Re: Hey Guys.......I Think I've Finally Found the Antichrist - PART II

@ refreshed - My pleasure, and no, Alexander is most emphatically not a Preterist, at least not full-fat. Diet maybe. He defo believes in a future second advent, general resurrection & judgment, dissolution of the elements, new heavens & a new earth, etc.  - but obviously no millennium. That won't come as a great surprise to you.

Yeah, he occasionally gets carried away with the spiritual interpretation, but he's not alone or unique in his treament of Gomer don't forget. There is a long line of illustrious schoiars who have a similar take. Hengstenberg thinks she's real, and that's good enough for me.

Were you surprised that your Pastor was a Finalist?

Ha!, no, of course not. That was a 'joke', as if to say, 'well, what did ya expect?'

when we first started this debate you made it sound like the UK may be less for literal interpretation than the US is and I have just wondered about why there was a difference

We don't get carried away by the 'sensational' stuff so much - esp. all that 'taken away/left behind' rubbish. Saw the film recently with Nick Cage. Was laughing most of the way thru it, but I'm sure it was not intended as a comedy. Millennialism has its adherents here as well - just not as many as you have over there. I think it has a lot to do with our psyche. We're more sober-minded, even keeled, don't get carried away with superficially 'attractive' women - I mean doctrine, etc

I noticed that most, if not all your favorite commentators were Brits.

You might be surprised - most of my Finalist authors are US. But yeah, the rest of my library is predominantly Brit. I'm a Brit. after all - BBC to be a bit more precise. BBC? Yeah, = British Born Cypriot, 2nd generation. So now you know.

So is the main difference between a Finalist and a Literalist, just the prophecies?

Hmm........now there's a subject, innit? What a question. Too late in the night to go into any detail, so maybe just a few words for now. To simplify matters a little, let's assume that dispensationalism is out of the picture for now. It then boils down to the fundamental difference between the above-mentioned two 'schools,' What is that difference?

Let me throw that question back at you by asking you another. Did the jews of Jesus' day understand their own holy books? They adopted the 'literalist' interpretation, did they not? And what was the result of that hermeneutic? Well, they expected a messiah who would be a military conqueror, one who would vanquish their enemies - especially the Roman Empire.

They wanted their freedom from military conquest and subjugation, so that's the very least they expected their long-promised messiah to deliver. But the real icing on the cake would have been the subjugation of all their enemies too - nothing less than international hegemony, with them at the pinnacle of world power. No, this has nothing to do with the Protocols of Zion. This is what their messianic expectation amounted to, and it had a solid foundation in the literal interpretation of the OT kingdom prophecies.

So, congratulations refreshed - you're in excellent company. You and the jews of Jesus' day (and possibly the majority of orthodox jews today) now have something in common. You're both still waiting for the fulfilment of those prophecies in some future mythical millennium. Good luck with that.

OK, a bit tongue in cheek maybe, but I hope you get the point. Unfortunately, there's more truth in that summary than you might care to admit. Think about it, then tell me where my analysis is flawed.