Missing Links

Abstract The author assesses the effectiveness of Thomas Schreiner’s exegesis of Revelation 20 in his recent technical Revelation commentary (Baker Academic, 2023). Schreiner boldly takes up the new creation millennialism interpretative solution, following J. Webb Mealy’s monographs After the Thousand Years and New Creation Millennialism , but he resists perhaps the most significant potential consequence of that model, namely, that John’s picture of the final fate of the stubbornly unrepentant is to be imagined as annihilation in a temporary pool (Gr. λίμνη ) of fire, and not, as commonly understood, as everlasting torment in a permanent lake of fire. The author argues that Schreiner’s resisting of this element leads to an exposition that misses crucial ties between Rev. 19–20 and the Isaiah Apocalypse (Isa. 24:1–27:5) and to a disjointed and at points internally inconsistent story of the end of the unrepentant.