I agree. While I abhor the office of the papacy, the idea of the Pope being the "vicar of Christ on earth", and may even go far as to say the papacy is of the spirit of antichrist (particularly in light of papal infalliability and Vatican I), I don't think the Pope is necessarily **the** Antichrist.
I had a hard time to brush of the idea of the papal antichrist since I first heard the case, even back when I really wanted to be an a-millennial, particularly because of 2 Thessalonians and Revelation 17. It's not newspaper exegesis to recognize that there is such a remarkably close correspondence to a prophecy that cannot be said to have been fulfilled by any earlier events (unlike many of the OT prophecies about Israel that match the second temple period)
If I submitted that paper under the guise of "exegesis" of a particular text, I would fail.
Well there's your problem: the assumption that the prophecy cannot have been fulfilled by any earlier events, when the key texts themselves include an insistence that it will, in fact, be fulfilled within the lifetime of many of the initial readers. Exegesis requires looking at what a particular text actually says and what the author intended to communicate to his immediate readers.
Who set himself up in the church as a god prior to the papacy?
I agree with your position. I would like to add that if people in the Protestant/Evangelical tuly understood the deep doctrinal divergences and implications between the Bible and the Vatican would be less inclined to pray that a born again pope would be elected and then lead the Vatican to the truth. We must pray for the conversion of Roman catholics as individuals, whether clergy or non clergy, the Roman edifice is not a structure which can be recovered nor salvaged. I learnt that from a RC priest, missionary in Asia, who encouraged his parishioners to attend a Presbyterian church in the evenings in line with some ecumenical views and was solemnly punished by his superiors for doing so. There is a kind of illusion that Franncis was a good and evangelical popel because he refused to live in the papal palace and did not want to be addressed as Pope. The late queen of England had, among her many titles, the one of Duke of Lancaster. You could address her as such, she could have asked to be addressed as such, however she would still have kept the other titles. You see Francis did not renounce any of his titles because if he did so he would not have been able to be the Pope. It was his prerogative as any monarch to be addressed with any of his titles, but he could not renounce to those titles which are the foundation of his office. I was taught Roman Ctaholic tehology by Fr Pino Puglisi who was beatified by Pope Francis in 2013 and made a saint. Brethren, pray for the conversion of Catholcis and Evangelicals wh are so ignorant of doctrine and church hsitory. I am not advocating hatred towards Catholics. No as I have many relatives still in that church, but wise conduct to win them to the truth. It is a slow process.
Amen. The most unloving thing we can do for our Catholic neighbors is pretend they are all right with the Lord while they remain in a body that withholds His good news from them.
Too many questions and two false assumptions. I'm off to ReformCon and won't be able to respond for several days. In the meantime, listen to the first episode of Greg Bahnsen's Sunday School series on Revelation--free on sermon audio. It's the main thing that persuaded me.
Nero by means of his false prophet Vespasian. He did this after the Emperor Claudius who had been restraining him was taken out of the way.
None of that makes any sense. Is it newspaper eschatology to observe that Daniel’s 70-weeks prophecy set a time frame within which the Messiah would come?
1 Cor. 3:15-16, "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are."
As you observe, not only is an existing antichristian papacy not mentioned in the text. It did not even come into existence until 500+ years after the text was written. How then is it possible to exegete it directly from the text? Instead you have to impose it on the text from the outside. And I’m guessing it was much longer before anyone even attempted this. I’m fine if someone wants to present this as a “theory that fits the facts” as the dispensationalists do, but let’s at least admit the irregular hermeneutic in play.
Because the Church is God's temple
Paul seems to suggest that the ones who fall away follow the man of sin, not that they fight and loose a disastrous war against him... who do you see as the falling away in verse 3? Because if it is the Jews, they were already falling away for a whole generation by the time Nero showed up.
The whole point of prophecy is to foretell things that weren't in existence when the text was written.
I will be careful to not state this too confidently since it's a while since I looked into this, but I remember reading Iraneus of Lyons (I think it was him, I could be mixing it up) and seeing an understanding that is for the most part what a historicist would expect to be understood prior to the point in which the fulfillment could be looked at in the eyes.
Gregorius I in his letter to Emperor Maurice warned against use of the term "oecumenical patriarch" by the Bishop of Constantinopol, Kyriakos II.
www.newadvent.org
Apples and oranges. It ignores the fact that the NT references to the man of lawlessness, antichrist, and the beast are all clearly placed in the immediate time-context of the original addressees, and they knew who was being discussed.
Nero certainly defiled the Church too so I’m not sure how that advances your argument.
That remains to be shown, and I think it's actually contrary to fact.
There are different conceptions of purgatory and its relation to remaining sin and guilt, but the general idea I think is that those who have achieved sinless perfection go directly to heaven, those who have unatoned for venial sins go to purgatory, and those who have unatoned for mortal sins go to hell.
That’s what I understood… but that only the Saints get to skip purgatory. I guess there’s a lot about their system I still don’t understand!
I don’t think Saints necessarily skip pergatory, rather they are no longer in pergatory and are now able to be worshipped.. sorry ‘venerated.’
