Eschatology Note # 4
Biblical eschatology is not presented in a way that would allow a detailed future history to be determined from it. Such predictive powers would give its knowers too much power, such as the ability to "make a killing" in the stock market. From eschatology that has been fulfilled, what is evident is that it is weak predictively but strong postdictively. That is, once it is fulfilled, it is possible to see clearly its fulfillment, while before its fulfillment, what would happen in the future is not made clear, with only shadowy possibilities. My hope is that diligent study will reveal additional information that shows eschatology from a more insightful perspective.
For instance, the statue of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, interpreted by Daniel, now clearly represents past empires: gold is Babylon, silver is Persian, brass is Greek-Macedonian, and iron is Roman. The sequencing of the empires in the statue is a sequencing in time, from top to bottom. When we arrive at the last human empire, in the sequence of history it is the medieval Vatican empire of the Papacy, of mixed iron and clay. The Vatican empire emerged and was built upon the Roman empire (and is also headquartered in Rome) but the clay mixed with iron - a mixture that does not hold together well - describes the nations in its jurisdiction. The Papacy (retaining the pagan Roman title of Pontifex Maximus) lost partial political control during the Reformation, when Frederick III of Germany protected Martin Luther. He could do so because he had the largest army in Europe; the Pope was not about to oppose him militarily. In 1798, General Berthier of Napoleon's French army took the Pope prisoner, ending this empire. The latest effort to unite them has been the EU; one of its main members (the UK) has already left, and the war in Ukraine is weakening both it and NATO. Some countries in these fragile unions such as Hungary, Turkiye, and Slovakia have already functionally departed.
If this interpretation of the statue is correct, then we are living in the time of the last great empire, before it is broken by the stone that strikes the feet of the statue and causes all of it to crumble. The Bible makes clear that the stone is Christ, and his reappearance would trigger such a collapse. This seems enigmatic because all the previous empires have already crumbled! Or have they? Politically the only one left is the Vatican-European empire. Yet the worldview on which all these empires was built was first established by Babylon as the Babylonian mystery religion, the historic source of all extant forms of paganism today. In his classic book The Two Babylons, written in the mid-19th century by Scottish philologist and historian-theologian Alex Hislop, he argues two propositions: 1) that all forms of paganism today trace back to Babylon, and 2) that the Vatican empire of the Papacy is a syncretism of Christianity and the Babylonian Mysteries. If Hislop's argument holds, then all of them have been built on paganism. The manifestation of neo-paganism in our time is labeled New Age, and it has close ties to the hidden or occult religion of the most powerful rulers today in the West. The Rothschilds worship Baphomet (the Devil) and are not terribly secretive about it, as evidenced by photos from their parties with, for instance, a Rothschild woman wearing a pendant of the goat-god depiction of Baphomet.
When did the Roman empire end and the medieval European empire begin? There is no clear historical point of separation, but the year Clovis, king of the Franks (northern French) and then Charlemagne, subdued the last of the ten barbed-Aryan tribes under the Pope was 1260 years earlier than 1798, in 538 AD (CE - your choice). The 1260 number occurs repeatedly in biblical eschatology in connection with time periods. In the early 1800s, the West was spiritually active, not only with the Devil's contribution in the Enlightenment (and the subsequent formation of the United States from the New England colonies) but also in the appearance of multiple Christian sects. People from various existing mainline sects such as Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians who were keenly interested in biblical eschatology found each other under the label of Adventists (before the church of Seventh-Day Adventism); they were apparently the first to discover the Papal reign of 1260 years in the 1840s. What marginalized them by mainstream Christian groups was another time period in scripture, beginning with a clearly marked event in history - the Persian announcement of the return of the Judeans to the Levant - and ending 1260 times two years later, which when correctly calculated was 1844. (The Adventists initially forgot about no zero year and thought it was 1843 - a costly mistake for some of their farmers!) This year also happened to be contemporary with their studies! Had the time come for postdictive eschatology to be revealed?
What happened in 1844? An earthquake in Portugal of no great significance and nothing much else they could find. What marginalized them from the evangelical mainstream was their subsequent explanation of the event of significance in 1844: an "investigative judgement" in heaven. The first problem with this is that it is removed from what can be observed to come true. Something that happens out there in the stars is for us earth-bounded humans a purely theoretical event with no means for its eventual or actual verification. Other biblical prophecy is verifiable when it happens and is correctly identified as such. (It is also falsifiable in principle, but this invokes the problem of proving a negative universal if it is not time-dated. That is, we would need to wait forever to verify that it never happened if it is false.) Secondly, it hangs a major feature of eschatology on scanty and speculative biblical support.
In my thinking about this, I come to two conclusions: 1) that the calculations are correct, that a day represents a year in biblical eschatology having to do with the visions of Daniel, that something of great significance happened in 1844; and 2) that the explanations of the Adventists are superfluous because something did happen in 1844, but not the kind of event most people would be seeking or imagining. So what happened? What has happened since 1844 that is of great significance? Does it have anything to do with a major revelation? To what extent has the origination and development of Ancient Near East (ANE) archaeology affected our understanding of the ancient world and of eschatology? It has been the most significant source of biblical information (and consequent biblical understanding) since the New Testament was written.
