@Mervin_Bitikofer, I’ll bring this part of our discussion over here so as not to diverge too far from the OP on the Book of Revelation.
Lately, I’ve been working my way back through James K. A. Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism with a rather fine toothed comb. It wavers between excellent and having missed the mark. The bit below is worth quoting for Smith’s depth of perception of Derrida’s work and the relevance of Smith’s application of it to the Gospel.
Derrida’s claim that there is nothing outside the text was often misunderstood, and not just by Christian theologians. Later, when presented with the opportunity, Derrida tried to clarify his claim: “The phrase that for some has become a sort of slogan of deconstruction, in general so badly understood (‘there is nothing outside the text’), means nothing other than: there is nothing outside context.” In a way, Derrida is repeating the axiom of real estate as a central condition of interpretation: location, location, location! The context of both the phenomenon (whether a book, a cup, or an event) and the interpreter function as conditions or frameworks that determine just how a thing is seen or understood. Just as he claims that there is nothing outside the text, elsewhere Derrida claims that “there are only contexts.” Context, then, determines the meaning of a text, the construal of a thing, or the “reading” of an event. For instance, part of the context of the centurion’s “reading” of the crucifixion was his compatriot’s earlier experience with the gentle healer from Nazareth—a context that the two natives of Jerusalem lacked. (I would also argue that grace formed part of the centurion’s context.) When Derrida talks about how contexts are “determined” or “filled in,” we find a very important (though largely ignored) emphasis in his work: the role of community in interpretation. As he explains in his afterword to Limited Inc, contexts are flexible and dynamic: contexts change as time and place changes, generating different meanings and interpretations. Derrida describes this as the possibility of recontextualization: a phrase can mean one thing in one context and something different in another […]. Contexts change, and therefore meanings are given to change[.]
Smith, James K. A… Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? (The Church and Postmodern Culture): Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (pp. 51-52). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Taking these words of Smith’s father than I think he does, as the context in which the Church exists changes and the generations of members change, as they have been doing for 2000 years, recontextualization of the Gospel and the Bible will continue – as we can see that it has done already. We are being dishonest with ourselves now, if we think we maintain today the precise theology of the earliest church, or that the church in 2000 years - if it survives - will look back to the theologies today, systematic or otherwise, and think, “You know, they really had it all together there.”