Helicopters, the Roman-Jerusalem War, and Protestantism

and the Futility of Useless Interpretations of the Apocalypse

Neither the Fundmentalists nor the Liberals really understand how to interpret the Apocalypse. One extreme sees it as supernatural prophecies of the geopolitical temporal catastrophes toward the end of time, the other, because they deny any sense of God's knowing the future, reduce the book to depicting locally hard times for its immediate audience, which, like the hypocrites they seek to disembowel themselves from, still ends up being the same type of useless data that the right minded person seeks, only at the opposite spectrum of Church history.

Let us take two prominent examples, from the following verses, one from the fifth trumpet, the opening section of Apoc. 8, and one from the singular verse of the beast that delineates its kings, Apoc. 17:9-11, to illustrate these futilities.

Let us take the first section, the first half of Apocalypse 8. Now, in this section, scary creatures are released that torture those without the Seal of God for five months.

Now, the right minded hypocrites, again, are looking at the very end of the world, and so they see it as a prophecy of a particular temporal calamity. Building on one of their original heroes, Hal Lindsay, they tend to see the creatures described by St. John as helicopters, in that St. John was given a vision of a particular calamity of the end in its literal essence (with the modern machinery) and is hence attempting to describe what he sees given his first century experience.

Let us first show the incredible folly of these right minded persons. First of all, we DO know that at the end of the world, there shall be horrors that cause people to die of fright.

But what the right minded person does not understand is that the only thing that matters about the end of the world's calamities is that they are the consequence of humanity's FALL away from the love of God. For, once men no longer care about God and His Truth, and seek only to find their happiness from this world, rather than the eternal marriage to come, it is only a matter of time before the human creatures' selfish tendencies to fulfill themselves merely from the things of this world, that they shall conflict amongst themselves.

Such is the imagery of Armaggeddon: for if the same Apostle that saw the apocalypse also wrote, in one of his letters, "How can you say you love God, whom you have not seen, if you do not love your brother, whom you have seen?", it actually goes both ways, for, in the first case, if you fail to love your brother, it is in fact because you have already turned away from God. So that, hence, if men have not peace with God, who is worthy of all love and worship, who is Himself utter perfection, with no darkness or sin, how much more impossible shall it be for man to love his fellow men, who are sinners.

For this reason, the right minded hypocrite is like an accountant rather than a mathematician. Which is to say, the Mathematician understands the law we have seen: Once humanity turns irrevocably and fully away from God, sparing a remnant (a small portion of the Gentiles, and the fuller number of Jews), the collapse of the social order and the supreme war of man against himself is the inevitable fruit.

But beyond this, the figurative accountants of the end of the world shall indeed see how it all maps out in its actuality of geopolitical permutations, and yet, the wise one understands that whatever such permutations of the world war of the end are, they are themselves merely arbitrary . For no matter what innumerable possibilities may arise at that time, the result will be the same: humanity comes to the brink of its own destruction precisely because they no longer wish to seek the God above and His will, but only, in the ultimate selfishness and pride of human history, to be satisfied merely with superficialities, thereby descending into all the cardinal sins that, if carried unto their completion, definitively end the world.

Which is another way of saying that the Decalogue is really a restraint from the end of the world, in that, to the degree that humanity seeks help and Revelation from God to live the principles of the Decalogue, there can be peace, and to the degree that they do not, terrible things, in their associated degree, come upon the world, based on the degree of error and sin, which is also not to mention that materialistic developments and power only serve to amplify these consequences.

So that, as it were, since the scientific development of the world shall be at its peak in the very end, so the materialistic power that stems from this shall serve as the means to amplify the fallen nature into apocalyptic levels of horror, thus undoing the existence of the human race, saving that God shall intervene before the total exinction, by the words of Our Divine Savior Himself, "but for the sake of the elect, those days shall be shortened. Else, no living thing shall survive."

Therefore, if we return to the foolish ones of the extreme Protestant right, we can see that whatever horrors come upon the world, it shall certainly exceed a mere attack of helicopters for five months. For, first of all, why should we be informed of the five months? Would the history of the world be drastically disrupted in the bigger plan had the helipocters attacked for merely THREE months, or, for that matter, TWENTY THREE months?

