Was Ellen a fulfillment of Joel 2?

BobRyan · Jul 16, 2023

The Liturgist said:
Indeed, all traditional churches reject Chiliasm

They rejected the literal millennium because they held the bible at too great a distance . But it is in Rev 20 all the same.

The Liturgist said:
Nonsense.

Common sense for those who take the time to actually read the following two chapters - as pointed out here.

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=================

BobRyan said:

First century writers gave us the pre-mill doctrine as we see it in Rev 19 - before the Rev 20 millennium

So we see the appearing of Christ in Rev 19

11 And I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and He who sat on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and wages war. 12 His eyes are a flame of fire, and on His head are many crowns; and He has a name written on Him which no one knows except Himself. 13 He is clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word of God. 14 And the armies which are in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, were following Him on white horses. 15 From His mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it He may strike down the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of iron; and He treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God, the Almighty. 16 And on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written: “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.”

And it is followed by the millennium in Rev 20

Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding the key of the abyss and a great chain in his hand. 2 And he took hold of the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years; 3 and he threw him into the abyss and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he would not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were completed; after these things he must be released for a short time.

4 Then I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was given to them. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or his image, and had not received the mark on their foreheads and on their hands; and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. 5 The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were completed. This is the first resurrection. 6 Blessed and holy is the one who has a part in the first resurrection; over these the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and will reign with Him for a thousand years.

That is THE first century document that describes both the appearing of Christ (Rev 19) and the 1000 yeas that follows, written by a first century Apostle.

The Liturgist said:
No they did not

You have free will and can believe what you wish and ignore what you wish.

The Liturgist said:
it was concern that the Apocalypse would be used in support of Chiliasm, which had been rejected by most of the Church in the third century, under the influence of the Catechtical Schools of Alexandria and Antioch, which caused much of the Church, including Antioch, which was home to the literal-historical form of exegesis, to object to its inclusion in the canon.

Your detail about what appears to be errors introduced in the 3rd century calling for the rejection of a book of scripture -- noted. The idea that "errors would arise centuries after" the first century text of Revelation was written came as no surprise to Paul.

Paul predicts errors enter the church "after my departure"

Acts 20;

29 I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; 30 and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them. 31 Therefore, be on the alert, remembering that night and day for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears.

Paul instructs Titus to battle the tide of errors arising inside the church

Titus 1:

5 For this reason I left you in Crete, that you would set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city as I directed you, ..., 9 holding firmly the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict it.

10 For there are many rebellious people, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, 11 who must be silenced because they are upsetting whole families, teaching things they should not teach for the sake of dishonest gain. 12 One of them, a prophet of their own, said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” 13 This testimony is true. For this reason reprimand them severely so that they may be sound in the faith, 14 not paying attention to Jewish myths and commandments of men who turn away from the truth. 15 To the pure, all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled. 16 They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any good deed.

Jude was very familiar with errors rising up within the church

Jude 1:

3 Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith that was once for all time handed down to the saints. 4 For certain people have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into indecent behavior and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

The Apostle John himself was very familiar with attempts by those inside the church to try and get people to pay no attention to what John taught.
3 John 1:

9 I wrote something to the church; but Diotrephes, who loves to be first among them, does not accept what we say. 10 For this reason, if I come, I will call attention to his deeds which he does, unjustly accusing us with malicious words; and not satisfied with this, he himself does not receive the brothers either, and he forbids those who want to do so and puts them out of the church.

The Liturgist · Jul 16, 2023

Leaf473 said:
Thanks for the offer, perhaps in the future when other threads have calmed down

Peace be with you!

Indeed, by that time hopefully I will be feeling better. To say my health is bad right now would be an insult to everyone in poor health

BobRyan · Jul 17, 2023

The Liturgist said:
Indeed, by that time hopefully I will be feeling better. To say my health is bad right now would be an insult to everyone in poor health

Sorry to hear about your poor health -- will add your health to my prayers.

The Liturgist · Jul 17, 2023

BobRyan said:
They rejected the literal millennium because they held the bible at too great a distance . But it is in Rev 20 all the same.

[/quote]

