Critique of the St John Apocalypse Movie | Part II, Trumpets

Critique of the St John Apocalypse Movie | Part II, Trumpets

Hello, the first discourse, A critique of the film The Apocalypse of St John | Introductory Comments unfortunately was way back several months ago.  Sorry for the delay, some TMI, just a lot of stuff going on, haha,. :P 

Anyway, I thought I'd get back and do some more critique. Let’s kind of delve first into the middle part, the trumpets, because there are some good examples of deficiencies there.

// E i s e g e tical speculation versus rigorous exegesis from doctrine

Effectively, when the film gets into, say, the trumpets and the seven letters, I feel that a lot of it is what you would call eisegeses instead of exegesis.  That is, like reading into the text what one speculatively sees without any rigorous basis to argue why in a very profound way what should be seen. 

For example, there's a person I will keep anonymous but who is in a certain sense a minor Catholic celebrity, who is involved with Catholic scholarship, and when I met him many years ago, I was explaining that my approach to the apocalypse and to my writing was spiritual historicism and not the extremes of fundamentalist futurism or the typical Catholic response, which is preterism, or mostly the first century Church. His response was that in many of the early fathers and scholars , there was no rigor, no reason that one thing they saw was really something that needed to be there doctrinally, it was effectively almost fully speculative.

Similarly in the film here, there is not always rigorous academic structure to work out what is going on in a general sense.  Toward this end, it leaves things less than desired.

This especially becomes true in the trumpets. For example. actually, as it stands, I agree almost completely with their assessment of the first 3 trumpets.  Beyond this, I begin to see lack of rigor and rather e i s e g e s i s   .

// Not Entirely Rigorous

Now, they assoiate the trumpets with the heresies against the Church, and thait is good and academic.

However, in our first critique, their first trumpet is merely Arianism.  The problem is here , before we start the rigorous examination, why do we simply single out Arianism and then in fact not mention the whole plethora of Trinitarian and Christological heresies of a lesser sense prior to Islam?  Another example would be to confound the first two great woes, or fifth and sixth trumpets, by not drawing the distinction between supernatural torture, or the first great w o e, versus supernatural death, or, the second great woe.

// The First Great Woe, Protestantsm: Supernatural TORTURE

In the very earlier article I wrote on scandal, Protestantism, and the trumpets four and five, here, in this regard, then, they associate the fifth trumpet, or again the first Great Woe, by conjoining protestantism with elements of enlightenment and of what we could call supernaturally dead ideologies.

The way to understand this is to say that, clearly, the first Great Woe, is a supreme supernatural disturbance of the Christian order, one that still leaves a sense of Christ, a sense of Revelation and grace, but very much frustrates this order by what could be seen as first formal heretics , or the frightening locust creatures who spiritually, quote on quote, torture innocent heretics , and then these poor innocent heretics themselves, who are seen as the ones without the Seal of God.

It is common sense that those with the “Seal of God in their forehead” are those who belong to the Catholic Church and at least assent to her teachings. This gives them stability and certain knowlede of soteriology. This is the intro to what the CCC tells us, RELAX, READ, and REJOICE!

RELAX: ALL of the Gospel has already given by the Spirit to the Church INFALLIBLY. You don’t have to become a Bible scholar in all the little spare time you have outside your normal job to figure out how to aviod hell! It is all here in this book of thousands of paragraphs.

READ: You know that what you are reading is the true teachings of Christ in fullness, and they are beautitul and wonderul. GOOD NEWS!!

REJOICE, as above!

But the innocent heretics, the victims of the myriads of pseduo, mututally confounding popes, do not have the Church’s certain teaching to reassure them how to get to heaven, and so do not know where to go without Rome, who could give them the stability in their hearts to not fear hell in an unreasonable degree. This fear would once again come from the symbolic locust creatures, the formal heretics, who, like an army, go out to conquer the world for the Gospel in place of the true Church, but doing so in a hurricane of doctrinal chaos; and this, precisely because these same fiery formal heretical ministers, tell the poor innocent heretics, “follow me or burn!” and “read the Scriptures for yourselves to see that I am right!” Yet, behind all this, there are 100 scary such mutually self-conflicting men telling you this!

