Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
Jacques-Benigne Bossuet
(1627-1704) "Six-Seal Preterist" | Canon of Metz | Bishop of Meaux | Tutor for son of Louis XIV | "Divine Right of Kings" Champion
| L'Apocalypse
Avec Une Explication
(1690)
Not to be confused
with Wilhelm Bousset
(1865 - 1920) |
"The Eagle of Meaux" |
Continuity of Religion
| Preterist Eschatology in the 16th through 18th Centuries | Biography | Encyclopedia
(On the
Significance of A.D.70)
"They have their book which they name Talmud, that is, doctrine, which they regard no less than the Scripture itself.. It is a collection of tracts and sentences of their doctors; and though the parts comprising that great work be not all of equal antiquity, the latest authors quoted in it lived in the earliest ages of the Church. There, amidst numberless irrelevant fables, which take their rise for the most part after the time of our Lord, we find some beautiful remains of the ancient traditions of the Jewish people, and proofs that might convince them. And first, it is certain from the admission of the Jews, that the Divine vengeance did never more terribly nor more manifestly declare itself than in their last desolation." (Continuity of Religion)
"Let us remember only what Jesus Christ had foretold them." (Continuity of Religion)
(On Luke 23:30)
"Fall upon us, hide us from the face of Him that is seated on the Throne,
and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great Day of their Wrath is come.
Who shall be able to withstand it? The words are borrowed from Osee, x.
8, and Our Lord applies them to the desolation visited upon the Jews to
avenge upon them His Passion." (Luke xxiii. 30. Bossuet, L'Apocalypse, vi.
16. )
(On
Daniel's Seventieth
Week)
"In the fifteenth year of Tiberius, St. John Baptist appears: JESUS CHRIST
receives baptism from that divine harbinger: the eternal father acknowledges
his well-beloved son, by a voice from heaven : the Holy Ghost descends upon
the Saviour, under the harmless figure of a dove : the whole Trinity
manifests itself. There begins, with the Seventieth week of Daniel, the
preaching of JESUS CHRIST. This last week was the most important, and the
most noted.
Daniel had distinguished it from the rest, as the week, wherein the covenant
was to be confirmed, and in the middle of which; tile old sacrifices were to
lose their efficacy. We may call it the week of mysteries. In it JESUS
CHRIST establishes his mission and doctrine, by numberless miracles, and
afterwards by his death. This happened in the fourth year of his ministry,
which was also the fourth year of the last week of Daniel; and after this
manner is that great week found exactly interfered by the suffering of our
Saviour.
Thus the computation of the weeks
is easy to be made, or rather is done already. We have only to add to 453
years, which will be found from the 300th year of Rome, and 20th of
Artaxerxes, to the beginning of the vulgar era, the 30 years of that era
which we fee come down to the fifth year of Tiberius, and the baptism of our
Lord ; these two sums will make 483 years : of the seven years which yet
remain to complete 490, the fourth, which makes the middle one, is that in
which which Jefus Christ died : and all that Daniel prophesied, is visibly
contained within the term prescribed. There would even have been no
necessity for so much exactness, nor does any thing oblige us to take in so
strict a sense the middle marked by Daniel." (Universal History, pp.
114,115)
'On voit ici que St. Michel est le
defensur de l'Eglise, comme il l'etoit de la synagogue." (Exp. de l'Apoc)
   
     
(On Luis Alcasar)
"Le savant jésuite Louis d'Alcasar, qui a fait un grand commentaire sur
l'Apocalypse, où Grotius a pris beaucoup de ses idées, la fait voir
parfaitement accomplie jusqu'au xxe chapitre, et y trouve les deux témoins
sans parler d'Elie ni d'Enoch.
"XV. Qu'il peut y avoir plusieurs sens dans l'Ecriture,
et en particulier dans l'Apocalypse.
A cela il faut ajouter ce que dit le même Alcasar avec tous les théologiens,
qu'une interprétation même littérale de Y Apocalypse ou des autres
prophéties, peut très-bien compatir avec les autres.
