Trumpet 4: Morally bad clergy, Trumpet 5: Protestantism

[spauline]

It is simple: dragon sows moral laxity in Bishops, disfiguring their image as mediated fathers, leading to the understandable rejection of their authority in the subsequent trumpet. The dragon understands the very common trait of the fallen nature: reject message because of messengers (who give bad witness).

 

[spauline]

Trumpet 6 follows similarly: Protestants confound living hell out of pursuit of supernatural revelation, so in Enlightenment, supernatural revelation and redemption is rejected, retaining only a merely natural religion, based on reason and unassisted will.

 

[spauline]

i’ve done this before, but here are the trumpets at a glance.

first, the meaning of the seal and the mark, which requires a digression.

Did the dragon say to Eve “Actually, God is right, you will die, but go ahead and take the fruit anyway, because it tastes good.”?

Of course not. Because if Eve still believed it was wrong to take the fruit, she would be LESS likely to take it. Yes, she could still be tempted, and might have taken it. Look at it this way: if a Catholic man knows it is wrong to masturbate, and that you can go to hell for it, wouldn’t he be less likely to do it, than if he just simply believed it was alright?

IOW, if kids don’t even care that fornication is wrong, or even if there is a God, is it not all the more easy for the dragon to make them fornicate than if they were devout Christiand and knew it was wrong?

Hence, to the degree that a person knows and assents to Divine Truth, it serves at least as an extra restraint of their sin than if they accept less truths about God.

So then, the dragon therefore, first attacks Eve in the FOREHEAD, getting her to lose faith in what God had revealed. Once Eve’s faith is utterly extinguished, will she not all the more easily reach out with her HAND (Hmmm, where in the Book of Revelation do we see the FOREHEAD and HAND mentioned? Hmm…, are we onto something?) and take the fruit.

Same thing in the Church age. When Constantine conquered, and ushered in the first great victory of the Catholic Church over spiriutal darkness, what other options does the dragon have except to deceive humanity so as to make the sun set again? But, of course, he cannot do it overnight. Too hard. Can’t place a live frog in boiling water.

So he has to gradually attack man in the FOREHEAD, progressively DIMINISHING his faith in the Divine Truths, until, the forehead is utterly impure, accepting none of God’s truth. That is the mark of the beast in the forehead. Then, once humanity has no concern for God whatsoever, THEN, they will reach out with their HAND and take the fruit, that is, materilism, ripping the Creation from the Divine embrace, and exalting it above the Creator, making it its own end, instead of God. That is, the supreme lie against the Sacramentality of Creation: no longer is the Creation an expression of Divine Wisdom, saturated with spiritual meaning and as a vehicle for love and grace, but only a brute machine to be sought at purely for superficial measures (pleasures, possessions, and selfish egotistical accomplishments).

But how does the dragon progressively harm the foreheads of men?

But causing humanity to progressively attack the SOURCES of Divine Truth from top to bottom.

These sources are, in order of most reliable to least:

The Trinity and Incaration
The Pope
The rest of Bishops and Oral Tradition
The Scriptures
Reason

five sources, seven trumpets. briefly, to make up the difference, I assign two stages instead of just one to both the first source (Trinity and Incarnation) and the third source (the Bishops and Oral Tradition). A brief overview follows:

the first source comprises two stages: intiial Christological and Trinitarian heresies that retain the Messiahship of Christ and the finality of Christ’s Word. The second stage of the first source is Islam, a total affront to the Trinity and Incarnation, and the dethronement of Christ as Messiah, and the claim that there is Divine Revelation that surpasses Him [Muhammed]. Hence, in the first stage, usually the Trinity and Incarnation are not utterly attacked, whereas Islam attacks these sources in the total sense, while yet retaining the other notions of the Gospel.

The next trumpet is the Great Schism, which attacks Peter.

And to create two trumpets from one source again, I split the attack on the general Bishops and Oral Trad into two stages: first, the great moral darkening [scandal, a great Biblical principle of Christ] of the Catholic clergy that was the primary antecedant to the Protestant Rebellion, the primary cause that is, and then of course, the second stage being Protestantism itself, who retain but Scripture and Reason as sources of truth.

The next stage, or second to last, is the Enlightenment, where even Scripture is rejected (and actually any notion of Divine Revelation), leaving only reason as the guide in a merely natural religion.

