The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

IV. Vitringa Compromises on Year-Day and Postmillennium

CAMPEGIUS VITRINGA (1659-1722), learned Dutch theologian, was born at Leeuwarden, on the Zuider Zee, and educated at the University of Franeker. In 1681 he was made professor of Oriental languages, and two years later professor of theology and afterward of sacred history in the same institution. In his Anacrisis Apocalypsios Johannis Apostoli (“Examination of the Apocalypse of John the Apostle”), Vitringa interprets the two beasts of Revelation as papal Rome and the false teachers of Antichrist, such as the Dominicans and Franciscans; ²⁷ the image as the Inquisition, and the mark as the profession of faith of the corrupt Roman church. ²⁸ PFF2 677.4

The successive states and fortunes of the Christian church from John’s time to the great consummation, including the desolations of the Saracens and Turks, are deemed represented by the seven churches ²⁹ and seven seals. ³⁰ The seven trumpets, illuminating the seventh seal, cover the whole period again, showing the judgments of God upon the persecutors of the church—the first five covering pagan Rome and its successors, the sixth and seventh, papal Rome—and the seven vials are to be referred to the seventh trumpet, designating the last judgments upon corrupt Christian Rome. ³¹ Favoring Scaliger’s concept of a year for a century, Vitringa suggests the interpretation of three and a half times as three and a half centuries—from Waldo to the Reformation, but he also follows the more usual year-day principle in the forty-two months or 1260 days, which he says refer to the period of the corrupt church of Antichrist, or Babylon, and whose terminus will be recognized when it comes. He sees in this an allusion also to certain literal periods of three and a half years such as the drought of Ahab’s time and the persecution under Antiochus. ³² PFF2 678.1

On the millennium Vitringa adopts the view just previously set forth by Whitby, to whom he refers—a view which considered it as a spiritual reign brought about by the complete victory of the reformed church, with the world completely evangelized, and answering to the description of the New Jerusalem. ³³ PFF2 678.2