As I explained, this was not the case. Rather they interpreted Revelation using the same Alexandrian hermeneutic that one uses if one wants to understand what our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ meant when He said that the books of the Old Testament were talking about him, and then explained them to the Apostles. In other words, interpreting it as prophecy, using mainly Alexandrian exegesis with some Antiochene exegesis and also a thorough knowledge of Judaism, which allows one to discern that the Number of the Beast is more likely than not a cypher using Gematria* to refer to Emperor Nero, which makes sense as it was he who initiated large scale persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, which would last, with brief interruptions, for example, under Emperor St. Constantine, until the last Arian emperor Valens died in the 370s AD and St. Theodosius became the first Christian emperor since St. Constantine, and the first in a lineage of Christian emperors that lasted until 1453 in Constantinople, and a few decades longer in with a brief interruption during the Fourth Crusade when Venice used the pretext of retaking the Holy Land to amass a military force that they then redirected to their chief rival in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Venetians also stole the relics of St. Mark the Apostle from the Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria, so they could claim his patronage and adopt the winged lion as the symbol of their city state, and invented the slave galley (the Roman navy was always an all-volunteer force; the film Ben-Hur’s depiction of a Roman slave galley is pure Hollywood anachronism; the Romans had a large number of slaves, but Spartacus, produced by Michael Douglas, who also played the famous leader of the slave revolt, with Sir Lawrence Olivier as Crassus, the cruel Senator who ordered the crucifixion of the rebel slaves, and later during the Triumvirate with Gaius Julius Caesar and General Pompeii was captured by Pontus and executed in a particularly horrific way, which makes one feel sorry for him until one realizes what a psychopathic creep he was, represents a more accurate depiction of Roman slavery. However actual Roman slavery was a thousand times worse, and one thing the Christian church did was to reduce its impact, and St. Theodosius and his successors, in addition to outlawing the Pagan religions, also prohibited Gladiatorial combat, the more lewd spectacles of the Greco-Roman theatre, and indeed pretty much everything else in terms of the circuses side of the bread and circuses equation except for chariot races, which was arguably a mistake, since a dispute between fans of the chariot teams known as the Blues and the Greens engaged in a violent quarrel which turned into a major incident of civil unrest following the disputed outcome of a chariot race during the reign of Emperor Justinian (who I am not a fan of due to his brutal persecution of the Oriental Orthodox, despite his early years resulting in the integration of the most important part of Oriental Orthodox theology into the Eastern Orthodox church), the hymn Ho Monogenes written most likely by St. Severus of Antioch and used at the start of the Syriac Orthodox liturgy, and in the Coptic Orthodox liturgy on Good Friday).

BobRyan said:
By the way I should tell you in all fairness that I am not providing this rich historical background solely for your benefit, since unfortunately you seem for some unknown reason not to believe what I have to say about ancient history despite my years of academic research into the history of the Roman Empire, the early church, and the other ancient civilizations that led to Rome, such as the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks and Persians, among others, and their diverse religious and cultural practices, but rather for the enjoyment of our mutual friends @leaf473 @MarkRohfrietsch @jipsah @ViaCrucis @prodromos @chevyontheriver @Michie @Der Alte @Carl Emerson @dzheremi @coorilose and others who I love very much, and trust you do as well, but I do wish you yourself could accept my historical reporting as generally accurate; I do occasionally make mistakes and am open to correction from scholarly sources. However I hope you understand I cannot accept the writings of Ellen G. White as a primary source of historical information concerning the Roman Empire because the work of hers I am most familiar with, the Great Controversy, contains several claims which contradict the eyewitness and ancient accounts of historical events, the archaeological evidence, and the consensus of contemporary scholars concerning these.

Common sense for those who take the time to actually read the following two chapters - as pointed out here.

.
=================

BobRyan said:

First century writers gave us the pre-mill doctrine as we see it in Rev 19 - before the Rev 20 millennium

So we see the appearing of Christ in Rev 19

11 And I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and He who sat on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and wages war. 12 His eyes are a flame of fire, and on His head are many crowns; and He has a name written on Him which no one knows except Himself. 13 He is clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word of God. 14 And the armies which are in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, were following Him on white horses. 15 From His mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it He may strike down the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of iron; and He treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God, the Almighty. 16 And on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written: “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.”

And it is followed by the millennium in Rev 20

Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding the key of the abyss and a great chain in his hand. 2 And he took hold of the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years; 3 and he threw him into the abyss and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he would not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were completed; after these things he must be released for a short time.
4 Then I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was given to them. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or his image, and had not received the mark on their foreheads and on their hands; and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. 5 The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were completed. This is the first resurrection. 6 Blessed and holy is the one who has a part in the first resurrection; over these the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and will reign with Him for a thousand years.

That is THE first century document that describes both the appearing of Christ (Rev 19) and the 1000 yeas that follows, written by a first century Apostle.

Click to expand...

We have all read the Apocalypse, or Revelation as it is also known, but the fact remains that most of us are convinced that the thousand years in question refers to a long time, which has already started, for the Kingdom of Christ will last forever, and this is a central item of faith in the current version of the Nicene Creed. The Creed dictates how we interpret scripture.

One thing I find frustrating about Adventist hermeneutics, or to be more precise, the hermeneutics of Ellen G. White which are disseminated into the Adventist church, is that it is extremely arbitrary as to what is interpreted literally versus figuratively. So you say common sense requires that we believe in a thousand year future millennial kingdom, despite there being very good reasons for not interpreting Revelation in that way, while concurrently insisting on a non-literal interpretation of the numerous statemetts, repeated in all four Gospels, 1 Corinthians, and the first century book of church order, the Didache, as well as in the writings of St. Justin Martyr and all other early Church Fathers, concerning the nature of the Eucharist, and also the fact that a misunderstanding of the Eucharist on the part of some Roman Pagans led them to conclude that the Christians were engaging in cannibalism, and this vicious rumor contributed to the martyrdom of millions.

