Duvall's New Theology of Revelation Book

Zondervan Academic, March 25, 2025

When I started seminary, twenty-five years ago, there were not that many affordable and basic-level resources on Revelation. Now we have the work of Richard Bauckham, Greg Beale, Craig Koester, Michael Gorman, and more.

Recently, Tim Gombis and I co-caught an introductory course on the New Testament, and at the end I surveyed students about their favorite part of the course: a healthy majority of them mentioned benefiting from Gombis’ lecture on Revelation and the textbook they read called Reading Revelation Responsibly, by Michael Gorman.

Just as that courses ended, a brand new resource was published: A Theology of Revelation, by J. Scott Duvall (Zondervan Academic). This is a beefy volume at over 600 pages, masterfully written. Duvall not only offers thematic study of key theological topics distinctive of Revelation, but also covers key introductory matters, genre conversations, and issues around methodology and approaches.

Thematically, Duvall focuses on the theology of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Salvation, the Church, Worship, Discipleship, Judgment, and New Creation.

Duvall avoids and even rejects obsession over signs of the “End Times” which leads to paranoia and craves knowledge that we simply don’t have. Rather, his work here emphasizes a literary-theological reading, especially how Revelation was written to inspire exclusive worship of and allegiance to the triune God. This is a rich resource that I will appeal to often when I study and teach on Revelation.

For reference, here is Gorman’s book, this was a big hit with students (as it always is!)