Historicism (Christianity)
In Christian eschatology, historicism is a method of interpretation of biblical prophecies which associates symbols with historical persons, nations or events.
Commentators have also applied historicist methods to ancient Jewish history, to the Roman Empire, to Islam, to the Papacy, to the Modern era, and to the end time.
An example in post-Reformation Britain is in the works of Charles Wesley, who predicted that the end of the world would occur in 1794, based on his analysis of the Book of Revelation.
[15] In 19th-century America, William Miller proposed that the end of the world would occur on October 22, 1844, based on a historicist model used with Daniel 8:14.
After the Great Disappointment some of the Millerites eventually organized the Seventh-day Adventist Church,[16] which continues to maintain a historicist reading of biblical prophecy as essential to its eschatology.
[17] Millerites also formed other Adventist bodies, including the one that spawned the Watch Tower movement, better known as Jehovah's Witnesses, who hold to their own unique historicist interpretations of Bible prophecy.
[1]: Appendix I The 10th-century Catholic bishop Arnulf of Orléans was, according to Elliott, the first to apply the Man of Sin prophecy in 2 Thessalonians 2:3–9 to the papacy.
Joachim drew connections between the rise of Islam and errors of the Greek church, he especially criticized the Orthodox rejection of filioque as a heresy.
[23] Joachim believed that, just as the last kings in Judah could not protect themselves against Babylon, the Christian faith could not defend itself from Rome through reform within the Catholic Church because the Pope would be the Antichrist.
The fifth round of talks in the Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue notes, In calling the pope the "antichrist," the early Lutherans stood in a tradition that reached back into the eleventh century.
[26] Tyndale's translation of 2 Thessalonians, chapter 2, concerning the "man of lawlessness" reflected his understanding, but was significantly amended by later revisers,[27] including the King James Bible committee, which followed the Vulgate more closely.
Isaac Newton's religious views on the historicist approach are in the work published in 1733, after his death, Observations upon the Prophecies of the Book of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St.
He avoided predictions based on prophetic literature, taking the view that prophecy when it has been shown to be fulfilled will be proof that God's providence has been imminently active in the world.
While the historicist paradigm, together with its pre- or postmillennialism, the day-year principle, and the view of the papal antichrist, was dominant in English Protestant scholarship during much of the period from the Reformation to the middle of the 19th century (and continues to find expression in some groups today), it now was not the only one.
[30] Arising in Great Britain and Scotland, William Kelly and other Plymouth Brethren became the leading exponents of dispensationalist premillennial eschatology.
The unprecedented upheaval of the French Revolution in the 1790s was one of several factors that turned the eyes of Bible students around the world to the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation.
[33] William Miller's movement was essentially a one-doctrine movement—the visual, literal, premillennial return of Jesus in the clouds of heaven.
[citation needed] Traditional Protestant historicism interprets the four kingdoms in the Book of Daniel as Neo-Babylon, Medo-Persia (c. 550–330 BC), Greece under Alexander the Great, and the Roman Empire.
[citation needed] Adam Clarke, writing in 1825, offered an alternative 1260-year period from 755 AD to 2015, based upon the Pope's elevation from being a subject of the Byzantine Empire to becoming the independent head of the Papal States by means of the Donation of Pepin.
