Born and raised in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town to Dutch immigrant parents, Rev. Peter C. de Vries studied at Penn State University and Princeton Theological Seminary. While working as a full-time pastor, he earned a Ph.D. in Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, with a focus on the theory of Biblical interpretation. He has taught New Testament exegesis at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, trains church leaders in Ghana, and has held regional and national leadership positions in the Presbyterian Church. He has been a Presbyterian pastor for over thirty years, having devoted over twenty-five of those years to a single congregation in rural southwestern Pennsylvania.

Chapter 1. Resolution of a Hermeneutical Problem
Chapter 2. Appropriation
Chapter 3. The Issues of Mark 13
Chapter 4. Textual Autonomy
Chapter 5. Ricoeur's Description of Metaphor
Chapter 6. Mark 13 as Metaphor
Chapter 7. The Appropriation of Mark 13

This book uses the phenomenological interpretive approach of Paul Ricoeur to shed new light on New Testament eschatological expectation. Peter C. de Vries argues for a metaphorical reading of the apocalyptic discourse of Mark 13, based upon neither the author's intention nor the reader's reception but latent meaning present in the text itself.