By the middle of the sixteenth century all three of the major Protestant confessions had condemned millenarianism, according to Hotson, the “Lutherans in the Augsburg Confession of 1530, the English in the Forty-Two Articles of Religion of 1552, and the Reformed in the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566 – and for the remainder of the century little dissent from this was raised by serious Protestant Theologians.” Specifically the Augsburg and the Second Helvetic Confessions rejected millenarianism as the revival of Jewish doctrines inconsistent with Protestant Christianity. Article 17 of the Augsburg Confessions condemns those “who are now spreading certain Jewish opinions, that before the resurrection of the dead the godly shall take possession of the kingdom of the world, he ungodly being everywhere suppressed.” Likewise chapter 11 of the Second Helvetic Confession rejected any “Jewish dreams that there will be a golden age on earth before the Day of Judgment, and that the pious, having subdued all their godless enemies, will possess all the kingdoms of the earth.” This was a common accusation levied against millenarians, since the doctrine of a future literal kingdom of Christ resembled the Messianic reign anticipated in Jewish Eschatology. Moreover the Early Church chiliasts were seen as the primary instigators of this Jewish infection.
* Jeffrey K. Jue,
Heaven Upon Earth: Joseph Mede (1586-1638) and the Legacy of Millenarianism
[Ο Ουρανός επί Γης: Ο Joseph Mede (1586-1638) και η Κληρονομιά του Χιλιετισμού]
(International Archives of the History of Ideas),
Springer, 2006,
p./σ. 126.
Related: / Σχετικά:
* Joseph Mede, Clavis apocalyptica (1649)
* Joseph Mede, A translation of Mede's Clavis apocalyptica (by R.B. Cooper)
[English/Aγγλικά, PDF]
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