For the person who is afraid of going to hell, and with such confustion before them, and because cleary no normal man with normal daily duties could accomplish a Unirvseity D in Scritpure, even in many lifetimes; he can only join the community that best fits his limited experiences in life, formation of conseince and resources, etc. And yet it is rumored that Calvin said, there is always guaranteed to be at least one true communion of Christians on earth at any one time, but if you don’t find it and join it in time, you perish!

Imagine having to deal with terrifying s*** like that? It is, you guessed it, TORTURE!

This brings us to the Catholic Church. God never intended even for the Scritpures to come together except by the infallible guidance of the Spirit to the Church, much less than to expect the faithful to have a personal copy of Scripture and work it out like a full time life time scholar of Scripture, determing all the true doctrines of Christ. Hence, later we will see the Seal of God in Apocalypse 7 as a spiritual Seal on the forehead, or intellect of soul, which protects the faithful Catholic from errors and confusion, since the Church, founded on Peter, and the Bishops and Tradition, does not move in her teaching except to deepen it like a photograph coming into greater and greater focus.

It seems that the film assumes this line of thinking, but it might be somewhat problematic as we move into the next, or second, Great Woe, the sixth trumpet:

// Addenduum on the Fifth Trumpet: A Little Literalism in the Film

Before we do this, one residual problem for trumpet 5, might be mentioned which is also coming up shortly in the next trumpet, the literal interpretation of the “long hair like women” as the fancy wigs that the men wore in the times of say 1700+, like in Enlightenment, Rennasiance, and so forth. Now, obviously, this is absurd. Might as well be like a Catholic Hal Lindsay! Rather, I think the hair has the semblance that, by the TOTB we saw in the previous article applied to the female fowl, femininity symbolizes receptiveness, and that is like the holy creature, who receives everthing she has from God, who is mainly seen anthropomorphically, and literally as Our Savior, male in spiritual form, since from God the seed of spiritual truth and grace resides as source, not us the creatures, and from Him it proceeds, not from us. We can only receive God’s truth and love humbly. (all this theology is seen in literal physical man and woman of our life)

This then can mean that the formal heretics have claimed “receptiveness toward the spirit,” saying, “See, the HS has given me these teachings, and I have humbly received them. Come follow me and I will show you the way to God.” And yet their teeth are fearfully iron, which could mean that their teaching is nonetheless crushing to the soul and scary, like the Roman Empire in Daniel!

// The Sixth Trumpet, the Second Great Woe, Supernatural DEATH:

“Enlightenment,” Countless Worldly Ideologies, Solo Ratio, ...

Then, the sixth trumpet, which again would be the second great w o e, becomes a supernatural death, and not tortue as in the previous one, so that it is not a literal killing of a great portion of mankind, but rather a spiritual one, and this, in the sense that a great portion of humanity rejects the sense of organized supernatural claims of religion such as Revelation and Grace or Salvation, and chooses to descend into a merely natural order of reason and brute natural efforts to keep the moral law.  These dispositions were then highly debated ad infiitum like protestantism with things like deism and rationalism and non-religious ideas beyond, so that TAN books , in Church History, when discussing this successive age after protestantism, says that, just as there seemed to be as many forms of protestantism as there were Protestants, so it seemed in the post Protestant era, there were as many forms of supernaturally dead infidelity as there were dead infidels. 

This clearly draws a distinction then between protestantism and the subsequent movement into the modern age of only retaining first natural religion versus an elevated Christian mindset, and then no religion at all; merely corrupted reason in the countless worldly ideologies, and philosophies, etc, that tried to find the meaning and purpose and solution to life and its problems with only an intrinsically flawed natural and worldly thinking, based on ignorance, bitterness, and the fallen nature manifested in arrogant mockery of the authentic religion of our beloved Church.

// Elements of Fundamentailsim

Another unexpected error , what you think would never occur in the Catholic movie, was that the authors of the film are considering the great number of the sixth trumpet as though it might be a literal army of 10,000 * 20,000 men, and of seeing the quote unquote fire and such emanating from the creatures, as say tank gun horrors and other modern literal physical warfare .

