Antidote for Sensationalism
Unsure whether or not to attack Persia, King Croesus of Lydia asked the oracle at Delphi if the attack would succeed. The oracle replied that if he went to war, he would destroy a great empire. Encouraged by the oracle he invaded Persia. His armies were crushed. Croesus was captured and imprisoned. He had a messenger sent to Delphi with the question, “Why did you deceive me?” The oracle replied that he had not been deceived. In fact Croesus had destroyed a great empire–his own.
Misinterpretations, such as that of Croesus, can be disastrous. Perhaps nothing has been misinterpreted more than the Book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse as it used to be known.
Is Revelation about the end of the world? Was it written mainly about first-century events for first-century Christians, thus having with little or no value for succeeding generations? What do all the numbers mean? Who or what is the beast whose name is 666? What about the “whore of Babylon”: Is this a reference to the papacy, as the Scofield Bible claims?
Is all this symbolic, or should it be taken literally? Are the interpretations by Hal Lindsey (Late Great Planet Earth) and Ellen Gould White (founder of Seventh-Day Adventism) accurate?
These questions are answered in Fr. Montague’s new book, The Apocalypse. He takes the reader step-by-step through Revelation. The biblical verses precede each section of commentary so the actual text is always at hand. His convincing explanations make this a valuable tool to have when responding to anti-Catholics who use Revelation as a weapon against the Church.
Some Fundamentalist Christians claim that the beast of Revelation is the pope. Some believe it is the European Community, a type of revived Roman Empire. The real identity of the beast was quite clear to the first century Christians for whom the book was written. The beast who was persecuting the Church was the emperor Nero. The solution lies in the ancient practice of gematria, in which letters stood for numbers.
In Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (and in other ancient languages) letters were used for numbers since the Arabic numeral system was not yet in use. The value of the letters in a person’s name was considered the number of his name. In Hebrew and Greek the letters of Caesar Nero add up to 666.
Further identification comes from the fact that several early Latin manuscripts give the number of the beast as 616, the value of “Caesar Nero” in Latin. A Latin copyist knew that Nero was the beast and that in Latin his number was really 616, so he “corrected” the reading.
In the seventeenth chapter of Revelation the beast is said to have existed once, but no longer exists yet will return. This is an allusion to a popular myth circulating at the time, the myth that Nero had not actually committed suicide and would return leading the Parthian army to reclaim the Roman Empire.
Christians living at the end of the first century considered the Emperor Domitian to be the fulfillment of this myth. His persecution of the Christian community was as severe as that of Nero, and he was labeled Nero redivivus, Nero revived. He mandated that he be addressed as Dominus et Deus, Lord and God, further identifying himself as Antichrist to believers.
Another frequently misinter-preted symbol in Revelation is the harlot or “whore of Babylon.” Certain Fundamentalists continue to claim the harlot is the Catholic Church, despite the clear identification in Revelation 17:18, which reads, “The woman whom you saw represents the great city that has sovereignty over the kings of the earth.”
The woman is not a church, but a city. She is also said to be drunk with the blood of the martyrs. This is a reference to Rome, where many Christians were martyred. (Cities are often portrayed in the Bible as women: Jerusalem as virgin or mother and pagan cities as prostitutes.)
Fundamentalists not only miss the point of what John meant, but also obscure the point it carries for us today. Like ancient Romans, many now are seduced by hedonism and materialism while the rest of the world suffers. As Christians we are called to be witnesses to the message of Christ, not to a prosperity message of “health and wealth” preached by televangelists.
John was warning his intended readers–those of the first century–that the “tribulation” they already were experiencing would intensify. It would end only when the activity of Satan was restrained by Christ.
— Mark Wheeler
The Apocalypse: Understanding the Book of Revelation and the End of the World
By George T. Montague, S.M.
(Ann Arbor: Servant 1992)
245 pages
$8.99
Rebreathing the Faith
In studies of the major arts, you might come across the saying: “Painting you feel with your eyes, music and poetry you feel with your ears, sculpture you feel with your fingers, but architecture you feel with your lungs.”
