[Proposition] 3 The time, times, and half a time did not commence before the year 800 in which the Pope’s supremacy commenced
The Moral Hazard of the Preterist & Futurist Views
What is the “moral hazard” of the Preterist and Futurist views”?
Short answer: You risk misidentifying the “Antichrist,” “Mystery Babylon,” and the Tribulation Period and risk committing mortal sin by taking the “mark of the Beast,” or the “number of his name” and thus earning God’s wrath and eternal retribution (Revelation 16, et al).
Does that make you nervous?
Short answer: It should.
The Historicists
Isaac Newton was a child of the Protestant Reformation and in particular, the Puritanism of the 17th Century. He had originally enrolled at Cambridge to study for the ministry, but as fate would have it, his studies were interrupted by the plague. The country shutdown, including the universities, and young Newton spent some unexpected time on a family farm. It was there that his thoughts turned to the grandeur of the “creation,” itself, in addition to that of the Creator. The world of science opened up before him.
The rest is history.
For the Reformers, their target of attack was the Papacy and anything which pertained to the Established Church. The Historicist View of Bible prophecy grew out of that polemic and Newton, as we have shown, was a Historicist.
Some Protestants have advanced the belief that the “Preterist” and “Futurist” views were introduced by Jesuit propagandists trying to deflect social criticism of the Church. If “the Antichrist” or “the Whore of Babylon” can be identified with persons or institutions from an earlier time (Preterism) or with those of a later time (Futurism), then the ad reductio conclusion would be that the Papacy could not possibly be this evil empire.
While certainly a motivation, church scholars know that these views are not new. They existed since the earliest times of Christianity and cannot have been invented by the Jesuits.
[Side note: Preterists tend to “demythologize” the language of prophecy to identify the various symbols as human actors or human institutions known to history. Futurists, however, tend to be literalists down to the point of believing that the Antichrist is a man who is miraculously conceived by Satan with a chosen Earth woman, hence, the fascination with “nephilim” conspiracies of our time.]
Regardless, Historicists believe that they are always living in “prophetic times” which requires moral vigilance in the face of momentous decisions at an intensely personal level.
During the Protestant Reformation, you had to choose sides. Both Protestants and Catholics were unyielding. It was all or nothing. The persecutions were bloody; the religious wars even bloodier. The divisions which societies rarely see – otherwise, life would be impossible – sometimes force themselves upon a generation tragically. People of that era saw that happen then. We may be seeing such a time today.
Newton and his colleagues came after such a deadly time (e.g. The Thirty Years War). They took refuge in science, mathematics, and the quest to find the “natural” order of things which did not require a Divine stamp of approval. Newton might have been loyal to the Christian faith, but he was not a churchman.
He saw his colleague, William Whiston, ejected from his position at Cambridge because of a heresy trial. The “Puritans” were called such for a reason: they were “purists.” They expressed equal hostility toward heterodoxy, as they did Catholicism. Whiston defended himself against the charge of Arianism by pleading that his collegiate accusers were Sabellians, an extremely heretical form of Trinitarianism. It did not matter. There were other forces at work.
Newton understood these implications; his works on religion were not published until after his death.
How Europe Became the “Antichristian Civilization”
The reader then should appreciate that Newton’s hand-written notes (more like scribbles on the back of a napkin) were not just “end of the world” scenarios. They represented periods of Divine judgment and institutional reckoning. The “Great Tribulation” was the reign of the Antichrist for a period far more than a seven-year ordeal as it was for Preterists and Futurists. According to the Historicist, the world is in the Great Tribulation now and has been for over a thousand years (1,260+ years, to be more exact). “Mystery Babylon” arose when the Roman Church obtained temporal power during the Middle Ages.
However, Newton did not stop there. He indicted all of the royal houses of Europe by identifying them with the “Ten Horns” or “Ten Kingdoms” which descended from and inherited the remains of the Roman Empire. They became the “feet and toes” of the statue in Daniel’s prophecy, which Newton lists as follows (Observations, p. 14-15):
[1] The kingdom of the Vandals and Alans in Spain and Africa;
[2] The kingdom of the Suevians in Spain;
[3] The kingdom of the Visigoths;
[4] The kingdom of the Alans in Gallia;
[5] The kingdom of the Burgundians;
[6] The kingdom of the Franks;
[7] The kingdom of the Britains;
[8] The kingdom of the Huns;
[9] The kingdom of the Lombards;
[10] The kingdom of Ravenna.
The take-away from this then is that the story of Europe becomes not the story of a “Christian” civilization, but rather that of an “anti-Christian” civilization: a complete inversion of our understanding. We should expect, of course, redeeming qualities in European Civilization, but Newton implicated European culture, as a whole, to be the Kingdom of the Antichrist.
This included the British monarchy. And no one should wonder why it was that Newton kept his manuscripts hidden away: it would have been treason and blasphemy – especially for someone like Newton who was himself a powerful figure at Court – to suggest that the English monarch as Head of the Church of England should also be in league with Satan!
For the Americans and all nations which have been “decolonized,” they do not escape culpability. Erroneously, they believe that the notions of monarchy and temporal power are what constitute the corrupting principles. In terms of the Babylonian commercial empire, it must not be forgotten that usury was banned in Europe for the better part of a thousand years: from the time of Charlemagne until the Reformation. Ironically, it was the Reformers, particularly Calvin and the Puritans, who brought it back and created the modern banking system.
In America, Quakers have had more to do with banking than the Jews ever did. John D. Rockefeller was an ardent Baptist.
It is Protestantism which has denuded our liturgies and secularized the public square. Whatever was wrong with the Established Church, the Protestants have magnified it seven-fold and filled the “Cup of Iniquity.”
******
[Next installment: Did Newton believe there was a pre-apostasy Europe that was Christian?]
JWS, 8/18/24