// History that Disappears Between Extremes

This is really surprising because it is cognizant of fundamentalist interpretation . Clearly, the vast majority of the Apocalypse must be describing spiritual realities and not physical ones. I have argued these things over and over like a dead horse from my writing here on Catholic 365. which admittedly are unbelievably redundant across the spectrum of what I've composed, but still which, I wish to instill and emphasize because, really, what good is it to have these extremes, when, in both cases, there are some physical things that are not spiritual, and then somehow they will have the audacity to say that there is quote unquote a lot of wisdom in this stuff.

What does it matter how long it took for Jerusalem to fall or how many Roman emperors reigned in the first century, when a great early father sees the same kings of the beast as ages of the world [St Hippolytus of Rome], or that the time for Jerusalem to fall could be an anti Sacramental theology of the deficiencies of protestantism [something we might get to later: there are five loaves, two fish, 5 sacraments, the apostolic ones, which heretics lack, and upon which can be very sensibly argued to the main five theological essenses that most of Protesrtantism confounds overall], instead of five literal months of Roman soldiers? Actually, which just delved in depth about these five sacraments in the previous article on the fourth and fifth trumpets.

If the vast majority of the apocalypse, disappears for some 1900 years and then picks up suddenly in 1948, when the Hebrew people come back to the holy Land, how else is preterism that much different, when it describes events of the first century, many of which are also literal or physical [the Parthians, delineation of Roman emprors, time periods of the fall of Jerusalem which we just saw, kind of viewing the physical sufferings of the time as literal in that first century], and then leaves a vast obscurity until the very end of the world that of course will have some meaning, but that will clearly have also things which don't matter possibly?

What about all the great ages between pagan Rome and today and the age of peace and beyond?

What about the trinitarian and christological heresies culminating with Islam, the great schism, the middle ages, protestantism and the great Supernatural death of the modern age, which we have just discussed , and finally the secular apostasies in east and west of the 20th and 21st centuries, and possibly a general chastisement followed by a great renewal, the reunion of christians, mass world repentance and the reign of the immaculate heart, lasting only until the world gets tired of its loving peace and goes back to godlessness at the end with the great apostasy?

Why, as in the typical Catholic amillennialism, does it leave this entire history between pagan Rome and the Antichrist in an obscure vacuum of wheat and tears, similar again to fundamentalism but on the other spectrum?

And so it is weird that a Catholic film, would give lip service to fundamentalism and mix spiritual ages with absurd literal armies and tanks and such.

// The Trumpets Rigor Finally

However, I have not introduced the rigor with which we could counter this with.

Well, at this point, let us begin this same rigor to work out the trumpets spiritually according to a logical trajectory based on Catholic doctrine rather than, again, reading into the text things that may or may not be there.

To begin, we should set up the overall picture so that we just don't jump into the trumpets without setting up a bigger model for the three great parts of seals trumpets and vials.

Here I will copy the basic discourse

// A speculative theology of the trumpets of the Apocalypse

// The Big Picture And Where We Are In Salvation History | The Minor Godless Age And Conditional Chastisement

According to some EWTN scholars here, this is not the very end of the world. From this text, firstly, by the late Pope Benedict, Public Revelation already shows that our current time cannot be the very end since the fullness of the Gentile conversion has not yet taken place, nor the fullness of conversion of the Jewish people. In addition, the text suggests that the best scenario that can be drawn from most of the fully approved Private Revelations seems to be that we are rather in a minor godless age which may include a conditional minor tribulation, yet one that is not God is condemning the world with wrath but trying to bring them back through mercy.

// The great renewal and age of peace

After the minor chastisement that is most likely coming is complete, effectively all or most Christians will be coming back to the Catholic church, and this will enable much of the world to come back to the Church that used to be Christian, if not also evangelziation that may spread outward.

Then our Lady of Fatima’s Immaculate Heart will reign in the world for a great age of peace.

// The great apostasy

At some indeterminate time then, the world will start getting lazy, and this will pave the way for the great apostasy and the antichrist, where there will be the incomprehensible persecution , the conversion of the Jews, the great tribulation, and the second coming.

*Disclaimer: from here on out, I am not longer referencing the article but starting my ideas, thnx.

