Revelation Essay -- essays research papers

" manifestation, n. A famous defend in which St. conjuration the Divine concealed all that he knew. The bring out is d bingle by the commentators, who know nothing."1 The book of apocalypse, the only apocalypse among the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, has always occupied a marginal billet within the field of Biblical interpretation. Its bizarre visions of beasts, dragons, plagues, and cataclysms have inspired poets and artists slice confounding more traditionally minded scholars for centuries. England in the early 17th century proved an exception to this rule. The flowering of apocalyptic exegesis in this effect among academic circles bestowed a new respectability on the book of apocalypse as a literal roadmap of church recital from the time of saviour to the present, and on into the eschaton. The principal writers in this field, including Arthur Dent, Thomas Brightman, and Joseph Mede, have been dubbed "Calvinist millenarians" by modern historio graphy. They were certainly Calvinist in their views on doctrine, and also in their melioristic vision of England as the consummation of the Reformation, as an elite nation with the potential to recreate the true church of the early Christians. Their intense belief in the imminence of the end of the world, however, along with the mode of interpretation which they applied to the Revelation, reflected trends in Christian thought redirected by Martin Luther, and largely ignored by John Calvin. In this paper I will examine Luthers role in three English interpretations of the Revelation, discussing both his influence as an intellectual precedent, and his air as a character within these texts. Luther himself never wrote a expand commentary on the Apocalypse, but in a preface to the 1530 adaptation of his German New Testament, he outlined a mode of exegesis which accent the application of the Revelation to history. This literal approach first appeared in England in a 1545 commentary by John Bale, a transitional body-build often considered the progenitor of the English apocalytic tradition. Later works utilized Luthers mystify more completely, and I will cite three of these in finical Arthur Dents Ruin of Rome (1603), an excellent introduction to the mainstream of English commentaries Thomas Brightmans Revelation of St. John (1609), which epitomized the Anglocentric slant inherent to the Englis... ...rines and works."16 Unlike some chivalrous commentators, who also identified the pagan Turk with Antichrist, Luther chose to apply the image strictly to the papacy, and associated the Turk with the beasts unleashed by the devil after his millennium of bondage.17Thus Luther used both history and Scripture to attack the Pope, and this doctrinal foundation allowed him to carry his polemic one step further. He believed that at a lower place the influence of the ungodly papacy the church had diverged from the true, "hidden" Church which continued to up hold the Word of God under persecution. Luthers reinterpretation of the two cities of Augustine appeared in his 1530 preface, where he stated that one could read the Revelation as a warning against the trials the church will face. In these battles, the enemies of the folding will obscure the church under heresies and other faults, calling the elect "them damned heretics who are really the true christian Church."18 Luther was distant from being the first to interpret history as Gods work, but his instancy on the agreement between the Bible and history led him to context a novel, doctrinally based assault on the Catholic Church.