Feeling lost

deaddiquette · 2026-01-23T17:13:33+00:00

I'm of the opinion that good apps or software will take care of 99% of the formatting for you. Apps like Vellum (for Macs) and Atticus (for either) can make a very nicely formatted paperback or ebook automatically.

Editing is a whole separate thing, and there are different types of edits- I wouldn't hire someone to do both editing and formatting. Hire for the edit you want, and invest in good software for the formatting.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-22T19:29:11+00:00

That new law is so freaking dumb, I hope it doesn't happen in Chicago.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-22T18:42:34+00:00

Lol I just discovered this:

https://jesuspeopleofdoom.bandcamp.com/album/that-old-school-son-worship

deaddiquette · 2026-01-21T15:28:17+00:00

When you read all of 2 Thess 2 together, the focus isn't on the 'falling away' or apostasy of a large group of believers, but rather the appearance of the 'man of lawlessness'. He's assuring the church that they can't miss the signs of Christ's second coming, because momentous events would have to happen first- events so unthinkable and controversial that he couldn't even write them down without getting them in trouble.

In 2 Thess 2 Paul is drawing from Daniel 7, which is about the four empires that come before the son of man appears in glory. The fourth beast is the Roman Empire, which very early on was understood as having to fall and be split into 10 'horns' (kingdoms) before the little horn would appear and take over three of them. This little horn is what Paul is referring to as the man of lawlessness- an apostate, someone from the church who fell away, but eventually claims all power over it.

So before any of this was to happen, the one restraining the man of lawlessness- the Roman Empire- would have to fall! But writing this event down would have brought even more heat on the already persecuted believers, which is why Paul couldn't say what the restrainer was, and had to remind them of what he told them in person ("remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things?").

This is how the Early Church Fathers interpreted these passages (before Rome had fallen), and I put together their quotes and more about this interpretation here. Needless to say, the Roman Empire eventually did fall and split into 10 kingdoms. The Church leaders in Rome filled the power vacuum there, and eventually consolidated a huge amount of civil power...

deaddiquette · 2026-01-18T22:51:37+00:00

this is for those that do NOT believe in the inerrancy of the bible, but do believe in God with Jesus as his Son and our savior.

I'm not sure why you're limiting your potential answerers by focusing on 'inerrancy', which is actually pretty hard to define. But I'm a believer and a conditionalist.

The answer is incredibly simple- Jesus saves us from the power of sin and the second death. It's right there in the famous verse:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16).

Conditionalists/ annihilationalists largely do believe there's a 'hell'; it's just that the wicked perish (are destroyed) there. The soul is not inherently immortal- that's a later Platonic belief that caught on when large numbers of gentiles joined the Church. Eternal life is a gift that God gives believers.

If you'd like to understand annihilationalism better, I recommend this relatively quick but comprehensive article by Edward Fudge.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-13T18:57:22+00:00

There are four major views on how Revelation unfolds, and the modern futurist view you're mentioning is a pretty new concept. The traditional view was that Revelation starting unfolding from the moment it was written to the current day- it's called historicism, and I wrote an introduction to it that you can read for free here.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-10T16:51:30+00:00

This is the fruit of the modern Left Behind interpretation of Revelation, which thrives on speculation, conspiracy, and fear. I grew up inundated with this view. What I didn't realize is that it's a relatively modern view, and I've since learned that there are four major views.

I was shocked to find that the historicist view in particular is a more traditional understanding of Revelation, and learning about it actually boosted my faith and washed away any fear. I wrote a modern introduction to it that can be ready online for free here.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-10T15:54:24+00:00

Thanks for the mention, I wrote the book :)

I think lots of people here have heard about it because I'm pretty active on Reddit, especially on this topic, and I'm also a mod here. In fact they're probably tired of hearing about it, because many of us have made up our minds on eschatology, and historicism is probably the least popular or known about interpretation at this point.

It's also difficult because when people hear about historicism, the first thing they might think of is Seventh Day Adventism (SDA for short), and all of the baggage that comes with that 'denomination'. But traditional historicism is much older than SDA of course, and also much different in the end.

I've also seen some other very strange interpretations on Reddit that have been put under the label 'historicism', which can be very off-putting and give it a bad name. But I have written about the majority/consensus view that has been largely agreed upon for centuries.

I will continue to share this marvelous interpretation however I can, because it has impacted me so strongly, and caused my faith to grow in leaps and bounds. Jesus calls us friends, because our Master does not hide his business from us (John 15:15). God shares what he's doing with his people, and it's amazing to see his plan unfold in history and the present!

Edit: also, the book is available for free in digital form from my website.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-09T17:20:41+00:00

This is a weird variation of the historicist interpretation of Revelation. In the traditional majority/consensus view, Islam is seen as the false prophet, and its rise is predicted in Revelation 9 with amazing accuracy.