Of course, the final stage, as pointed out, is the total depravity, the rejection even of reason itself, and the total indifference to religion or rejection thereof (atheism, relativism), that is the mark of the beast.

 

[spauline]

Filler in reponse to a Q about where I see all this:​

Well, admittedly, the fifth trumpet does not necessarily speak of massive confusion as it does of “torture”. In this regard, I use Catholic theology that distinguishes between FORMAL heretics and MATERIAL ones. Formal heretics are persons who are culpable for their heresy, that is, their rejection of the Divine Truth is due to ill will, that is, sin, and hence, usually, they have hard hearts, and then, derivatively, they excercise spiritual torture on scrupulous souls, or MATERIAL heretics, as did Calvin and other Reformers, kind of like the evangelical torture of “ya gotta really, really, really, really, *really *get saved, and only hope that you are saved.” But the scrupulous souls who seek the Divine WiIl sincerely, but have been led astray by the formal heretics, then retain the life of grace, but it is indeed spiritual torture, seeing as they can no longer be certain how to avoid hell (sort of how Calvin had to admit that no eccelesial community can know for certain that it correctly interprets Scripture, they only have the frail hope that God always blesses at least one such community in the world with this gift.)

So then, the monsters that do this torture, were the formal heretics of the Protestant Rebellion, and the victims of their wrath, that is, those without the Seal of God, but who were tortured, are the poor material heretics, who are tortured in conscience by uncertain doctrine, and who also lose, ipso facto, FIVE Sacraments (heretics retain only Baptism and Marriage, and lose the other five sacraments that require a valid priesthood). This then, IMHO, would be the meaning of the five months of torture.

The next trumpet, or the sixth, then speaks not of physical death, but supernatural death, which is what occured in the Enlightenment, seeing as the infidels of this movement denied the notion of any Divine Revelation and Internvention, that is, denying all supernatural action of God within the world, and so dying supernaturally, and retaining a mere natural goodness and religion.

From this, long story short, the number of sacraments heretics retain [2], I use to suggest 2 can be a symbol of heresy. I then use this analogy with the number 2 in the sixth and seventh trumpets. Specifically, the number in the sixth trumpet is “2” myriads of myriads, or two ten thousands of ten thousands, which i interp as follows. The first number in the multiplication is two myriads, or two ten thousands, or that is, 2 x 10 x 1,000, which i factor to mean heresies [2] of the world [10, the Biblical number of the world] pluralified [1000], meaning, the confounding heresies of the deists and rationalists in the Enlightenment are “worldly”, because religion has been brought down to the level of the world, instead of originating from “above” [supernatural].

The second half of the Enlightenment period, or myriad [10,000], was then pure worldliness [10 x 1000], eg, the worldliness of the latter half of the 1800’s and first half of 1900’s.

Finally, the false prophet has two horns, like a Lamb, who has seven. The greatest power of Christ’s Redemption is the Seven Sacraments. The dragon, according to ECF Tertullian, plagairizes the Sacraments, taking their beauty and twisting them diabolically into selfishness. Hence, the two horns of the false prophet are the image of the ultimate “heresy”, the diabolical twisting of even what goodness heretics retain, in the form of the two primary lies of the dragon from the foundation of the fall:

1. anti-Baptism [the total negation of faith in Divine Revelation and the seeking of the Divine Will] and…
2. anti-Marriage [materialism: since Marriage is the supreme Sacramental sign of Creation, the Whore images its total antithesis, in that, in materialism and secular messianism, the Creation is ripped from God’s loving hands, divorced from its Sacramental and Catechetical meaning, and made to replace God, exalted above Him, and sought as the final end in place of God].

Know this is alot, but if you search my proflie, you will find i post about this type of stuff all the time. I also have some links on my website if you are interested.

For the brief, trumpet two is a great mountain, that is the spiritual kingdom of Islam, just as Daniel shows the RCC in chapter 2 as the great mountain that fills the earth, so Islam is a great spiritual kingdom that causes much spiritual damage.

The third trumpet is bitterness, the first great betrayal and division of Christians, the Great Schism.

The fourth trumpet is a great darkening of the stars, the moral darkening of the Catholic clergy.