Historicism

Apocalypse: The Historicist Interpretation

GLOSSARY: Amillennialism | Apocalyptic | Christian Zionism | Dispensationalism | Eschatology | Hermeneutics | Historicism | Idealism | Millennial Reign of Christ | Preterism | New Covenant Theology | Postmillennialism | Premillennialism | Pre-Tribulational Rapture | Reconstructionism | "Seventy Weeks" | Theo-Politics | Parousia | Universalism

F. F. Bruce
“No important contribution to exegesis of Revelation was made by [historicists], whether J. A. Bengel in Germany or Joseph Mede, Sir Isaac Newton, and William Whiston in England—eminent as these exegetes were in other fields of study. The book itself has suffered in its reputation from the extravagances of some of its interpreters, who have treated it as if it were a table of mathematical conundrums or a divinely inspired Old Moore’s Almanack.” (Revelation, The International Bible Commentary, ed. F. F. Bruce, H. L. Ellison, and G. C. D. Howley (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), 1595.)

Stanley J. Grentz
"Lying historically between the apparent preterism of the second-century fathers and the futurism of contemporary advocates is a third alternative -- the historicist approach -- that predominates after the reformation." (The Millennial Maze: Sorting Out Evangelical Options, p.145)

Samuel Lee (1850)
"'MY DEAR BROTHER HOPPER,-- . . . I think I said in my last that I should show what the principles of Mr Mede were, and what sort of reliance can be placed on them. I have finished my preface, and in a day or two shall send it to press. You will not be sorry to hear that I find my principles and the main of my results to accord exactly with those of the early Christian Church. So far as it judaized, Mr Mede and his school are with it.' " (Letters)

Merrill C. Tenney
"Perhaps even more devastating is Tenney’s observation: “The historicist view which attempts to interpret the Apocalypse by the development of the church in the last nineteen centuries, seldom if ever takes cognizance of the church outside Europe. It is concerned mainly with the period of the Middle Ages and the Reformation and has relatively little to say of developments after AD 1500." (“Revelation, Book of the,” in Zondervan Pictoral Encyclopedia of the Bible, ed. Merrill C. Tenney, vol. 5 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan 1975), 96.)

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