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The Anti-Preterist Historicism of John Calvin
and the Westminster Standards
(2000)
Finally Jesus then
stated: "Truly, I tell you this generation shall not pass, till all
these things be fulfilled." Matthew 24:34. It is true that "within
fifty years, the city was destroyed and the temple was rased" Calvin
concedes to preterism. But then he also comments, historicistically,
that "the same evils were perpetrated in uninterrupted succession
for many ages afterwards.... The apostles endured the same things
which we see in the present day [A.D. 1555-63]. And yet, it was not
the design of Christ to promise to His followers that their
calamities would be terminated within a short time. For then, He
would have contradicted Himself having previously warned them that
the end was not yet!"
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The Olivet Discourse and the
Destruction of Jerusalem in Prophecy
(PDF)
"For the wrath had come upon them, to the uttermost, at the end of the
63-70 A.D. Seven Years' 'Great Tribulation.' This was by far quite
the greatest time of trouble or tribulation the World had ever seen, or
ever would see. Not only in Judea, but also internationally."
"Finally Jesus then stated: "Truly, I tell you this generation shall not
pass, till all these things be fulfilled." Matthew 24:34. It is true
that "within fifty years, the city was destroyed and the temple was
rased" Calvin concedes to preterism. But then he also comments,
historicistically, that "the same evils were perpetrated in
uninterrupted succession for many ages afterwards.... The apostles
endured the same things which we see in the present day [A.D. 1555-63].
And yet, it was not the design of Christ to promise to His followers
that their calamities would be terminated within a short time. For then,
He would have contradicted Himself having previously warned them that
the end was not yet!"
In his comments on Christ's Olivet Discourse, Calvin
further discusses inter alia the fulfilment during the course of church
history of the 1335 day-years in Daniel 12:12. In Matthew 23:38 to
24:34, Christ predicted the destruction of the obsolescent Jewish temple
in A.D. 70 and, more importantly, the construction of the adolescent
Christian Church! Jesus told the first-century A.D.
Jerusalem Jews who opposed Him: "Lo, your house is left to you
desolate!" Matthew 23:38. Calvin comments that Christ here "threatens
the destruction of the temple, and the dissolution of the whole frame of
civil government" among those first-century apostates. More
importantly, the sixteenth-century genius of Geneva then immediately
adds: "It was therefore a dreadful vengeance of God that the place which
[He] Himself had so magnificently adorned, was not only forsaken by Him
and ordered to be razed to the foundation but consigned to the lowest
infamy, to the end of the world. Let the Romanists now go, and let them
proceed in opposition to the will of God to build their Tower of
Babylon!"
