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Historicism, a method of interpretation in Christian eschatology which associates biblical prophecies with actual historical events and identifies symbolic beings with historical persons or societies, has been applied to the Book of Daniel by many writers. The Historicist view follows a straight line of continuous fulfillment of prophecy which starts in Daniel's time and goes through John's writing of the Book of Revelation all the way to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.[1]
One of the aspects of the Protestant historicist paradigm is the speculation that the Little Horn Power which rose after the breakup of the Roman Empire is the Papacy, the predicted Antichrist power.[citation needed] Futurism and Preterism, alternate methods of prophetic interpretation, were used by Jesuits to oppose this interpretation[2][3][4] that the Antichrist was the Papacy or the power of the Roman Catholic Church.[5]
- ^ History of the Church of God, pp. 252, 253 (1876)
- ^ "Jesuit scholarship rallied to the Roman cause by providing two plausible alternatives to the historical interpretation of the Protestants. 1. Luis de Alcazar (1554-1630) of Seville, Spain, devised what became known as the 'preterist' system of prophetic interpretation. This theory proposed that the Revelation deals with events in the Pagan Roman Empire, that antichrist refers to Nero and that the prophecies were therefore fulfilled long before the time of the medieval church. Alcazar's preterist system has never made any impact on the conservative, or evangelical wing of the Protestant movement, although in the last one hundred years it has become popular among Protestant rationalists and liberals. 2. A far more successful attack was taken by Francisco Ribera (1537 - 1591) of Salamanca, Spain. He was the founder of the 'futurist' system of prophetic interpretation. Instead of placing antichrist way in the past as did Alcazar, Ribera argues that antichrist would appear way in the future. About 1590 Ribera published a five hundred page commentary on the Apocalypse, denying the Protestant application of antichrist to the church of Rome." M.L. Moser, Jr., An Apologetic of Premillennialism, p.27
- ^ H. Grattan Guinness, Romanism and the Reformation From the Standpoint of Prophecy, p. 268 (1887)
- ^ Rev. Joseph Tanner, Daniel and the Revelation, pp. 16, 17.
- ^ The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary, vol. 4 [4BC], 42.)