The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 3

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: The Futurist Foundation of the Oxford Movement

I. Protestants Revive Futurism to Neutralize Historicism

As became apparent in Volume 2 of Prophetic Faith, the Reformation of the sixteenth Century, which gave birth to Protestantism, was not only based on the Bible but guided and motivated by the prophecies. Indeed, it was the virile interpretation of prophecy that added strength to the Reformation, leading the Reformers to separate from the established church of Antichrist. On the other band, the Preterist and Futurist counterinterpretations of the Jesuits sought to undo the damage by parrying the prophetic application to Rome, and by Splitting the essential unity of Protestantism. The vague concepts of the Preterists conceived the Apocalyptic predictions as having been fulfilled in the early centuries. This, as we have seen, was gradually accepted by the rationalistic wing of Protestants on the Continent. PFF3 655.1

But now, for the first time, Catholic Futurism, initially projected by Ribera about 1585, began to obtain a foothold and then gain momentum among Protestants in Britain. Thus the same concept that sought to break the force of the Reformation view of the papal Antichrist, by assuming a future infidel anti-christ, was again invoked to weaken the force of the great evangelical advent and prophetic awakening. Protestant expositors, some leaning toward Rome and some prompted by rationalistic concepts, joined hands in the attemptperliaps unwittingly-to promote the Jesuit position. This, moreover, came to be tied inseparably with the Oxford Tractarian Movement of the Anglican Church, wherein ninety tracts were scattered by the hundreds of thousands to favor Rome and to disprove the Protestant concept of Antichrist, as will be noted shortly. PFF3 655.2

The Rome of the sixteenth Century had felt the force of these prophecies and had sought to evade them in Counter Reformation days. There was no way out but to deny their application to Rome. Their inescapable existence in Scripture could not be gainsaid, as they were assuredly there. So the Jesuit Champions of Rome denied that the prophecies referred to the Roman Catholic Church and its head. They pushed them aside-one group thrusting them forward and the other backward-shifting them out of the entire field of the Middle Ages. As to Babylon, they evaded application by interpreting it to mean pagan Rome, not papal. They also denied the year-day principle. PFF3 656.1

But now, in the nineteenth Century in Britain, the Futurist concept was again revived, by Samuel Maitland, James Todd, William Burgli, John Darby of the Plymouth Brethren, and the renowned John Henry Newnian. ¹ It was espoused by opposite parties-by those who, though Protestants, disavowed the Reformation and referred to it äs an “unwarrautable schism.” These leaned strongly toward Rome. But it was also espoused by others, who, though likewise Protestant, held that the Reformation stopped short of its mark, with much of Babylon still in the Reformed churches. Such refused to believe their brethren had come altogether out of Babylon. PFF3 656.2

However, both parties appealed alike to the authority and tradition of the primitive church that had expected the Anti christ to be an individual, atheistic blasphemer, whose tyranny would last three and a half years, and be exercised just prior to the advent. They chose to go back to the undeveloped concept of the nature and length of: the Christian dispensation held by the early church. They denied the progressive interpretation that had added fact to fact and principle to principle, and perspective, äs history fulfilled, clarified, and confirmed the great positions held in common by the growing body of Historical School interpreters through the centuries. PFF3 656.3

It all started in 1826, the same year that Irving’s English translation of Lacunza appcared, with its Futurist elements. Maitland’s Enquiry into the generally received year-day view of the 1260 days of Daniel and the Apocalypse was then released, followed by later Enquirics. In these Maitland had militantly assailed the whole Protestant application to the Roman Papacy of the symbols of the little horn, Daniel’s fourth beast, the Apocalyptic Beast, and Babylon-holding that a personal and avowedly infidel antichrist was meant, and asserting that the prophetic days of its dominance were simply literal days. Arid nearly contemporaneously with Maitland’s first book, Burgh, of Ireland, likewise published his pamphlet on the Antichrist. Then came Todd’s large treatise, re-enforcing the others and laying the foundation for Newman’s major positions. (Title pages of Maitland, Todd, and Newman treatises reproduced on page 540.) PFF3 657.1

The contrast between Lacunza and Lambert on the one hand, and Maitland, Burgh, and Todd on the other is impressive. The three Protestants were now excusing the Papacy from any connection with the predicted Christian apostasy, the Beast, or Babylon; while the two Catholic writers, on the contrary, had declared that its resemblance to that apostasy had been so marked for centuries that the application was rnanifestly to papal Rome ² PFF3 657.2

One major point in the attack by the English recruits to the Futurist School was the marked discrepancy among the Mistoricists, or expositors of the Historical School, on various points of prophelic interpietation, such äs the seals and the Two Witnesses, and the manifestly unsatisfactory nature of their explanations on some of these points. This was seized upon by both Maitland and Todd, and the novelty of the year-day principle asserted, as if it had never been applied before the time of Wyclif and Brüte. This Historical School view, nevertheless, in a degradual but steady advance. PFF3 657.3

The Futurist scheme had now received the support of prominent Church of England clergymen. But while these Protestant Futurists had borrowed from Lacunza, they rejected that which cost him most in taking his stand on the prophecies- the admission that the Roman church is Babylon. In preference to this, the Protestants joined Cardinal Bellarmine in the expectation that Rome will fall away from her present faith before the days of Antichrist. PFF3 658.1

The inroads of the Futurist theory also served to divert attention and understanding from the relationship of the seventy weeks to the terminus of the 2300 years. If the seventieth week is separated from the sixty-nine weeks, then the inseparable relationship of the remaining 1810 years of the 2300 is hidden, and the divine harmony and understanding of the whole is ruptured. By fixing the eyes upon a transcendent future, one obscures the epochal events of the present. And when the 2300 days are conceived of äs but literal time, any consideration of a nineteenth-century terminus is obviously puerile. Confusion of the Historical School of interpretation, and its final breakdown, is now definitely under way. Let us note the new developments under Todd, after a brief glance at Burgh. PFF3 658.2