THE JEWS AND THEIR LIES

Preterist Eschatology in the 16th Through 18th Centuries

"However, this interpretation I am not positive in, but offer it as matter of inquiry to those who think and impartial search into the true meaning of the Sacred Scriptures the best employment of all the time they have."

(On the Destruction of Jerusalem)
The destruction of Jerusalem was most lamentable, and altogether horrible : insomuch that the plagues and punishments of all other empires and kingdoms (as that of Sodom, or Pharaoh, &c.) was nothing in comparison of that desolation ; for this city was God's habitation, His garden and bed, as the Psalmist saith, "Here will I dwell, for I have a delight therein.'  There was the Law, the Priesthood, the Temple ; there David, Solomon, Isaiah, and so many prophets were interred.  Truly the Jews had just cause to boast of such privileges.   What are we, poor miserable Gentiles, and Rome, in comparison of Jerusalem?  Did God pass over and forsake that glorious Jerusalem, which in such sort was adorned with His word, with His law, with His blood, friends, and consanguinity?  Truly, let us make this reckoning, -- that the same may light upon us.  This destruction of Jerusalem was more fearful and horrible than all the plagues that ever happened on earth, or that shall happen.  And, indeed, it was too much that God's own nation should lead out of the city His Only Son, and crucify Him.

A man's heart might break in sunder to see the Jews scattered and dispersed up and down the whole empire, and to think that almost all the blood-kindred of Christ burn in hell.  They are served rightly, and even according to their own words which they spake to Pilate, -- 'His blood be on us and on our children,' 'We have no king but Caesar,' &c.  The Jews have haughty prayers, wherein they praise and call upon God, as though they alone were His people, and, meanwhile, curse and maledict all other natios.  The poor people are not to be helped ; they refuse to hear God's word, and only follow their own cogitations and conceits."

The Westminster Confession Chapter 32 - Of the State of Man After Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead

1. THE bodies of men, after death, return to dust, and see corruption; but their souls (which neither die nor sleep), having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them. The souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies; and the souls of the wicked are cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, reserved to the judgment of the great day. Besides these two places for souls separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowledgeth none.

Martin Luther on this point:

"It would take a foolish soul to desire its body when it was already in heaven!" - D. Martin Luthers Werke, ed. Tischreden (Weimar, 1912-1921), p.5534, cited by Althaus, op. cit, p.417.

"Now, if one should say that Abraham's soul lives with God but his body is dead, this distinction is rubbish. I will attack it. One must say, The whole Abraham, the whole man, shall live. The other way you tear off a part of Abraham and say, "It lives." (Table Talk, cited by Althaus, op. cit., p.447.)

(On Grace)
"If any man ascribes anything of salvation, even the very least thing, to the free will of man, he knows nothing of grace, and he has not learned Jesus Christ rightly."   (Sermons, Vol. 1, p.395)

(On Hermeneutics)
"In Romans 7, St. Paul says, "The law is spiritual." What does that mean? If the law were physical, then it could be satisfied by works, but since it is spiritual, no one can satisfy it unless everything he does springs from the depths of the heart. But no one can give such a heart except the Spirit of God, who makes the person be like the law, so that he actually conceives a heartfelt longing for the law and henceforward does everything, not through fear or coercion, but from a free heart." ("Preface to the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans")

(On Hermeneutics)
"{The Holy Spirit's} words cannot have more than one, and that the very simplest sense, which we call the literal, ordinary, natural sense. . . . We are not to say that the Scriptures or the Word of God have more than one meaning. . .We are not to introduce any . . . metaphorical, figurative sayings into any text of Scripture, unless the particulars of the words compel us to do so.. . . For if anyone at all were to have power to depart from the pure, simple words and to make inferences and figures of speech wherever he wished. . . [then] no one could reach any certain conclusions about . . . any article of faith. . . {Quoted by W. G. Kummel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems (Nashville/New York: Abingdon, 1972) 22-23.}"

WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID

Alexander Brown
"Let us not forget that once in the Church's history it was the common belief that John's 1000 years were gone. Dorner bears witness that the Church up to Constantine understood by Antichrist chiefly the heathen state, and to some extent unbelieving Judaism (System iv.,390). Victorinus, a bishop martyred in 303, reckoned the 1000 years from the birth of Christ.