When it comes to other varieties of Christianity, the decisions on whether or not to interpret a passage literally or figuratively are made according to defined criteria, and it is my opinion that the traditional churches (the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, Assyrians, traditional Methodists, Reformed Catholics, traditional Moravians, Old Catholics and related denominations) tend to have the most consistent and least arbitrary hermeneutics, in that these are based on the interpretation of the early church, which has been condensed into books of dogmatic theology, with varying degrees of systematic theology such as that of Thomas Aquinas, or in the case of Calvinists, John Calvin or Karl Barth (Orthodoxy lacks that level of systematic theology although one could argue the writings of St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Athanasius the Great, the Cappadocians, Origen, St. John of Damascus, St. John Cassian, St. John Chrysostom, St. Severus of Antioch, St. Cyril the Great, St. Vincent of Lerins, St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Isidore of Toledo, St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Irenaus of Lyons, St. Epiphanius of Salamis, St. Symeon the New Theologian, St. Ignatius the Martyr and St. Gregory Palamas, among others, are coherent enough to form a systematic theology that works of dogmatic theology such as St. John of Damascus or more recently Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, Mere Christianity by CS Lewis, The Orthodox Way by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, and other such works are able to succintly summarize them in the same way that many people read summaries of St. Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth rather than reading through all of the volumes of the Summa Theologica or Kirchliche Dogmatik.

The prevailing Baptist exegesis strikes me as also being a bit arbitrary, however, unlike the SDA, in which the writings of Ellen G. White at present appear to have more influence and authority than the Magisterium over Roman Catholics, and much more than Holy Tradition over the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, in that the Holy Tradition primarily specifies what is not to be believed - theological errors, and allows enormous room for theologoumemna, a Greek word meaning theological opinions, so that there are differences in interpretation between say, Fr. Seraphim Rose, the translator of Protopresbyter Michael, Metroplitan Kallistos Ware and Fr. Michael

You have free will and can believe what you wish and ignore what you wish.

Your detail about what appears to be errors introduced in the 3rd century calling for the rejection of a book of scripture -- noted. The idea that "errors would arise centuries after" the first century text of Revelation was written came as no surprise to Paul.

Paul predicts errors enter the church "after my departure"

Acts 20;
29 I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; 30 and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them. 31 Therefore, be on the alert, remembering that night and day for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears.

Paul instructs Titus to battle the tide of errors arising inside the church

Titus 1:
5 For this reason I left you in Crete, that you would set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city as I directed you, ..., 9 holding firmly the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict it.

10 For there are many rebellious people, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, 11 who must be silenced because they are upsetting whole families, teaching things they should not teach for the sake of dishonest gain. 12 One of them, a prophet of their own, said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” 13 This testimony is true. For this reason reprimand them severely so that they may be sound in the faith, 14 not paying attention to Jewish myths and commandments of men who turn away from the truth. 15 To the pure, all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled. 16 They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any good deed.

Jude was very familiar with errors rising up within the church

Jude 1:

3 Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith that was once for all time handed down to the saints. 4 For certain people have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into indecent behavior and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

The Apostle John himself was very familiar with attempts by those inside the church to try and get people to pay no attention to what John taught.
3 John 1:

9 I wrote something to the church; but Diotrephes, who loves to be first among them, does not accept what we say. 10 For this reason, if I come, I will call attention to his deeds which he does, unjustly accusing us with malicious words; and not satisfied with this, he himself does not receive the brothers either, and he forbids those who want to do so and puts them out of the church.

*Gematria is a system of numerology and cryptology that uses numerical values assigned to the subset of the Imperial Aramaic “square letters” used to write Hebrew since the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which is similiar to the Samaritan alphabet, fell out of use, probably during or immediately after the Babylonian captivity, at the same time the Jews switched from using Hebrew as their vernacular tongue to using Aramaic, the language spoken by our Lord and His disciples, except in the Temple and the Synagogue, where Hebrew survived as a liturgical language, like Latin, Classical Armenian, or Ge’ez, until the Zionist movement and the State of Israel successfully revived it as a vernacular language to unite the Jews who previously spoke Yiddish, various Aramaic dialects, Arabic, Greek, Italian, Ladino (a dialect of Spanish analogous to Yiddish, the dialect of German spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews) with a common language which happened to be the one in which their scriptures and liturgy are mostly written in (although large chunks of the Old Testament, even including parts of the Torah or Pentateuch, are written in Aramaic, and large chunks of the Jewish synagogue service are in Aramaic, the phrase Bar Mitzvah is Aramaic, for Bar is Aramaic for son, the Hebrew equivalent word being Ben, and the Arabic equivalent being Bin, or the plural Bene, and indeed Rabbi is also an Aramaic word which also appears as Rabban, from the Semitic triconsonantal stem RBN, meaning lord, master or teacher; in Syriac Aramaic my understanding, which could be in error, but our friend @coorilose might know for sure, the word Mar replaces RBN to refer to Lord or Master, and thus RBN mainly refers to teachers).

The Liturgist · Jul 17, 2023

BobRyan said:
Sorry to hear about your poor health -- will add your health to my prayers.

Thank you, that’s very kind.

Was Ellen a fulfillment of Joel 2?

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Was Ellen a fulfillment of Joel 2?

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