The dawn of ANE archaeology traces back to a German in what is now Iraq giving some clues to a British lawyer-adventurer, Henry Layard (who truly was "Indiana Jones on steroids") who was traveling through the Middle East to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to work in his uncle's law office but never arrived there. (Imagine that: the REAL Indiana Jones was a British lawyer!) In 1844, he was in Turkiye with the idea of excavating Nineveh. The British government had no funds to offer for it, but the British ambassador in Istanbul used what we would call "discretionary funding" to start the project. It was the beginning of the revelation of the ancient world of biblical history. That has got to be the most significant revelatory drama since 1844, yet most of the apostate world would not recognize it as such. Because of ANE archaeology, ancient history has been unfolding to us, and what was scorned text about a seemingly mythological "Bible World" turns out to be about the actual world of our past. It is a major revelation of a kind that could only have happened with the technological capabilities and cultural affinities of the 19th and 20th centuries.(Yet many Christians today are still living in a Disneyland Bible World.)
Once ANE archaeology "ignited", major ancient languages became decrypted. The hieroglyphics on the walls of the temples and palaces of ancient Egypt could be translated from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform was cracked along with Elamite from the Rock of Behistun in NW Iran. The British moved the royal library of Ashurbanipal, with its hundreds of clay tablets, from excavated Nineveh to the British Museum in London. Few, then or now, are fluent in cuneiform and the few who could read it in the 19th century did not see "Israel" in any of the texts and concluded that they must have withered away, an insignificant people having an insignifcant history. ("Israel" was a Yahwist designation of Yahweh's people; "el" is God.)
In the later 20th century, ANE archaeologist Raymond Capt found "Israel" all over in the Assyrian documents, but by their Assyrian name of Gomri, after the dynasty of King Omri of Greater Israel (or later, Kumbri - and still later, "Cimmerian"). The Assyrian texts provided the missing links that completed the tracing of the Anglo-Saxons (and Caucasians generally) in the early 19th-century work of Sharon Turner back to their identification with the Israelites. And who will argue that the West - that Europe - has not had a leading role in world history since the Spanish and British-American empires? Indeed, the biblical thread woven through history is central to human history, not incidental or irrelevant. And the revelation of that significance was made possible by events put in motion in 1844.
Biblical eschatology is not presented in a way that would allow a detailed future history to be determined from it. Such predictive powers would give its knowers too much power, such as the ability to "make a killing" in the stock market. From eschatology that has been fulfilled, what is evident is that it is weak predictively but strong postdictively. That is, once it is fulfilled, it is possible to see clearly its fulfillment, while before its fulfillment, what would happen in the future is not made clear, with only shadowy possibilities. My hope is that diligent study will reveal additional information that shows eschatology from a more insightful perspective.
For instance, the statue of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, interpreted by Daniel, now clearly represents past empires: gold is Babylon, silver is Persian, brass is Greek-Macedonian, and iron is Roman. The sequencing of the empires in the statue is a sequencing in time, from top to bottom. When we arrive at the last human empire, in the sequence of history it is the medieval Vatican empire of the Papacy, of mixed iron and clay. The Vatican empire emerged and was built upon the Roman empire (and is also headquartered in Rome) but the clay mixed with iron - a mixture that does not hold together well - describes the nations in its jurisdiction. The Papacy (retaining the pagan Roman title of Pontifex Maximus) lost partial political control during the Reformation, when Frederick III of Germany protected Martin Luther. He could do so because he had the largest army in Europe; the Pope was not about to oppose him militarily. In 1798, General Berthier of Napoleon's French army took the Pope prisoner, ending this empire. The latest effort to unite them has been the EU; one of its main members (the UK) has already left, and the war in Ukraine is weakening both it and NATO. Some countries in these fragile unions such as Hungary, Turkiye, and Slovakia have already functionally departed.
If this interpretation of the statue is correct, then we are living in the time of the last great empire, before it is broken by the stone that strikes the feet of the statue and causes all of it to crumble. The Bible makes clear that the stone is Christ, and his reappearance would trigger such a collapse. This seems enigmatic because all the previous empires have already crumbled! Or have they? Politically the only one left is the Vatican-European empire. Yet the worldview on which all these empires was built was first established by Babylon as the Babylonian mystery religion, the historic source of all extant forms of paganism today. In his classic book The Two Babylons, written in the mid-19th century by Scottish philologist and historian-theologian Alex Hislop, he argues two propositions: 1) that all forms of paganism today trace back to Babylon, and 2) that the Vatican empire of the Papacy is a syncretism of Christianity and the Babylonian Mysteries. If Hislop's argument holds, then all of them have been built on paganism. The manifestation of neo-paganism in our time is labeled New Age, and it has close ties to the hidden or occult religion of the most powerful rulers today in the West. The Rothschilds worship Baphomet (the Devil) and are not terribly secretive about it, as evidenced by photos from their parties with, for instance, a Rothschild woman wearing a pendant of the goat-god depiction of Baphomet.