De sorte que sans entrer en inquiétude des autorités qu'on oppose, la
réponse à tous ces passages, c'est premièrement qu'il faut savoir distinguer
les conjectures des Pères d'avec leurs dogmes, et leurs sentimens
paiticuliers d'avec leur consentement unanime : c'est qu'après qu'on aura
trouvé dans leur consentement universel ce qui doit passer pour constant, et
ce qu'ils auront donné pour dogme certain, on pourra le tenir pour tel par
la seule autorité de la tradition, sans qu'il soit toujours nécessaire de le
trouver dans saint Jean; c'est qu'enfin ce qu'on verra clairement qu'il y
faudra trouver, ne laissera pas d'y être caché en figure, sous un sens déjà
accompli et sous des événemens déjà passés.
Qui ne sait que la fécondité infinie de l'Ecriture n'est pas toujours
épuisée par un seul sens? Ignore-t-on que Jésus-Christ et son Eglise sont
prophétisés dans des endroits où il est clair que Salomon, qu'Ezéchias, que
Cyrus, que Zorobabel, que tant d'autres sont entendus à la lettre? C'est une
vérité qui n'est contestée ni par les catholiques, ni par les protestans.
Qui ne voit donc qu'il est très-possible de trouver un sens très-suivi et
très-littéral de l'Apocalypse parfaitement accompli dans le sac de Rome sous
Ala- ric, sans préjudice de tout autre sens qu'on trouvera devoir
s'accomplir à la fin des siècles? Ce n'est pas dans ce double sens que je
trouve la difficulté." (Oeuvres complètes, 378)
QUOTED BY BOSSUET
Josephus
"Save," said he, "the Holy City, save yourselves, save that Temple, the wonder of the world, which the Romans reverence, and which Titus is loath to destroy." (Joseph., The Jewish War, bk. 7, ch. 14, bk. 6, ch. 2)
Rabbi Johanan, Son of Zacai
"O Temple, Temple! what is it that moves thee, and why dost thou make thyself afraid?" (Treat. on the Feast of the Atonement)
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID
Alexander Brown
"Let us not forget that once in the Church's history it was the common belief that John's 1000 years were gone. Dorner bears witness that the Church up to Constantine understood by Antichrist chiefly the heathen state, and to some extent unbelieving Judaism (System iv.,390). Victorinus, a bishop martyred in 303, reckoned the 1000 years from the birth of Christ.
Augustine wrote his magnum opus 'the City of God' with a sort of dim perception of the identity of the Christian Church with the new Jerusalem. Indeed we know that the 1000 years were held to be running by the generations previous to that date, and so intense was their faith that the universal Church was in a ferment of excitement about and shortly after 1000 A.D. in expectation of the outbreak of Satanic influence. Wickliff, the reformer, believed that Satan bad been unbound at the end of the 1000 years, and was intensely active in his day. That this period in Church history is past, or now runs its course, has been the belief of a roll of eminent men too long to be chronicled on our pages of Augustine, Luther, Bossuet, Cocceius, Grotius, Hammond, Hengstenberg, Keil, Moses Stuart, Philippi, Maurice." (Alexander Brown, Great Day of the Lord, p. 216.)
Ron Cooke
"The praeterist view found no favour and was hardly so much as thought of in the time of primitive Christianity. Those who lived near the date of the book of Revelation itself had no idea that its groups of imagery were intended merely to describe things then passing, and to be in a few years completed. This view is said to have been first promulgated in anything like completeness by the Jesuit Alcasar, in his "Vestigatio Arcani Sensus in Apocalypsi" (1604). Very nearly, the same plan was adopted by Grotius. The next great name among this school of interpreters is that of Bossuet the great antagonist of Protestantism." (Unmitigated Twaddle)
Rand Winburn
"In 1688, Jesuit-educated and Preterist, Bishop Bossuet dropped a bombshell on Protestants by publishing his scathing indictment of Protestantism, The History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches. Bossuet's purpose is so doing was to show the lack of unity and succession of Protestant doctrines through the ages (which the Calvinists claimed), unlike the unity and apostolic doctrines of the Catholic Church, thus fulfilling the promise of Jesus in Matt. 16:18. Using the Protestant belief (that there have always been believers who have held to their anti-Catholic doctrines) against them, he proposes arguments proving the unorthodox Christianity of all the groups Protestants claimed as forefathers." (Paulicans)
What do YOU think ?
Send an email with your comments to
todd @ preteristarchive.com
Be sure to include the article name.
They will be posted shortly
upon receipt
| 
