Prophecy
Dear Bro. Don,
I was very pleased to read your editorial as a response to Bro. Al Hussey’s letter. I’m aware that there is world wide growing concern about the attitude held by many to the continuous historical approach to the Apocalypse. Personally I think it has a place in revelation, but not necessarily with the specifics of Eureka, after all the continuous historical (CH) interpretation didn’t originate with Christadelphians. It might also be suggested that the CH view is the bridge that joins the preterist and the futurist interpretations. It is a great pity that we have followed the theologian’s categorization of the apocalypse in preterist, continuous and futurist terms, so that each student gets categorized by his preference, so questioning the individual’s ability to understand otherwise clear teaching of scripture.
There are at least two parallel chapters [in Revelation] dealing with Jesus’ sacrifice and ascension to God’s throne, and numerous references to the establishment of the kingdom, so we have a recognizable beginning and ending to John’s book, not dependent on artificial dating. The one gives a rock solid base to the historical events that follow, and the other gives the only acceptable conclusion to the book. The beginning is preterist, the ending is futurist and the middle historical.
One problem is seeing where, in the historical sequence, our ecclesia fits. Another that we encounter is lack of objectivity. Each generation wants the kingdom now, so each generation interprets the final phases of the historical symbols within their own terms of reference. For example, you very reasonably suggest that the sufferers under Diocletian would see chapter 12 fulfilled in Constantine. However, to the Christians in the second century, the same words could equally apply to Hadrian’s destruction and rebuilding of Jerusalem and the final dispersion of the Jews. The Huguenots may well have looked for the kingdom to come shortly after the signing of the Edict of Nantes, and our pioneers would have loved to see Christ’s return following the “fall” of the Papacy in 1870. The same expectancy, based on Ezekiel, existed among our ecclesias in 1967. Russia’s downfall is just one more glitch in a 2000-year-long series of frustrated expectancy, if we are allowed to assume that Paul, in his early letters, was certain of Jesus’ return in his own life time.
Your Sea beast — presumably the ascendancy of Charlemagne’s dynasty, from the end of the pagan Roman empire to the beginnings of the German Empire under Otto — is far more likely to extend from the apostasy of the Hellenised Church in the first century to the blatant Mariolatry of this century, since the beast still exists in Revelation 19, and is the leopard in 12 of Revelation, so giving students a second platform which is not dependent on a specific time frame.
From Bro. Peter Ratushni’s letter we have another example of categorizing. By researching through all the Bible dictionaries, commentaries and encyclopaedias, we find little common ground and end up more confused than ever, finally being subjective and picking what we wanted to believe in the first place, which inevitably has little scriptural backing, but suits our current understanding of present-day events. Any time an argument is presented based on an article [“the” / “a”] — definite or otherwise — we should proceed with caution. Hebrew and Greek never heard of Dr. Thomas’s “universal rules of grammar.” Magog was the name of a man. He was brother to the sons of Japheth, most of whom can be identified, when Genesis was written, as originally inhabiting the Mediterranean coast east of and including Greece. That was about 4,000 years ago. His name is next encountered in Ezekiel, and is generally interpreted as ma-Gog – the Land of Gog. Since a land is normally named by or after a specific person, that name is adopted by his ancestors. It is, therefore, irrelevant whether we look at Magog as the “land of Magog” or the land of the Magog, since either way it is the land of the sons of Magog. But that still doesn’t tell us where Magog migrated to. In Ezekiel 38, it is Togarmah (Armenia?) that is on the sides of the North, so where does that put Magog? I don’t know !
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One