When did the Roman empire end and the medieval European empire begin? There is no clear historical point of separation, but the year Clovis, king of the Franks (northern French) and then Charlemagne, subdued the last of the ten barbed-Aryan tribes under the Pope was 1260 years earlier than 1798, in 538 AD (CE - your choice). The 1260 number occurs repeatedly in biblical eschatology in connection with time periods. In the early 1800s, the West was spiritually active, not only with the Devil's contribution in the Enlightenment (and the subsequent formation of the United States from the New England colonies) but also in the appearance of multiple Christian sects. People from various existing mainline sects such as Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians who were keenly interested in biblical eschatology found each other under the label of Adventists (before the church of Seventh-Day Adventism); they were apparently the first to discover the Papal reign of 1260 years in the 1840s. What marginalized them by mainstream Christian groups was another time period in scripture, beginning with a clearly marked event in history - the Persian announcement of the return of the Judeans to the Levant - and ending 1260 times two years later, which when correctly calculated was 1844. (The Adventists initially forgot about no zero year and thought it was 1843 - a costly mistake for some of their farmers!) This year also happened to be contemporary with their studies! Had the time come for postdictive eschatology to be revealed?
What happened in 1844? An earthquake in Portugal of no great significance and nothing much else they could find. What marginalized them from the evangelical mainstream was their subsequent explanation of the event of significance in 1844: an "investigative judgement" in heaven. The first problem with this is that it is removed from what can be observed to come true. Something that happens out there in the stars is for us earth-bounded humans a purely theoretical event with no means for its eventual or actual verification. Other biblical prophecy is verifiable when it happens and is correctly identified as such. (It is also falsifiable in principle, but this invokes the problem of proving a negative universal if it is not time-dated. That is, we would need to wait forever to verify that it never happened if it is false.) Secondly, it hangs a major feature of eschatology on scanty and speculative biblical support.
In my thinking about this, I come to two conclusions: 1) that the calculations are correct, that a day represents a year in biblical eschatology having to do with the visions of Daniel, that something of great significance happened in 1844; and 2) that the explanations of the Adventists are superfluous because something did happen in 1844, but not the kind of event most people would be seeking or imagining. So what happened? What has happened since 1844 that is of great significance? Does it have anything to do with a major revelation? To what extent has the origination and development of Ancient Near East (ANE) archaeology affected our understanding of the ancient world and of eschatology? It has been the most significant source of biblical information (and consequent biblical understanding) since the New Testament was written.
The dawn of ANE archaeology traces back to a German in what is now Iraq giving some clues to a British lawyer-adventurer, Henry Layard (who truly was "Indiana Jones on steroids") who was traveling through the Middle East to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to work in his uncle's law office but never arrived there. (Imagine that: the REAL Indiana Jones was a British lawyer!) In 1844, he was in Turkiye with the idea of excavating Nineveh. The British government had no funds to offer for it, but the British ambassador in Istanbul used what we would call "discretionary funding" to start the project. It was the beginning of the revelation of the ancient world of biblical history. That has got to be the most significant revelatory drama since 1844, yet most of the apostate world would not recognize it as such. Because of ANE archaeology, ancient history has been unfolding to us, and what was scorned text about a seemingly mythological "Bible World" turns out to be about the actual world of our past. It is a major revelation of a kind that could only have happened with the technological capabilities and cultural affinities of the 19th and 20th centuries.(Yet many Christians today are still living in a Disneyland Bible World.)
Once ANE archaeology "ignited", major ancient languages became decrypted. The hieroglyphics on the walls of the temples and palaces of ancient Egypt could be translated from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform was cracked along with Elamite from the Rock of Behistun in NW Iran. The British moved the royal library of Ashurbanipal, with its hundreds of clay tablets, from excavated Nineveh to the British Museum in London. Few, then or now, are fluent in cuneiform and the few who could read it in the 19th century did not see "Israel" in any of the texts and concluded that they must have withered away, an insignificant people having an insignifcant history. ("Israel" was a Yahwist designation of Yahweh's people; "el" is God.)
In the later 20th century, ANE archaeologist Raymond Capt found "Israel" all over in the Assyrian documents, but by their Assyrian name of Gomri, after the dynasty of King Omri of Greater Israel (or later, Kumbri - and still later, "Cimmerian"). The Assyrian texts provided the missing links that completed the tracing of the Anglo-Saxons (and Caucasians generally) in the early 19th-century work of Sharon Turner back to their identification with the Israelites. And who will argue that the West - that Europe - has not had a leading role in world history since the Spanish and British-American empires? Indeed, the biblical thread woven through history is central to human history, not incidental or irrelevant. And the revelation of that significance was made possible by events put in motion in 1844.