This final period of horror and darkness, can be likened to the phase of martyrdom apocalyptically. Then of course the second coming begins quote unquote the eschaton beyond history, and this of course is like when the saint dies; he passes into quote unquote the next age, or heaven and eternity, just as at the second coming, we will have the Resurrection, the public judgment, and the new world of love that will never end.

// Looking at the bigger picture of the trumpets, the seals, and the vials

Now, I would like to return to the trumpet discourse of a while back and also a larger view of which includes the seals and vials around it. Long story short, the film sees each set of sevens, and the letters, (except the vials which are presumably yet to come in their sequel) as describing the entire course of Church history, at least to what they call the Parousia, unto themselves each. I suppose that might be true of the letters, also acceptable as an approach of its own.

However, we should note the following: The quantitative, fractional harms increase with the sets of sevens. What do we mean? It means that they go from ¼ to 1/3 to complete.

More specifically, in the seals, only ¼ of the earth and such is afflicted. In the trumpets, in several places, 1/3 is afflicted. And in most of the vials, they afflict the totality of things, or 1.

Here, then, I suggest an additional layer of meaning to these three sets as a progression of Church history, and not necessarily all of Church hisortry in each, There are, of course, intermissions in the book which add multi-dimensionality which I think the aurthors of the film do and will recongize.

// The Church walks the Way of the Saint Historically

Now, we can ask, what would this process or “progression" be? Well, why not the progression of WAYS of the SAINT lived out apocalyptically, or, that is HISTORICALLY in a spritual sense for the Church!

This can make sense because the Church is likened to symbolic individuals in Scripture. Two large examples suffice: St Paul likens the Church to the Body of Christ. Secondly, in Apocalypse intermission, the Woman of Apocalypse 12 is also the Church in one layer of meaning by common theology.

The overall breakdown of this process can be seen here, in one article of prelude to my hoped for book in the horizon: The Way of the Saint for the Peoples of God. For the record, here is an excerpt:

We can similarly argue that a major Society of Holy Ones under a Divine Covenant would likewise follow such spiritual stages relative to the sinful world around them, as follows.

Hence, just as the flesh rebels against the incoming spirit of the individual holy one and stings the saint who must resist it with pain, so the outside world feels threatened by the infusing Spirit of God’s Holy People and stings them by oppression and persecution. In the case of the Prefiguring Nation, it will be a single predominant nation that oppresses them. In the case of the Universal Society of Incarnate One, it will be the universal collection of nations around them.

The People are delivered into the Illuminative way, the Prefiguring Ones, into their literal nation of bounty, the New People of Incarnate One, into a spiritual kingdom, spiritual freedom.

Then the Holy Societies contemplate and grow in the understanding of the Divine Truths, the mysteries; the People of Prefiguring, through their Prophets, the People of New, through the development of doctrine by the Teaching Office of the Church amongst the nations.

Punctuated desolations assault the Holy Ones who ponder the mysteries, culminating in an age of unfaithfulness, the dark night of the soul. In the case of the Old, the majority of the Prefiguring nation resists the prophets, and in the case of the New, the majority of the general nations that had received the Divine Revelation reject the teaching office of Incarnate One’s True Society.

Then, the vindication: the consequences of sin and lack of faith fall upon the unfaithful. The faith is restored, the People and their surroundings walk in peace and love, the unitive way. In the Prefiguring case, the People are restored to their literalland, in the case of the New Covenant, the world is restored to the spiritual land, the Church.

Finally, just as the flesh stings the saint a final time, so the world around the holy ones stings them in a concluding episode, martyrdom. In the case of the People of Old, a manifestation of persecution, as in Maccabees, in the New Covenant, a similar persecution, NT Antichrist.

Then a new age is crossed, the Holy Incarnate One comes: after the Way of Old, the FIRST Coming, after the Way of the New, the SECOND Coming!

