jomawh
Puritan Board Freshman
I've been on an eschatology kick lately. In particular I've been examining the Historicist interpretation Revelation as held by many (most?) of the magisterial Reformers and the Puritans. As someone who kind of just "fell into" the Idealist hermeneutic in frustration with Preterism and Futurism ("You know what- you're both right, you chumps!"), Historicism's unique claims regarding the Papacy as the Antichrist spoken of in scripture and the Reformed confessions, its epoch-based approach to the latter days, and its distinguishing between the Kingdom (present) and the millennium (yet future), have all intrigued me as perhaps taking the best elements from Preterism and Futurism and trying to make them fit into a cohesive narrative.
In his three-part series entitled "Historicism: Is It Tenable?", Brian Schwertley (former RPCNA minister- now doing his own thing, apparently?), an orthodox Preterist, makes the case here (1:40) that all of the dates put forth by the historic Historicist commentators regarding the destruction of the Papacy and the ushering in of the thousand-year golden age have passed (the latest having been in 1987), thus proving the unfeasibility of the hermeneutic. He further states that all of the historicist interpreters argued that the witnesses who were martyred in the "city where our Lord was crucified" meant Rome, which all standard hermeneutics would direct towards Jerusalem (3:00)
How would an historicist counter these arguments?
In his three-part series entitled "Historicism: Is It Tenable?", Brian Schwertley (former RPCNA minister- now doing his own thing, apparently?), an orthodox Preterist, makes the case here (1:40) that all of the dates put forth by the historic Historicist commentators regarding the destruction of the Papacy and the ushering in of the thousand-year golden age have passed (the latest having been in 1987), thus proving the unfeasibility of the hermeneutic. He further states that all of the historicist interpreters argued that the witnesses who were martyred in the "city where our Lord was crucified" meant Rome, which all standard hermeneutics would direct towards Jerusalem (3:00)
How would an historicist counter these arguments?
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