Augustine wrote his magnum opus 'the City of God' with a sort of dim perception of the identity of the Christian Church with the new Jerusalem. Indeed we know that the 1000 years were held to be running by the generations previous to that date, and so intense was their faith that the universal Church was in a ferment of excitement about and shortly after 1000 A.D. in expectation of the outbreak of Satanic influence. Wickliff, the reformer, believed that Satan bad been unbound at the end of the 1000 years, and was intensely active in his day. That this period in Church history is past, or now runs its course, has been the belief of a roll of eminent men too long to be chronicled on our pages of Augustine, Luther, Bossuet, Cocceius, Grotius, Hammond, Hengstenberg, Keil, Moses Stuart, Philippi, Maurice." (Alexander Brown, Great Day of the Lord, p. 216.)

Rusty Entreken
"And so we clearly see that it is the preterists, not the partial preterists, who are departing from the Reformer's concept of the analogy of faith, at least as Martin Luther understood it. Gautier's claim reflects a misunderstanding of the analogy of faith, one that has tragically led the preterists down the wrong road. " (Examining the Foundations of Preterism)

Donald James Perry
"Is it possible that the WCF 32 could be in error since it contradicts Luther and Calvin?"

R.J. Rushdoony (1949)
(On Rape) "The penalty for the rape of a married woman, or of a betrothed woman, was death. The law specified that consent on the part of the woman was presumed if it occurred "in the city" and "she cried not," and she then was assumed to be a participant in the adultery rather than an act of rape. As Luther observed, "The city is mentioned here for the sake of an example, because in it there would be people available to help her. Therefore she who does not cry out reveals that she is being ravished by her own will." In other words, "the city" represents here available help; was it appealed to?"

Jack VanImpe
"And again, I talk to you who are proclaiming Preterism:  Martin Luther, in the sixteenth century,  said there would arise in the last days a king of fierce countenance.  Now he said that almost 1,400 years after you guys said that there would be no more fulfillment of prophecies, because it ended in 70A.D." (June, 2002)

Foy Wallace
(On the Subject of Revelation)
"John was no more entranced to write a history of the Latin church and the Dark Ages than he was inspired to prophesy the discovery of the North American continent, the organization of the United States, the formation of the Southern Confederacy or the existence of the United Nations!  The historical events of far distant future whether the papacy, the pope, Martin Luther or Alexander Campbell are all outside the scope of Revelation.  And we need not go outside the provincial governments of Judea and the Palestinian representatives of the Roman emperor to identify the second beast -- the beast of the land -- and find the fulfillment of the visions concerning him."  (The Book of Revelation, Ft. Worth, TX, Foy E. Wallace Publications, 1966), p. 295)

"The repeated reference to the period of the destruction of Jerusalem is indicative of the author's inclination towards this view." (The Book of Revelation, Ft. Worth, TX, Foy E. Wallace Publications, 1966)

John Walvoord
The historical approach. A popular view stemming from the Middle Ages is the historical approach which views Revelation as a symbolic picture of the total church history of the present Age between Christ’s first and second comings. This view was advanced by Luther, Isaac Newton, Elliott, and many expositors of the postmillennial school of interpretation and has attained respectability in recent centuries. Its principal problem is that seldom do two interpreters interpret a given passage as referring to the same event. Each interpreter tends to find its fulfillment in his generation. Many have combined the historical interpretation with aspects of other forms of interpretation in order to bring out a devotional or spiritual teaching from the book. The preceding methods of interpretation tend to deny a literal future Millennium and also literal future events in the Book of Revelation. " (The Book of Revelation)

On "Last Days" Historicism

"I hope the last day of judgment is not far, I persuade myself verily it will not be absent full three hundred years longer; for God's word will decrease and be darkened for want of true shepherds and servants of God. The voice will sound and heard erelong: 'Behold the Bridegroom cometh.' God neither will nor can suffer this wicked world much longer, He must strike in with the dreadful day, and punish the contemning of His word." (Familiar Discourses, pp. 7, 8. )

"Let us not think that the coming of Christ is far off." ; Believed that the End would occur no later than 1600. (Weber p.66)