Gordon Fee on Revelation

At ETS/SBL Gordon Fee's Revelation commentary in the NCCS will be available. To wet your appetite here is an excerpt from the preface:

"Stepping into Revelation from the rest of the New Testament is to enter into a strange, bizarre world; and this is true even in the days of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Instead of narratives, arguments, or plain statements of fact, the Revelation is full of angels, trumpets, and earthquakes; of strange beasts, dragons, and bottomless pits. Most believers, therefore, take one of two extremes: some simply avoid it in despair; others take an exaggerated interest in it, thinking to find here all the keys to the end of the world. Both of these positions I would argue are simply wrong. On the one hand, in the providence of God, it is Holy Scripture, a part of the twenty-seven document canon of the New Testament. Indeed, it serves as the ultimate - and marvelous - conclusion to the whole of Scripture. On the other hand, a great deal of what has been written about it, especially at the popular level, tends to obscure its meaning rather than to help the reader understand it. In fact many years ago, when I was teaching a course on the Revelation at Wheaton College, one of the options for a term paper was to analyze the exegesis of Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth. Two of the students took me up on this alternative, both of whom independently came to the conclusion that the task was altogether impossible, since there is not a single exegetical moment in Lindsay's entire book. John himself would surely have found Lindsay's book as 'apocalyptic' as most modern readers do John's".