JERUSALEM; ROME; REVELATION - The Preterist Archive

380. At the great Protestant Reformation and thereafter, this anti-papal Historicalism
was unanimously embraced by Luther, Calvin, and all the Reformers without exception.
When the Lutheran Confessions emphasized this, Rome duly reacted with Ribera of
Salamanca’s Futurism and Alcazar of Seville’s Preterism. But all to no avail. For against
Rome, anti-papal Historicalism was championed by all the leading Reformed symbols. By
these we mean: the French Confession, the First Scots Confession; the Belgic Confession; the
Second Swiss Confession, the Thirty-nine Articles; the Second Scots Confession, the Irish
Articles; the Decrees of Dordt; the Westminster Standards, and the Congregationalists’ Savoy
Declaration - as well as by the [Non-Anabaptistic] Baptist Confessions derived therefrom.
381. Needless to say, nearly all of the Protestant Reformers themselves made the same
identification of the Papacy being either the Antichrist or the second lamb-beast - or
equating all three. Thus: Luther; Oecolampadius; Osiander; Joye; Tyndale; Bale; Jewel;
Amsdorff; Bullinger; Virgil Solis; Conrad; John Knox; and Mrs. John Calvin’s brother-in-law
Rev. Dr. William Whittingham in the Geneva Bible. So too, later, did: Napier; Foxe; James
the First; Brightman; Mede; the Dordt Dutch Bible; Goodwin; Durham; Tillinghast; Poole;
Cocceius; Cotton; Roger Williams; Mather; Matthew Henry; Newton; Gill; Wesley; John
Brown of Haddington; Lacunza; Faber; Fuller; Scott; Adam Clarke; Elliott; David Brown;
Fairbairn; Dabney; Albert Barnes; Bonar; Makrakis; Marcellus Kik; and many others.
382. Calvin himself, dead when but fifty-five, did not live long enough to write a
commentary on the book of Revelation. Yet in his Institutes of the Christian Religion
(IV:2:12 & IV:7:25f), he indeed wrote: “Daniel and Paul foretold that Antichrist would sit in
the Temple of God (Daniel 9:27 & Second Thessalonians 2:4).... We regard the Roman
Pontiff as the leader and standard-bearer of that wicked and abominable kingdom.... We call
the Roman Pontiff - Antichrist.... The Spirit...says that his reign would be with great
swelling words of vanity (Daniel 7:25).... This calamity was neither to be introduced by one
man, nor to terminate in one man (see Calvin on Second Thessalonians 2:3 and Daniel 7:9)....
We ought to follow [through,] in searching out Antichrist.... The Roman Pontiff has
impudently transferred to himself the most peculiar properties of God and Christ. There
cannot be a doubt that he is the leader and standard-bearer of an impious and abominable
kingdom.... He is the most inveterate enemy of Christ, the chief adversary of the Gospel, the
greatest devastator and waster of the Church.”
383. Yet - as Revelation chapter fourteen records - the Members of the True Church,
[baptismally] branded in their foreheads with the perfect Name of the Father of the Lamb, do
not succumb to worship the beast. 194 Instead, they begin to overcome the Roman beast - even
during their present life, here and now.
384. This perhaps refers especially to the work of the Pre-Reformation heralds and of
the Protestant Reformers and their successors down to the present time. Thus Brightman,
Pareus, the Dordt Dutch Bible, Newton, Scott, Matthew Henry, and Adam Clarke. For John
next saw a flying angel. And that angel had “the everlasting Gospel, to preach to them that
dwell on the Earth, to every nation and kindred and tongue and people.” And the angel said
with a loud voice: “Fear God, and give glory to Him!” 195
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