Newton : A Very Short Introduction by Iliffe Rob

Author:Iliffe, Rob. [Rob., Iliffe,]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780199298037
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

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9. The Whore of Babylon, according to Albrecht Dürer, 1498 Beast. The latter makes war on and slaughters saints and martyrs, while the kings of the world fornicate with and worship the Whore. According to Newton, the sixth trumpet (and for him, the sixth vial) referred to a period, the Great Tribulation, when the apostasy 78

reaches its peak. The gospel is preached to every nation and the surviving remnant of the godly give thanks to God. The last trumpet and vial describe the arrival of many people from different nations bearing palms; the Lamb of God feeds them and sends them to living waters, while God wipes tears from their eyes. The Lamb is reunited with his wife to be, an image conventionally understood to be the reunion of Christ with the saints and martyrs. Prophecy as history

Newton and his radical Protestant contemporaries were steeped in these and other prophetic images and for such individuals they made sense in their own right. However, for their full explication, they still needed to be ‘applied’ to historical events. Newton followed his definitions with an analysis of the history of the church O that was alternatively expressed in the form of ‘propositions’ or ne of G

‘positions’, in a form reminiscent of a mathematical treatise. The od’s c

fifth seal, for example, referred to the period when the Emperor Diocletian persecuted and slaughtered Christians at the start of the hosen fe 4th century ce. The advent of Emperor Constantine ushered in the w

following seal, a period when Christianity became the state religion by dint (Newton believed) of diluting it to appeal to pagans. On Constantine’s death in 337 the empire was split into East and West, the appearance of the latter (according to Newton) being the rising of the ten-horned Beast from the Sea.

Constantine’s sons, who became leaders of these domains, differed in their religious views; one, Constans, was pro-trinitarian or as Newton termed it ‘Homoüsian’, while his brother (Constantius II) supported the Arian position, named after the priest Arius who had defended the lesser status of Christ with respect to God. By 364 the religion of the Beast was openly worshipped in the form of idols such as ‘dead men’s bones & other reliques of martyrs’ and along with the worship of ghosts this soon became universal, Newton noted, ‘as it hath continued ever since’. Now the devil was let loose on Earth to play what Newton called ‘his cunning game’, seducing 79

ignorant people by means of false or diabolical miracles. In Newton’s understanding of events, this was represented by the triumph of trinitarian Roman Catholicism and the persecution of godly Arians.

The Great Apostasy, accomplished by making Athanasian trinitarianism the official religion across the Roman Empire in 380, was described by the opening of the seventh seal. For Newton, the apostates, who were to overrun the visible church and persecute the godly, were to be Christians, albeit of a ‘heathenish’ and perverted sort; some might quibble with the idea that they were outwardly of

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