Ecclesiology in the Apocalypse II: the Trumpets

[spauline]

Building off the following thread:

Ecclesiology in the Apocalypse

let us explore the implications.

Specifically, how would we interpret the Trumpets? From the post on Salvation history, we see the Church traverses the three ways of the saint [the purgative, the **illuminative, and the unitive], the same as the Jews. Seeing as then Revelation’s main chronology is of three main parts, the Seals, the Trumpets, and the Vials, so then it is natural to associate the ways with the three main sections. Hence, the trumpets correlate with the Illuminative way.

This is the most sensible approach for a Catholic. Because the other extremes are useless. First, Fundamentalists tend to think that “literally”, 144,000 Jews will be miraculously protected from physical harm at the end of the world. First, that is absurd! Which is more important at the end of your life: for your physical house to stand or your spiritual one? For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul in the process? What is the benefit of having protection from temporal troubles, and yet be harmed spiritually in intellect and will? Hence, preterism is neither that much better, seeing as, even if God protected the Christian Jews in the time of the AD 70 destruction of the temple, to what avail? They then only pass into the outer world, the pagans, who shall torture and kill them instead of the Pharisees. So then the temporal protection was only temporal, and in the end, what is the point?

For Christ has not promised the children of the Father that they shall escape physical tribulation. For the same Christ who said, “not a hair on your head will be harmed…” also said, “Fear not them who can kill the body and then do no more harm. Rather, fear him who can kill both body and soul in Gehenna.” And “And some of you they shall to death.”

And in point of fact, the Church proclaims that in the end, what matters is that you cross the threshold of death with sanctifying grace in your soul. But where do you get grace? Directly from God, sometimes, but the more profound ones are the Sacraments. But you cannot partake of the fullness of the Sacraments lest you have a bishop. Hence, the Protestants have only two.

But even more so, the less you know about God ,the less chance you have of being saved. For “if any man will harm them, in this manner must he be harmed.” No truer statement from the standpoint of the Oral and Written Word of God. For, these two Great Witnesses bear the truths of God to humanity, truths that are desperately needed to guide your intellect such that you understand who you truly are, who God is, and how to better cross death with his love in your heart. ***For behold, when you reject, even if not fully culpably, a particular truth or set of truths proclaimed by the Word of God, whether Oral or Written, you are intrinsically harming yourself to the very same degree of the error you make. ***

Hence, the dragon knows that his best weapon is to get people to reject the most amount of truth that God wills humanity to know. For the less truth the person believes, the more likely they are to go ahead and take the fruit. For, behold, did the dragon simply say to Eve immediately, “Go ahead and take the fruit [with your **hand]”? NO! First he sows doubt in Eve of what God had revealed. Therefore, first the dragon attacks Eve in her forehead, deceiving her to lose trust in God’s Revelation. Once her FAITH is fully dismantled, it is then like taking candy from a baby to get her to reach out with her hand and take the fruit.

So then, as the Church emerges from the purgation of the senses (pagan Rome, the Seals) into Catholic Christendom, what other options does the dragon have except to in fact, dismantle the forehead, that is, the intellect, of the world, so as to get them to reject all of the truths of God, so that, once fully depraved, they will once again reach out with their hand and take the fruit unashamedly.

But can the dragon do it overnight? Can the dragon, while the blood of many men, women, and children lies fresh on the ground of the new Emperor Constantine’s land, say to an empire that has turned Christian, “You do not need the Trinity or Incarnation, the Pope, the Bishops, the Scriptures, nor Reason. Just completely apostatize all at once?” God forbid. No, you can’t place a live frog in boiling water. Gotta turn up the heat gradually.

…

 

[spauline]

…

But so then what is the Seal of God in the 144,000? Is it the elect in general? But I ask you, do the elect all have the same degree of protection from spiritual harm while journeying on earth? By no means. For indeed, Muslims, Orthodox, Protestants, and even some pagans could potentially be elect, but they all suffer various harms in their intellect, that is ,in their faith, that is, in their forehead.

And if the protection of the Seal is not, as we have seen, physical, but spiritual, and if the protection applies to the illuminative phase of the Church, where she will progressively develop the doctrines of Christ, which will in turn suffer attacks of great spiritual nature, what protection can this mean except in regards to faith. But if the protected one is preserve their faith in CHASTITY, and not be stained by the spiritual harm of error, then the Seal cannot be all of the elect, but only those who are Catholic and faithful to the Church’s Revelation.

Hence, the Trumpets are not meant to be taken literally. In the context of illumination, they would be great spiritual calamities that afflict those “not Sealed”, progressively harming their victims in their faith, such that, once complete, the end product is utter depravity of faith: the total denial of all God’s truth, hence, a “mark” in the “forehead”, but one that renders the opposite of the Seal. Hence, just as those with the Seal are fully faithful to ALL of God’s Revelation and its sources, so then those marked will hear NONE of the sources of Divine Truth. Hence, being utterly separated from God’s Truth, there is then no impediment to them “taking the fruit with their hand,” that is, to do the utter works of evil.

 

[spauline]

a person asked:

“I’m wondering what you understand John’s message to be to his contemporaneous readers? Also, what do you understand the trumpets, the seal, the bowls, etc., to mean to John’s contemporaries and how do you know?”

I responded:

Admittedly, preterism is a legitimate layer of meaning all its own. Scholars can indeed investigate that layer, and many Catholic scholars have already done so, and those findings can be valid in their own right.

However, remember that Scripture need not have only one layer of meaning. In fact, there is really the question of whether preterism was St. John’s primary intention. Personally, I doubt it, as that layer of meaning does not really address what the apocalyptic Q’s are. In effect, it is useless to know, even for Early Christians, that the war in the fall of Jerusalem was “five months”, or that there were 10 Roman Emperors and 7 Herodian Kings in the first century, or that Nero had a head wound, or that the Parthians threatened Rome. In the end, this data is just as useless as the futurist literalism (such as, China will have 200 million man army, and Russia will invade Israel, and the Antichrist will head the EU, and that helicopters will literally torture people for five months.)

The apocalyptic Scriptures are not really addressing, in their primary sense, temporal bs of either the very beginning or very end of Church history. Rather, they address the SPIRITUAL meaning of all Salvation history. Hence, the only data that is really of any use to Catholics would be a SPIRITUAL analysis of the major history of both the Old and New Testaments. But how does one analyze Christian history from a spiritual standpoint? In that regard, ecclesiology is at the heart: for whether you are Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant affects how you structure, and understand, the history of the last 2000 years. Hence, this is an area that the false ecumenists do not want to tread in. They would rather just say, “can’t we just hold hands and say we love Jesus and leave it alone?” Hence, preterism becomes a good excuse to dodge the question. But in the end, when we pursue the real depth, this thread is smack in the middle of the real core of what’s going on.