Why the historicist approach is important for Adventists
Written by Frank B. Holbrook. Source: Biblical Research Institute (link provided below)
What is a Seventh-day Adventist? A common description is that a Seventh-day Adventist is a Christian who observes the seventh-day Sabbath and who is preparing for the Saviour’s second coming. That is true, but the perspective is larger.
The real distinctive frame holding together the picture of truth as perceived by Seventh-day Adventists is their understanding of the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation. In these apocalyptic prophecies Adventists have found their times, their identity, and their task.
Seventh-day Adventists arrive at their interpretations of Bible prophecy by employing the principles of the ‘historicist school’ of prophetic interpretation. This historicist view (also known as the ‘continuous historical’ view) sees the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation unfolding at various points in historical time, often encompassing the sweep of history from the times of Daniel and John (the human authors of these books) to the establishment of God’s eternal kingdom.
A biblical illustration of this unrolling of the prophetic scroll along the continuum of human history is the prophetic dream given to the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and its interpretation by the prophet Daniel (see Dan. 2:31-45). In his dream the king saw an image of a man composed of various metals of descending values: golden head, silver chest and arms, bronze belly and thighs, iron legs, feet and toes made of iron and clay. The dream concluded with a large stone, mysteriously quarried without human assistance from the side of a mountain, that fell with devastating force upon the statue, smashing it to pieces. As the wind blew these metallic elements away ‘like the chaff of the summer threshing floors,’ the stone ‘became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth’ (Dan. 2:35).
Daniel clearly identified the golden head as symbolizing the empire of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar (vss. 37, 38). It was to be followed by three successive world kingdoms corresponding to the three different metals. History records that these were Medo-Persia, Grecia, and the ‘iron monarchy’ of Rome. In the latter part of the fifth century A.D. the empire of Rome in the West was fully broken up. Its parts came to form the nations of Western Europe–symbolized by the strengths and weaknesses of the feet and toes composed of iron and clay. The ‘stone,’ which will ultimately destroy these and all other human, political entities, is the eternal kingdom that ‘the God of heaven will set up’ at the end of human history (see vss. 44, 45, RSV).*
Thus the historicist system of interpretation sees in the apocalyptic prophecies of Daniel and Revelation the hand of Divine Providence moving across the ages, overruling events to bring about the fulfillment of God’s purposes.
Jesus, our Lord, saw a similar unrolling of the prophetic scroll in Daniel 9:24-27, part of a much longer prophecy given to Daniel by the angel Gabriel in the early years of the Medo-Persian empire. In this portion, several important predictions were made. A period of ‘seventy weeks’ was to be allotted to Israel subsequent to their release from Babylonian captivity. On the principle that in apocalyptic prophecy a symbolic ‘day’ equals a literal year, this period translates into 490 years (70 weeks of seven days each equals 490 days, or 490 actual years). Near the close of this time the long-awaited Messiah would appear. This could and should have been Israel’s finest hour when the Saviour of the world would ‘make an end of sins,’ would ‘make reconciliation for iniquity,’ and would ‘bring in everlasting righteousness’ (vs. 24).
But there was a shadow–a dark side to the prophetic picture. It implied a rejection of the Messiah, who would ‘be cut off, but not for himself.’ Tragic retribution would follow in the destruction of both Jerusalem and its Temple (vs. 26).
The Messianic aspects of this prophecy met their respective fulfillments in the life, ministry, and atoning death of Jesus Christ. But the destruction of the city and the Temple were still future events when the Saviour gave His important discourse on Olivet two days prior to His passion (see Matt. 24). On the basis of the prophecy recorded in Daniel 9, our Lord pointed to the impending national ruin (see Matt. 24:15; cf. chap. 24:1, 2; Luke 21:20-24), which met a fiery fulfillment by Roman arms about forty years later, in A.D. 70.
Daniel 9:26, to which Jesus alluded, is a part of a much larger vision occupying chapters 8 and 9 of Daniel’s book and symbolizing events that extend from Persian times to the onset of God’s final judgment (see chap. 8:13, 14). Here again is another striking example of the historicist perspective of apocalyptic prophecy that serves to confirm and to strengthen faith in God’s leading across the centuries through all the play and counterplay of satanic opposition and human pride and ambition.
