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{"id":18340,"date":"2016-09-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-02T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=103"},"modified":"2016-09-02T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-02T00:00:00","slug":"revelation-between-protestant-and-catholic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/09\/revelation-between-protestant-and-catholic\/","title":{"rendered":"Revelation between Protestant and Catholic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

T<\/span>he Reformers read Revelation as a prophetic outline of history, and so identified the beast and harlot with the Catholic church of their time. In response, Catholics developed \u201cpreterist\u201d and \u201cfuturist\u201d readings of the book, which viewed the Apocalypse as a prophecy of fulfilled events of the distant past, of the history of the church prior to Constantine, or events that will be fulfilled only at the end of all things.<\/p>\n

According to Craig Koester (Revelation<\/a>, 56-57), \u201cFrancisco Ribera (d. 1591) said that the messages in Rev 1-3 pertained to Christians of John\u2019s time, while the first five seals pointed to the preaching of the apostles, Nero\u2019s persecution, the rise of false apostles, and persecution under Trajan (6:1-11). All of that was in the past. But the rest of the book relates to the end of the age, with the cosmic signs of the sixth seal anticipating Christ\u2019s second coming (6:12\u201317; cf. Matt 24:29) and the trumpet plagues prophesying eschatological tribulations. Most importantly, the visions of the beast and whore in Rev 12\u201319 point to future <\/em>persecutions by the Antichrist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Revelation can\u2019t be about a corrupt papacy, they argued, because it\u2019s about events that already happened or events that won\u2019t happen for a long time. That doesn\u2019t solve the problem, though, since it could be argued that events of the first century foreshadow analogous events in church history, or that events of church history anticipate events of the end.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"