Theopedia

Historicism

Definition

Historicism reads apocalyptic prophecy, especially the seals, trumpets, and bowls of the Book of Revelation and the visions of Daniel, as a continuous, sequential history of the church from the apostles to Christ’s return, rather than events clustered near the first century, the second coming, or recurring patterns with no fixed historical referent. Its main tool is the day-year principle, reading a symbolic “day” as a literal year, drawn chiefly from Daniel’s seventy weeks and Ezekiel’s day-for-year sign-act (Ezek. 4:4-8).1 It identifies the papacy with the Antichrist of Daniel, Paul, and John, a reading the Reformers held “with one voice.”2

Confessional Contrast

Which method to use for reading apocalyptic prophecy is a question the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession does not settle. Its chapter “Of the Church” does name the papacy directly as “that Antichrist, that Man of sin, and Son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ,”3 the same conclusion historicism reaches, and states it in historicist terms: an ongoing institution, not a single future individual. But the confession stops there. It does not require reading the rest of Revelation’s seals, trumpets, and bowls as a continuous, dated sequence of church history, and it says nothing about the day-year principle or any other interpretive method as such. The clause is the confession’s nearest adjacent commitment to historicism, not an endorsement of the whole hermeneutical school.

Arguments

Historicism’s textual starting point is the day-year principle. Ezekiel is commanded to lie on his side for a fixed number of days, each representing a year of Israel’s and Judah’s iniquity (Ezek. 4:4-8), and Elijah Porter Barrows calls this “symbolical transaction” a case where “a day is expressly put as the symbol of a year.”1 Barrows treats Daniel’s seventy weeks (Dan. 9:24-27) as “one of the most certain examples” of the same principle, and argues that consistency extends it to Daniel’s “time and times and dividing of time” (Dan. 7:25) and Revelation’s “forty and two months” (Rev. 11:2; 13:5) and “thousand two hundred and threescore days” (Rev. 11:3; 12:6).1

Historicists also read Revelation’s own structure as marking a real historical sequence rather than a repeating symbol. Barrows notes that, among the book’s numerical patterns, “the succession of events is distinctly marked” specifically in the seven seals, the seven trumpets, and the seven bowls.4 Edward Bishop Elliott’s Horae Apocalypticae, which Augustus Hopkins Strong calls “the most learned and exhaustive” statement of the school, applies the day-year principle to Daniel 7:25’s “time, times, and half a time” to reach 1,260 years, reading that period as the temporal power of the papacy: from either AD 531 (Justinian’s edict) or AD 606 (Phocas’s acknowledgment of Roman primacy) to 1,260 years later, AD 1791 or AD 1866.5

Historical Development

The Reformation

Historicism became the near-universal Protestant reading of Revelation during the Reformation. Herman Bavinck dates the identification of Rome as apocalyptic Babylon and the pope as Antichrist to this period, part of a wider Reformation-era resurgence of speculation about the last things.6 Charles Hodge states the consensus more strongly still: “the Reformers with one voice pronounced the same judgment,” holding up the papacy as the antichristian power predicted by Daniel, Paul, and John.2 Calvin and Gill each defended the identification at length in their own writing.

Seventeenth through nineteenth centuries

Strong names several exponents of the view across the following three centuries: Isaac Newton, Campegius Vitringa, Johann Albrecht Bengel, Edward Bishop Elliott, William Kelly, and John Cumming as holding the “continuous” reading, with Ernst Hengstenberg and Henry Alford defending a synchronological variant in which the seals, trumpets, and bowls “each succeeding set go[es] over the same ground and exhibit[s] it in some special aspect” rather than following one another in strict sequence.5 Strong calls Elliott’s four-volume Horae Apocalypticae (1844) “the most learned and exhaustive” statement of the school, working out a detailed, dated scheme for the whole of Revelation’s symbolism.5

Eclipse

Strong, writing in the early twentieth century, treats the failure of Elliott’s own scheme as demonstrating a structural weakness in date-driven prophetic interpretation generally, not merely an error specific to Elliott: Elliott had assumed Revelation was written under Domitian rather than Nero, an error Strong says renders his calculated starting point, and so his whole scheme, unreliable.7

Opposing Views

Three other schools divide the interpretation of Revelation. Augustus Hopkins Strong names two directly, alongside historicism (which he calls the “Continuous” view): the Preterist reading (Hugo Grotius, Moses Stuart), which finds most of the book’s prophecy “mainly fulfilled in the age immediately succeeding the time of the apostles,” and the Futurist reading (Samuel Roffey Maitland, James Henthorn Todd), which places the book’s events “immediately preceding and following the coming of the Lord.”5 Preterism develops the first of these; futurism, closely associated with dispensationalism, develops the second. A fourth school, idealism, reads Revelation’s symbols as recurring patterns of conflict between Christ and evil, true in every age without designating one specific historical fulfillment; Strong’s own taxonomy does not name it.

Objections and Responses

Elliott’s own dated scheme failed: its proposed end points came and went without the expected consummation. Strong grounds this in a specific error rather than dismissing the method outright: Elliott wrongly dated Revelation’s composition to Domitian’s reign instead of Nero’s, which threw off his starting point and, with it, the rest of his calculation.7 But Strong draws a broader conclusion from the failure than a single correction would warrant, treating it as “a practical demonstration that a clear understanding of the meaning of prophecy is, before the event, impossible.”7

The day-year principle rests on only a few explicit textual examples and is then extended, by inference, to every other symbolic time-period in Daniel and Revelation. Even Barrows, who states the principle’s textual basis most fully, extends it only tentatively beyond Ezekiel’s sign-act and Daniel’s seventy weeks (“in all probability”), and notes that “hitherto history has not verified the results as to time which the students of these prophecies have obtained.”1

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 35, 565-566. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Charles Hodge, “Second Advent,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 787-834. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 4. ↩

  4. Barrows, chap. 38, 611. ↩

  5. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1909), 1009. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 24, “The Return of Christ.” ↩

  7. Strong, 1009-1010. ↩ ↩2 ↩3