And even for that matter, what about all other calamities that shall afflict various persons for different portions of time? Which sort of calls us to mind that, what need have we of knowing ANY of the temporal details of the end, in terms of specific calamities and time frames?

And so, the futility of the right has been seen.

But so that the liberal is not to be vindicated, how is he any better? For, they simply apply the five months to the duration of the war in the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Now, admittedly, it is certainly more suitable and believable. BUT, if this is the ONLY primary intended meaning that shall ever be given, which the extreme liberal believes, is it not the same futile uselessness as the right minded hypocrites?

Why? Well, for one, there is first of all the reality that the measurement of time in terms of units is completely arbitrary.

For the text could just as soon have read 150 days instead of 5 months. And if we want to get nerdy, we could say, it lasted 24 X 150 hours, or 60 X 24 X 150 minutes, and so forth. And what really is the fruit?

For, why would God give us a Biblical text that tells us data that in the end is not really usefull for the theology of salvaiton history?

Let me put it to you this way: had the war in Jerusalem lasted three months or 23 months, as in our above example, would this drastically alter the course of salvation history? Which is to say, in ANY history God could predestine, will such minor, and clearly merely ARBITRARY, details somehow disembowel the larger plan of God, as in the movie Back to the Future?

What then is the solution?

The solution comes from a layer of meaning that is largely abandoned in the Catholic Church today, namely, spiritual historicism. Now, we do not mean that the Church has definitively interpreted hardly anything of the apocalypse. They haven't. It is largely left open to questioning. But, for the time being, should we not at least eliminate layers of meaning that are relatively useless toward the THEOLOGICAL meaning of Salvation history?

Toward that end, certain Catholic scholarship of earlier eras has suggested that the trumpets are ages that are part of the ages of the Church, and that, in particular, the fifth trumpet could be Protestantism.

For the sake of argument, there is clearly no such amount of space and time at this juncture to give the support that this is correct in a fuller sense [which is to say, why would Protestantism be the FIFTH trumpet, and not a different one], but we CAN at least observe that such methods are APPROACHING a more wise and meaningful layer of meaning.

And what do we mean? We mean that whereas the fall of Jerusalem took five months to finish, and that, PERHAPS, at the end of the world, machinery that bears some characteristics to the frightening creatures of the fifth trumpet may indeed torture mostly wicked men ( and who knows, maybe even for literally five months), nevertheless, does not Christian division , which Protestantism brought to a terrible climax in Church history, have much more importance, in fact, INTRINSIC importance, in God's Plan to bring His Son into the world, than these other methods?

For whereas I have never heard of Jesus foretelling how LONG it would take for Jerusalem to fall, nor foretelling helicopters, did not the Christ pray at considerable length in the first Eucharistic prayer for the unity of His disciples (John 17)?

And is this not common sense. To use an analogy, if a movement of persons seeking to spread a Message is utterly contradicted and confounded amongst themselves, shall not the outer world's response be to grow disillusioned with the message and eventually to reject it outright?

And so it is that in EVERY single Mass in the world, nine times out of ten, at least some EXPLICIT or IMPLICIT prayer is made that the unity of the Church might expand (whereas, there are no mentions of helicopters, or the specific duration of the Roman-Jewish war), which, in one way or another, is the expression of the desire of Christ's True Church to gather into one bossom back home the various Churches and myriads of communities that stand apart from her for various reasons, the bulk of which are related to God's doctrine.

Which brings us back to what really matters: to the degree that humanity seeks to live the Decalogue, there shall be peace, and to the degree they do not, there shall be problems.

But alas, is not the Decalogue now seen in its fullest sense only in the TOTALITY of God's Revelation and grace offered, the fullness of which resides EXCLUSIVELY in the Catholic Church? Which is to say, shall we not expand our thesis, that the real, more grave problems of the world can only be reduced to the extent that humanity is open to the FULLNESS of all truth and grace in the CATHOLIC Church, so that, by way of IMPLICATION, to the degree that humanity resists the teachings and grace of the Church, there shall be problems?

From this, we see that if God were to explain to us the meaning of His Plan and its attending stages, the original Catholic approach to the Apocalypse, the questions we need to ask at any point in Church history (and derivatively even the OT times) are, To what degree does a society in relation to God's People accept His truth and grace?

