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The prophecies in Daniel are one part of the Bible that Adventists love to interpret to their heart's content ... and to misinterpret. Daniel provides Adventism with a lot to fuel their anti-Catholic desires. And when you don't accept their interpretation of the prophecies, they often want an alternative interpretation.
That is poor logic ... in order to refute an error, one only needs to show why it is an error, and one doesn't necessarily need to provide a new theory to replace it. Most Christians who study Daniel can see that Adventism's theory is in error, but that doesn't mean they are sure what it means themselves.
To say, "Teaching X is in error, that much is clear, but feel free to develop your own understanding of the passage, because we don't specify what it means, although we do see the clear error in some interpretations." is quite acceptable. And this is what Adventists need to understand.
Hugo, an ex-Adventist, now Catholic, on the SDA2RC blog, goes into his own understanding of Daniel's prophecies, which he has placed on his Dies Domini website (see his blog post for the direct link to the PDF, but it can be found with a set of related articles here.) He also gives another link to a similar perspective. His views are what I find most logical, and in agreement with historical and biblical evidence. But the Catholic Church does not impose one interpretation of this - and most other - passages on us. For us, spiritual growth is more important than working out the details about the end of the world ... although that can be an exciting topic.
That is poor logic ... in order to refute an error, one only needs to show why it is an error, and one doesn't necessarily need to provide a new theory to replace it. Most Christians who study Daniel can see that Adventism's theory is in error, but that doesn't mean they are sure what it means themselves.
To say, "Teaching X is in error, that much is clear, but feel free to develop your own understanding of the passage, because we don't specify what it means, although we do see the clear error in some interpretations." is quite acceptable. And this is what Adventists need to understand.
Hugo, an ex-Adventist, now Catholic, on the SDA2RC blog, goes into his own understanding of Daniel's prophecies, which he has placed on his Dies Domini website (see his blog post for the direct link to the PDF, but it can be found with a set of related articles here.) He also gives another link to a similar perspective. His views are what I find most logical, and in agreement with historical and biblical evidence. But the Catholic Church does not impose one interpretation of this - and most other - passages on us. For us, spiritual growth is more important than working out the details about the end of the world ... although that can be an exciting topic.
, -- that kind of nonsense. It's just impossible that God would send St. John visions of "things that must shortly come to pass," but most the visions were really about things that wouldn't come to pass until centuries and centuries after the death of St. John. No, I would think that many if not most of those visions were about events that were about to happen in St. John's day -- not the return of Christ and the Last Judgment, of course, but those Beasts and such ought to have been understandable to the original audience of the Apocalypse, and there's just no way they ever would have even remotely suspected that the visions had to do with medieval Catholicism.
on December 17, 2006, 5:23 pm
Unfortunately the NAB footnotes also endorse the Maccabean dating of the Book of Daniel, insisting that Daniel's stories and prophecies are fictional. "Vaticinio ex eventu" I think is the Latin term for it -- history written in a way to deceive people into thinking it is a prophecy. I find it impossible to believe that the God of Truth would use deliberate falsehoods to get people to believe in prophecy. The unanimous consent of the Fathers is that Daniel's prophecies are real prophecies. The NAB editors don't have any problems with the Hellenistic theory of Daniel 2 and 7 because they don't believe Daniel's prophecies are real prophecies anyway. Therefore they expect Daniel's prophecies never to be fulfilled, and don't have a problem with the Book of Daniel's prophecies failing to match history.
Also, for what it's worth, I am pretty sure that most if not all of the Fathers who commented on Daniel's prophecies saw the fourth kingdom of iron, and the fourth beast with ten horns, as the Roman Empire, not the short-lived empire of Alexander that immediately was broken into numerous lesser kingdoms. I would be more comfortable with the Hellenistic interpretation of Dan. 2 and 7 if it had some patristic support.
I also diagree with his interpretation of the stone carved out without human hands that shatters the feet of the image and causes the destruction of the entire image and then grows to fill the entire earth. That stone is obviously Jesus and His Kingdom, the Catholic Church. But Jesus was born after the last of the successor states of Alexander's Empire had been swallowed up by the Roman Empire. There simply were no more Hellenistic kingdoms around by the time the Kingdom of God arrived. In addition, Christianity was instrumental in the dissolution of the pagan Roman Empire. Consequently I see no way to avoid the traditional patristic interpretation of the iron kingdom, the beast of ten horns, as the Roman Empire. That interpretation is supported by St. John's Revelation, in which we see a Beast and an Image, and the Beast has all the characteristics of the four kingdoms of Daniel 7. St. John identifies the Beast as the pagan Roman Empire. The Fathers clearly identified that Beast with Rome. Thus, it seems the Holy Spirit Himself intends us to see the fourth kingdom as pagan Rome, not the Hellenistic kingdoms.
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on December 17, 2006, 11:36 pm
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