Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Catholic authority was also grounded in a traditional understanding of
providential history, and so Luther needed to find an alternative historical
basis for his own doctrinal pronouncements. The title of one of Luther's
great treatises from that year,
The Babylonish Captivity of the Church
, antici-
pates this change. While his subject was doctrinal, the biblical grounding
of the sacraments which Luther was now paring down from seven to two,
his title reflects the altered historical thinking that such a sweeping doc-
trinal change demanded. If the Catholic Church had erred so fundamen-
tally, the traditional assumption that its teaching authority was validated
by the historical continuity of apostolic succession also had to be rejected.
Such a reconfiguration, no less than Luther's doctrinal alterations, needed
a biblical grounding, and his title indicates where this was to be found.
Luther had identified the errors of the Roman Church with the apostasies
that had once caused God to abandon ancient Israel to its Babylonian
conquerors. The period of Catholic dominance was now being interpreted
as a recapitulation of ancient Israel's idolatry, with European kings now
playing the part of Nebuchadnezzar and the dawning reform movement
representing the faithful remnant of Israel that made a second exodus
back into Palestine.
Validation for this historical analogy came from the fact that the same
comparison was already found in New Testament eschatology, where Israel's
Babylonian exile and restoration were used to symbolize a similar scenario
of the end times. This way of situating the Protestant movement in his-
tory had the important effect of reorienting historical thinking from the
past to the future. The Babylonian exile had already been appropriated in
John's Apocalypse (Rev 17-18) as the model for that future epoch in which
the greater portion of Christ's followers would be led astray by a second
Nebuchadnezzar, the antichrist of the end times. Once Protestants adopted
this visionary narrative as a prophetic template for their own struggles, the
Catholic Church became the “Harlot of Babylon” which had abetted these
worldly temptations. Protestants, by contrast, were the faithful remnant des-
tined to return to the heavenly Jerusalem of this future cycle as the purified
bride made ready for the “marriage of the Lamb” (Rev 19:7).
Appeals to this prophesied future undermined the historical authority
of the Catholic past, but their more important effect was a vital shift in
temporal orientations. Providential history could no longer afford to find
its point of reference in the past, since this was what sustained Catholic
authority. It needed to find its main point of historical reference in the
future, and millenarian prophecy enabled Protestants to do this without