Summary of the Ages of Any Fallen World that is to Receive an Incarnation

Early Fall of Man, Two Greater Ages:

I. Anti-Baptism

The Fall and Wickedness of Noah's day
The Flood, an Apocalyptic Baptism

II. Anti-Marriage

Tower of Babel, Blasphemous Pursuit of Materialistic Grandeur
Confounding tongues, Marriage to Prefiguring People (Abraham)

The Three Greater Ages of the Prefiguring Covenant:

III. The Purgative Way:

Dark Night of the Senses: Oppression by glory-seeking pagan power (Egypt)

IV. The Illuminative Way:

Exodus and Preaching of Prophets, development of OT doctrine on the Law
Dark night of soul, intermediate Jewish apostasy from Old Law

V. The Unitive Way:

Exile, Vindication of Prophets, Repentance of Jews, Restoration to Holy Land, Restoration of faithfulness to OT Covenant
Martyrdom: The Crisis of OT Antichrist and final Jewish apostasy (Maccabees)

******* First Coming of Incarnate One ***************

The Three Greater Ages of New Covenant:

VI. The Purgative Way:

Dark Night of the Senses: Persecution by glory-seeking pagan power (Pagan Rome)

VII. The Illuminative Way:

The Development of Church Doctrine
Dark night of soul: intermediate apostasy from New Law [the modern era of roughly 20th century to present]

VIII. Unitive Way

Minor Chastisement, Vindicating Church, Restoration of Christian Unity and Catholic Christendom, Age of Peace [all these presumably future, but rather imminent according to Fatima and many approved Private Revelations]
Martyrdom: Great Apostasy, NT Antichrist, Great Persecution and Tribulation

******* Second Coming of Incarnate One ***************

From these concepts, the trumpets are clearly kind of like the illuminative way of the Church apocalyptically , expanding from just after pagan Rome, or the dark night of the senses historically , all the way into the apostasy that we now have, the dark night of the soul.

 
// The 144,000

In this personal view which I have, the 144,000 are those who are protected from succumbing to spiritual error, or falsehoods, in the mind. By this, it is meant that the Seal of God covers the forehead, behind which lies the mind, or intellect of soul. The protection of these special souls, then, is spiritual, and protects, again, their intellects by the reality that, if they remain attentive and docile to the teachings of the Church, they will at least always have the true doctrines of Christ, and never believe falsehoods, since, again, the Church is infallible in her teachings, promised by Our Divine Savior never to fall into heresies, schisms, infidelitites, and apostasies, and the like.

// The protection from and harm of the trumpets

The trumpets then symbolize great periods of spiritual attack while the Catholic Church trumpet blasts the great sources of Truth down through the ages of doctrinal development, from Constantine to our current godless age today, inclusive. The 144,000 are not harmed by the trumpets because they listen to the church who trumpet blasts the teachings and the beauty of the sources. But those who resist the teachings of the trumpet blasts befall the effects of them, which are symbolized spiritually by the calamities of the trumpets, which again span apocalypse 7 to effectively apocalypse 11 in the bigger picture.

In this view, here are the 7 trumpets that make very good sense but which involve a lot of theology behind them, which we will cover momentarily.

 
// The trumpets listed in conjecture theology

1. The initial trinitarian and christological heresies before Islam
2. Islam, the supreme anti-trinitarian and antichristological heresy
3. The great schism
4. The great moral scandal and decline of the church hierarchy prior to the Protestant rebellion
5. The Protestant rebellion
6. The great supernatural death of the world, where organized religion is radically rejected and only reason and the natural order is preserved, such as, enlightenment, deism rationalism masonry and the countless ideologies and philosophies that try to understand the meaning of life and human problems without religion and only with flawed natural reason.
7. The modern minor secular apostasy, where the world doesn’t even listen to reason but is completely dark, no truth no repentance materialism

// The logical and theological trajectory of the trumpets

Part of this theology follows in logical trajectory which I will include here:

 
// Five great sources of Catholic truth theologically ordered

There is a sense in which there are five great sources of Catholic truth, which are organized like a pyramid. As you ascsend the pyramid from the bottom, the height increases but the width decreases.

// The theological nature of the pyramid of the sources

If we let height symbolize the degree of truth that you can get from the source by itself, and if you let width symbolize the degree of evidence for the source as a legitimate source of Truth, then the structure of the pyramid completely vindicates the sources of Catholic truth from top to bottom and in the trajectory that the devil has attacked the church in this illuminative way process.

// The five sources of the pyramid

Here are the five sources of Truth alone which contain everything that the Catholic Church has to give us in doctrine.