I have always liked the analogy of feeling the inside of a building with your lungs You have to be inside it to appreciate it. It’s much the same with the faith. Many non-Catholics study Catholicism diligently from the outside, but they miss an enormous amount if that’s all they will let themselves see.
If they convert they step inside and “inhale,” fully experiencing the Church. Having been once on the outside, they tend to have a particular advantage–a heightened ability to explain and bring others (Catholic and non-Catholic) to appreciate the Catholic faith. It’s true that converts make converts. Their examples and their influence are especially needed today.
Typically you hear parents, inclduing many Catholic parents, say, “We sent our kids to college, and now they don’t believe anymore, they don’t go to church anymore.” That’s typical, but not universal. My own case was just the opposite. I found my faith in my late teens and early twenties and have been a believing, practicing Catholic ever since.
Often I am asked what happened to me, and I say two things. The first was that I came to want to know the truth about things and was not satisfied with comfortable or appealing answers. The other thing was I found footsteps to follow. I found books written by converts, and as I read them I followed their steps back into the Church.
Virtually any Catholic alive in the faith, whether he is a convert or not, seems to take a vicarious delight in reading a convert’s story. The story might be the introspective autobiography of Augustine, Newman, or Merton, or it might be a simpler account, such as the one found in John L. Stoddard’s Rebuilding a Lost Faith, who situates himself by taking the moniker “an American agnostic.” He was a Christian-turned-agnostic-turned Catholic.
Stoddard began his life in a pious Protestant home. He was 22 when he entered a Protestant seminary. He had an appetite for truth, but it was in the seminary that he learned to doubt Scripture and Christianity. He decided not to continue into the ministry.
Not finding real answers to questions he had about Christianity and a possessing a deep prejudice that prevented him from considering Catholicism, he found himself going down a road toward rationalism and agnosticism. As we follow him we see him rebuilding the faith he had lost. We follow his footsteps through the arguments and influences that brought him back to faith in God and the Bible, to belief in immortality and Christianity, and finally into the Catholic Church.
Stoddard provides an apologetical gold mine. His book has a wealth of information and is a treasury of useful quotations ranging from Eliza Cook to Napoleon and from Augustine to Cardinal Manning. This is not a manual or reference book, but it achieves, effortlessly, what an otherwise dry apologetics text only tries to achieve. Stoddard’s style snaps and crackles like a fire. He gives off sparks of insight as he lights upon one truth after another, moving through problems, doubts, objections, and arguments like a fire through a dry field. You can feel his faith rebuilding as he moves along.
Bishop Fulton Sheen warned you could win an argument and loose a soul, but don’t be afraid of Stoddard in this regard. He is not pugnacious, but direct and unequivocal. He is trying to get to the truth and goes marching after it uninhibited, and we go marching along with him. His arguments often are with himself as he chides his own blindness, slowness, and prejudice against the Catholic Church.
He contends with all the problems non-Catholics have with the Catholic faith–the papacy, infallibility, confession, purgatory. He also contends with agnosticism. This gives the book a large and diversified audience. It is one you can put into the hands of a liberal Protestant, a Fundamentalist, a minister, an agnostic, or a heterodox Catholic. You can put it into the hands of anyone who sincerely wants the truth of the Catholic faith or who needs it, which is to say everyone.
The book’s original date of publication (1921) might surprise you–it surprised me–because Stoddard’s arguments have such cogency today. It was printed only five years after the Russian Revolution and decades before the sexual revolution, but Stoddard is prescient when he says. “Some day, when atheism has been tried and found wanting, [society] will look around for a fixed point in the social chaos and will find nothing but the Catholic Church.” That someday is now.
— Clayton F. Bower, Jr.
Rebuilding a Lost Faith
By John L. Stoddard
(Rockford, Illinois: TAN Books 1990 [1921])
300 pages
$12.95