Historicism and the Reformation
The Millerites, the immediate spiritual forebears of Seventh-day Adventists, were historicists; that is, they interpreted Daniel and Revelation in harmony with the principles of the ‘historical school’ of prophetic interpretation. But the method was by no means original with the Millerites of mid-nineteenth-century America; they simply reflected and elaborated upon the labors of many earlier Bible students of the Reformation and post-Reformation eras.
Sixteenth-century-Reformation preaching of the apocalyptic prophecies of Daniel and Revelation tended to center on what the Reformers believed to be a Christian apostasy that had arisen within European Christendom and which they saw symbolized in the little horn (chap. 7), the leopard beast (Rev. 13), and the woman seated on the scarlet-colored beast (Rev. 17). This preaching had a telling effect upon Europe.
In the Counter-Reformation, which inevitably followed, Rome, rising to the challenge, sought to divert the damaging import of these applications. The result was the publishing of the initial argumentation for what would later become two distinctive, but diverse, methods of prophetic interpretation: the futurist and the preterist systems. Catholic and Protestant scholars alike agree on the origin of these two distinctively different systems, both of which are in conflict with the historicist method and the interpretations derived thereby.
Futurism
Toward the close of his life, the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Ribera (1537-1591) published a 500-page commentary on the book of Revelation. He assigned the first few chapters to ancient Rome but proposed that the bulk of the prophecies would be fulfilled in a brief three-and-one-half-year period at the end of the Christian era. In that short space antichrist (a single individual, according to Ribera) would rebuild the Jerusalem Temple, deny Christ, abolish Christianity, be received by the Jews, pretend to be god, and conquer the world. Thus the Protestant contention that the apocalyptic symbols of antichrist denoted an apostate religious system was countered, and the focus of the prophecies was diverted from the present to the far distant future.
Preterism
Another Spanish Jesuit, Luis de Alcazar (1554-1613), also published a scholarly work on Revelation, this one posthumously in 1614. The result of a forty-year endeavor to refute the Protestant challenge, Alcazar’s publication developed a system of interpretation known as preterism (from the Latin praeter, meaning ‘past’). His thesis, the opposite of Ribera’s, was that all the prophecies of Revelation had been fulfilled in the past, that is, by the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., the early centuries of Christianity. He asserted that this prophetic book simply described a two-fold war by the church–its victory over the Jewish synagogue on the one hand (chaps. 1-11) and Roman paganism on the other (chaps. 12-19). Chapters 21, 22 Alcazar applied to the Roman Catholic Church as the New Jerusalem, glorious and triumphant.
With the passage of time, these distinctive systems of counterinterpretations began successfully to penetrate Protestant thought. Preterism was the first; it began to enter Protestantism in the late eighteenth century. Its present form is linked with the rise and spread of higher critical methodologies and approaches to Scripture study. Preterist interpretations of the prophecies have today become the standard view of liberal Protestantism.
The seeds of Catholic futurism, although refuted at first, eventually took root in the soil of Protestantism during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Futurism, amplified with other elements (for example, many futurists teach a secret, pretribulation rapture), is currently followed in some form by most conservative Protestant bodies.
Thus in the centuries following the Reformation, Rome’s countermoves to deflect the Reformers’ application of the apocalyptic prophecies from herself have been largely successful. The futurist system of interpretation, as it functions today, wipes the Christian era clean of any prophetic significance by removing the bulk of the prophecies of Revelation (and certain aspects of Daniel) to the end of the age for their fulfillment. The preterist system accomplishes the same objective by relegating the prophecies of both books to the past. According to preterism, the significant prophetic portions of Daniel are assigned to second-century-B.C. events and the times of Antiochus IV Epiphanes; Revelation is restricted to Judaism and Rome in the first five hundred years of our era. Thus for most Protestants and Catholics the Christian era from the sixth century until the end of time stands totally devoid of prophetic significance as far as the books of Daniel and Revelation are concerned.
Seventh-day Adventists stand virtually alone today as exponents of the ‘historicist school’ or prophetic interpretation. If our interpretations of prophecy and our self-understanding differ from those of Christian friends outside our ranks (or from some critics who may arise from within our communion), it is largely because we as a people have been and are committed to a historicist system of prophetic interpretation, which we believe is soundly biblical.
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2 Timothy 2:15, “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” AND 1 Thessalonians 5:21, “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”
The Plain Word embraces the principles of the ‘historicist school’ of prophetic interpretation because it is a principle that allows for Preterism (past), Futurism (future), and Idealism. No other prophetic interpretative principle allows for all three: past, present, and future.