The Christians knew growing up had a very different understanding of “prophecy” in the Bible from the view adopted by professional biblical scholars.  (I have been thinking about this because of my posts on Amos.)  My sense is that most evangelical and fundamentalist Christians (certainly the latter) continue to have this non-academic view.   It is that the prophets of the Bible – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos, Zechariah, and so on (there are seventeen prophets in the English Bible) – were principally interested in what was going to be happening in our day. At the time when I became familiar with this view, that meant that prophets were interested in what would happen in the 1970s and 1980s.   Today, of course, it would mean that they were principally interested in what would happen in the 2010s.   That in itself should give us pause.  Do you mean they were *not* mainly interested in the 1970s and 80s? The same can be said, obviously – far more so! – for Christian understandings of the book of Revelation, [...]