Defending the Apocalypse Millennium as Image of Our Lady's Immaculate Triumph

Defending the Apocalypse Millennium as Image of Our Lady's Immaculate Triumph | Part I

The purpose of these next series of essays will be to defend my position that the best way to see the Millennium of Apocalypse 20, is not the traditional augustinian one that the church has tended to follow, but should now be viewed more profoundly as the coming age of peace, where the blessed Virgin Mary of Fatima will reign in most of the world through her most Immaculate heart.

For reference to this interpretation, please see the following prerequisite if you require more information to follow along

An alternative solution to the Millennium of Apocalypse 19 to 20 | The Era of the Virgin’s Immaculate Heart

https://www.catholic365.com/article/46143/an-alternative-solution-to-the-millennium-of-apocalypse-19-to-20-the-era-of-the-virgins-immaculate-heart.html

This is part one to answer a first objection.

Objections

I would like now to deal with what would be common objections to the theology discussed.

Objection 1: The Vatican’s official Scripture position on Apocalypse is effectively preterism. How can you give interpretations not in line with this layer?

Answer: Admittedly, the formal, literal sense that the Church sees at this time, although non-dogmatically, is effectively the preterist mode, or at least the view that ties most of the book to the first century of Church history. We should note, however, that the Church, in saying that this is most likely the literal sense, is not condemning other earlier layers of meaning.

Admittedly, futurism is the least valuable layer of interpretation since there is no way of knowing, at least now, that we are at the very end of history (and, in fact, in light of the approved revelations we have looked at, we are most likely not at the end of the world at this time.) And this is even beyond the point, namely, that the type of data that fundamentalists concoct from the text regarding this mode of interpretation through sensationalist eisegesis is laughable since it misses the end of the text: nations, kingdoms, wars, earthquakes, literal time periods of known duration, and helicopters are not the subject of divine revelation. “It is not for you to know times or seasons.” (Acts 1:7) “ And you shall hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that ye be not troubled. For these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be pestilences, and famines, and earthquakes in places: Now all these are the beginnings of sorrows.” (Mt 24:7–8)

Toward this end, I have endeavored to show that the meaning of human history does not really depend on petty details of any specific time period—whether beginning, middle, or end history—but the ages themselves that are governed according to spiritual characteristics, as in, but not limited to:

• The Age of Intermediate Secular Apostasy: Anti-Reason, Atheistic Materialism, and Relativistic Materialism

• The Age of Protestantism

• The Age of Supernatural Death (rejection of all supernatural essence of existence and retention of merely natural existence: solo-ratio, including Enlightenment, French Revolution, Renaissance, Masonry, and so forth)

• The Age of the Martyrs, or Pagan Rome

• The Age of the Trinitarian and Christological Heresies

• The Glorious Age of Catholic Renewal, and so forth

• The Middle Ages

Each of these ages is governed by spiritual characteristics of negative or, sometimes also, positive elements that form the prima causa for the essential history of the age, barring minor exceptions. What the minor temporal history is within these ages is of no avail, as we see above with the testimony of our Savior.

For example, to get at a clear item of objection implied above, the beast kings of Apocalypse 17, suppose we have many parallel worlds like our own, worlds that have fallen and received an Old Covenant, and, after their respective Incarnations, have a persecuting worldly power on the New People of God. We have analyzed our beast kings as ages of sin, but by the Vatican estimate, they are Roman emperors in the first century. Toward that end, does it really matter that there were five emperors who fell before St. John wrote, that one reigned while he wrote, and that one or possibly two came later? What is the meaning or wisdom in that? In each of these parallel worlds, there could be endless possibilities of how the emperors are laid out in this first age of darkness for the worlds, but it wouldn’t matter. For example, if we let 5 | 1 | 2 denote “five have fallen, one is, [and so forth]”, we could have 4|2|9, 3|1|3, 8|3|6, and what would be the difference? For, regardless of how long any one emperor reigns to help contribute to the emperors’ chronological delineation, is not his spiritual condition the same: to consider himself divine and want to put to death anyone that does not recognize it? How then would the trajectory of major history for any of these worlds be any different, since, in the end, we know that the same spiritual principle will apply: the love and heroic courage of the martyrs will progressively move the empire to conversion, casting out the dragon as ruler above of this Gentile world forever and ushering in the first great victory of the Church: “And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying: Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: because the accuser of our brethren is cast forth, who accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of the testimony, and they loved not their lives unto death.” (Rv 12:10–11)

Similar arguments can be made against the five months of the first great woe. (Rv 9:5,10) In preterism and common evangelical futurism, the five months are taken literally in either case; in the case of preterism, it is the time that it took Roman soldiers to destroy Jerusalem; in the common futurist view, it is the time that it takes for helicopters to try and kill Jews; either way, if, again in our parallel worlds, we had the old place of worship under attack, knowing that it will destroyed by divine chastisement on the old people for rejecting the time of their respective Messiah. So again, what if the durations of time for the destruction of this edifice or such, however measured in each world, varied widely. Would just variances cause a radical change in the greater historical ages of those worlds? Obviously not, since, in the end, the place of old worship, or “temple,” is destroyed. The worldly persecution of the Church will follow, regardless of how many emperors reign and to what length, and in the end, the empire will still be converted, all without regard for these minuscule, inconsequential details.

This, consequently, brings us to the reality that it really wouldn’t make sense if many of the details of not only futurism but also preterism would ever be defined dogma, since they are useless data in and of themselves. On the other hand, the meaning and the theology of the ages, which we have pursued here in this writing, do provide profound meaning for the development of God’s plan, to the degree that this is speculative theology. As a consequence, I ask the reader to ask himself which is more appropriate from the traditional Catholic wisdom: largely temporal details of the very beginning or very ending of Church history, or a theology of the great phases of divine redemptive activity in all history, that is, spiritual historicism?