These are the underlying conditions that drive history in the bigger picture, and not how many days the Jews suffered under Rome, or how long helicopters will torture a certain group of persons in the end times.

Toward that end, we see the real ages for what they are:

The initial heresies that attacked the Trinity and Incarnation (300-600)
Islam (600-)
The Great Schism (1000-)
Protestantism (1500-)
Enlightenment (1700-)
Secular Apostasy (1950 - present, roughly)

As for the five months, it is worth noting that Protestantism deprived its Christian victims of FIVE sacraments, sacraments that largely relieve the Christian of the "torture of scrupulosity," namely:

1. Confession (God can forgive after Baptism and I can KNOW I am forgiven when I leave the priest)

2. Confirmation (God predestines no one to hell, but desires to strengthen all His children for the courage to practice as an adult and attain eternal life)

3. Eucharist (God has formed only one Church, and its center is the meal of God. Behold, I know belong to the true Church if I am Catholic)

4. Holy Orders (God does not desire you to have search myriads of communities and only HOPE you have found the right one. Behold, God has given us Bishops and priests, who are GUARANTEED to preserve the true doctrines of Christ, unstained by error)

5. Annointing of the Sick (God will never tell you in this life that you are damned and leave you in the remnant of life to sulk in futile waiting for hell. God desires all men to be given healing ointment in the evening of life as His resolve to prepare the soul for forgiveness and eternal bliss.)

As for the beast's delineation verse, we see that St. John wrote that five kings of the beast had fallen in St. John's time, that one existed then, and that one had yet to come (and even an eighth somehow remained).

For fundamentalists, they shall sometimes seek these to be literal individual men of the end, or spread out. But again, I ask, are not individual antichrist's in much greater number than merely seven?

Or shall we fish seven or eight literal men from the times of the end, or from the beginning and say, here is a meaning?

Or, in the way of the liberal, who says these are a certain, as of yet unagreed upon, Roman Emperors of the first century, what shall we say? Does it really matter how many Roman persecuters there were in the First Century, and their chronology in relation to St. John's writing? For in the end, are not all of the Roman Emperors bearing similar characteristics, namely, self deification and ruthless persecution of the Church?

But what should it matter, if three roman emperors with longer durations of reign preceded St. John's immediate time than five? Or for that matter, what if there had been 23 shorter reigns? Would this somehow alter the bigger picture of God's Plan?

For what really is important for us to know about pagan Rome, except that it bore the general spirit of antichrist, the supreme pagan civilazation, boasting its grandure blasphemously before God, like Egypt and Babylon and Greece, and oppressing and wounding the People of God?

This leads, again, to spiritual historicism. If we dig into the Early Fathers, we see that St. Hypollytus made a secondary suggestion that the seven kings of the beast are ages of sin.

Now, I suppose a person would retort, how are seven ages any different from seven Emperors? Well, from a cursory analysis, perhaps none. On the other hand, if one follows my previous writings, which are based on already existing Catholic doctrine, we see that there is, most likely, a PROFOUND PURPOSE and MEANING to the PROCESS of God's Redemption of the world, a world that is GRADUALLY and MEANINGFULLY fed truth and grace to prepare for the fullness of truth, the Incarnate One.

For have we not in fact seen that the ages of the Old Covenant, first the preeminent ones of Flood and Babel and then the Jewish Covenant, were necessary THEOLOGICALLY, to prepare for God's offering of the Incarnate Son to ALL of humanity? And that, as we have seen, there is also a true SPIRITUAL process to complete Salvation history, that the Christ may APPLY the fruits of His Redemption to humanity through His CHURCH, and its stages of development relative to the world.

And all this would imply that if the heads of the beast, in a common sense fashion, veil the mystery of the darknesses that arise across ALL of Salvation history and their theology and purpose, we have much more suitable meaning than a collection of first century Roman Emperors or an arbitrary selection of evil rulers toward the end of time.

From these things, we have seen that the Catholic Church should truly seek to revive in these turbulent times the more meaningful approach of looking at the broader spiritual theology of the ages of the world and of the Church, rather than looking for specific temporal data that, whether in the beginning or ending of Church history, is futilely useless in understanding God's bigger Plan to heal the world of sin and bring them into the fullness of light.