1. God himself and his mysteries as Trinity and incarnation
2. The supreme apostolic successor, or Peter
3. The general apostolic successors and the sacred, oral  tradition which they guard
4. The written tradition, or scripture
5. Reason , or unaided natural philosophy 

// The theological inverse proportional relationship of the sources: the degree of Truth versus evidence for legitimacy

Let us show that if we start from the bottom and work up, the truth that we get from the sources by themselves is greater than all before it, but the evidence to support the source of Truth as legitimate gets less.

1.  Reason is the least amount of truth because it mainly only gives you monotheism and natural law in its basic form. But reason is the most evident source of Truth since every human being that is normal has reason. No man can claim if he is normal that he cannot think about spiritual questions like what is the maker of all things where do I come from why am I here and where should I be going? As the proverb says, the fool has said in his heart there is no God.
2. Scripture has much much much more truth than reason because it is one of the greatest forms of divine revelation. The marvelous epic stories of the history of God’s salvation, commentary of the God man’s meaning of our lives Saint Paul’s commentary on Christ and what the gospel really means in his fullest implications etc etc. no savage or pagan who has never been reached by the gospel knows about scripture so it is less evident than reason, which as we just saw is nevertheless evident to every normal Man.
   

   But by itself, scripture is a can of worms relative to all forms of Revelation above it, since heretics  have had scripture or most of it for centuries, but the heretical communities keep confounding and mutating like the cells of the human body because without the guidance of the church and the magisterium, their private experiences and selfishness and or ignorance etc etc ad infinitum confuses the meaning of scripture.

   Hence out of all forms of divine revelation, the scriptures are the least reliable when taken by themselves.

3. Next is bishops and tradition, from the writings of the fathers, scripture is mentioned unfathomably more than are quotes that talk about the authority of apostolic succession and tradition. Therefore the evidence for bishops and tradition are much less than evidence for the veracity of scripture by themselves. And yet, if we did not have scripture, we could still have the fullness of truth because the bishops and their sacred tradition in fact preserve all of the teachings of Christ without the new testament, and this is seen through the fact that for several decades before even a letter of the New testament was written, the Christian community survived on the apostolic teachings handed on orally to the bishops.

   But also the bishops and their apostolic tradition are far more reliable by themselves than the scriptures because the bishops have been given the explicit understanding of the scriptures so that they are not misinterpreted in general, and it is for this reason that the Orthodox are far more stable than the heretical sects, because they too have bishops and tradition in validity ; so that if you tell a heretic that he must believe this or that doctrine, he will he will say where is that in the Bible, but if you ask the same questions to an Orthodox, he will say where is that in tradition!

4. Next in line is the petrine office or the supreme mediating successor of the  apostles.

   If it is true that testimony from the fathers is very little in their writings compared to scripture quotes, how much more less is the testimony from the fathers about the supreme authority of Peter, then merely just all apostolic succession and tradition. And yet, with Peter on Earth the buck stops with him.

   As Vatican I testified, Peter in his dogmatic declarations even apart from all bishops is infallible when he speaks ex cathedra , and he has the authority to settle all doctrinal disputes of his own volition because of his power and authority. The petrine office is while being the least evident form of mediating Revelation on Earth is nevertheless the greatest earthly source of mediated Truth for the people of God.

5.  But finally there is God himself , who is the ultimate source of truth and Who is no longer here with us in a revelatory sense, but he has left us with dogmas concerning the ineffable mysteries of the incarnation and trinity, and the catechism testifies that it is these teachings are the foundational of all Christian and Catholic religion.

   The greatest source of Truth by itself, and yet if we were to try to work these mysteries out without the aid of the magisterium over the first great centuries of the church after pagan Rome, the process would all be but impossible without this guidance by the holy Spirit since It is these mysteries that are the most elusive in the unfathomable wisdom of God that he has given us.

// The devil's process of attack follows the pyramid perfectly

But now, if we simply follow this process backward , the devil has taken pot shots from top to bottom until we have today, which is no reason, which means no faith, no repentance, and materialism.

This then explains most of the theology of the trumpets and concludes our discourse. In the next installment, we will examine the details of some of the trumpets which we have not done already and explain why the trumpets are seven in quantity even though there are only five sources.