular Spirit of God is explored. The phrase “I was in the Spirit” is examined as a literary structural marker and as a description of John’s experience of the Spirit, which has been explained as an ecstatic or trance like state, as spirit possession, as denoting a prophetic revelatory experience, and/or as indicating a context of worship. The “in the Spirit” phrase is also explored in relationship to John’s activity of writing “in the Spirit” to determine if such writing should to be understood as a literary fiction or as an actual expression of the church’s spiritual experience. An examination of “the Spirit of Prophecy” explores the issue via the identification of the book’s literary genre and its relationship to: the witness or testimony of Jesus, the phenomenon of prophecy in the church, pneumatic witness, and pneumatic discernment. A final section focuses upon the way in which Jesus and the Spirit are both interconnected and distinct characters within the book.