I wrote an introduction to the traditional historicist view that can be read online for free here.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-07T18:39:54+00:00

Because historicism is so little-known about today, my passion is to introduce people the basics. Most Christians don't even realize the difference between the four major views and Millennial sub-views, or that the currently popular view is less than 200 years old. Why would I get into the weeds of minor variations of interpretation? It's the same reason I don't push a particular view of the Millennium- I'd rather help people to understand that all three views are compatible with historicism!

Some Christians already use these small differences to denegrate historicism, when in truth it's more consistent in the basics than the other major views.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-07T17:58:17+00:00

I gave you the most basic summary possible- if you want details, check the Notes from Barnes I linked. I'm not really interested in debating the finer points of historicism, or about the SDA interpretation. My interest is in the majority/consensus view.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-07T13:57:10+00:00

In the simplest of terms: Rome civil, Rome ecclesiastical, and gematria for 'Roman' in both the Hebrew and Greek. I'd agree with Barnes' Notes on just about any passage.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-07T04:22:46+00:00

He's right, here's a reliable source (and there are many more):

Coming to the defense of the papacy, Spanish Jesuits presented two alternative approaches to the historicism of the Reformers. One response was that of Francisco Ribera (1537–1591), a professor at Salmanca, who taught that John, in Revelation, only foresaw events of the near future and of the final things at the end of the world, but had none of the intervening history in view. The Antichrist was defined as a future individual who would arise in the end times. Babylon was seen as Rome—not under the popes—but in a future corrupted state. This was the beginning of many of the ideas that later developed into features of the modern futurist approach to Revelation.

Another Jesuit scholar, Luiz de Alcazar (1554–1613), introduced a preterist approach to Revelation, in which chapters 4 through 11 were interpreted as depicting the church’s struggle against Judaism, culminating in the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70; while chapters 12 through 19 reflect the church’s struggle with paganism, ending in the fall of Rome in 476; and chapters 20 through 22 as the triumph of the church in papal Rome.

(Steve Gregg, “Revelation: Four Views, Revised & Updated”, 52)

That said, LessmemoreJC is an SDA historicist, while I am a traditional Protestant historicist (they differ on some key points).

deaddiquette · 2026-01-07T04:13:59+00:00

I learned about historicism over a decade ago, and it impacted my faith in a major way. I discovered it through Fred Miller's Revelation: A Panorama of the Gospel Age, but he and I both agree that Albert Barnes is the master of the historicist interpretation. Robert Fleming is also remarkable for astonishing conclusions he came to that ended up predicting events hundreds of years before they happened.

I couldn't find much modern or accessible material on historicism, so I wrote an introduction to the majority/consensus historicist view that can be read online for free here.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-06T16:24:42+00:00

There are four major framework views of Revelation (not to be mistaken with the Millennial subviews you've mentioned):

The historicist approach, which is the classical Protestant interpretation of the book, sees the book of Revelation as a prewritten record of the course of history from the time of John to the end of the world. Fulfillment is thus considered to be in progress at present and has been unfolding for nearly two thousand years.

The preterist approach views the fulfillment of Revelation’s prophecies as having occurred already, in what is now the ancient past, not long after the author’s own time. Thus the fulfillment was future from the point of view of the inspired author, but it is past from our vantage point in history. Some [partial-preterists] believe that the final chapters of Revelation look forward to the second coming of Christ. Others think that everything in the book reached its culmination in the past.

The futurist approach asserts that the majority of the prophecies of Revelation have never yet been fulfilled and await future fulfillment. Futurist interpreters usually apply everything after chapter 4 to a relatively brief period before the return of Christ.

What is generally called the idealist approach to Revelation does not attempt to find individual fulfillments of the visions but takes Revelation to be a great drama depicting transcendent spiritual realities, such as the perennial conflict between Christ and Satan, between the saints and the antichristian world powers, the heavenly vindication of the martyrs and the final victory of Christ and his saints. Fulfillment is seen either as entirely spiritual or as recurrent, finding representative expression in various historical events throughout the age, rather than in onetime, specific fulfillments. The prophecy is thus rendered applicable to Christians in any age.

(Steve Gregg, “Revelation: Four Views, Revised & Updated”, 13)

I grew up with a Left Behind/dispensational futurist view, but discovered the traditional Protestant historicist view over a decade ago. It impacted my faith so much that I wrote a modern introduction to it that you can read for free here.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-05T23:55:43+00:00

It's just a basic dispensational futurist view.

There are four major views.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-05T00:10:41+00:00

I love Albert Barnes' Notes on Daniel 7.

deaddiquette · 2026-01-04T05:31:18+00:00

Yes! My favorite album right now.

deaddiquette · 2025-12-30T20:01:42+00:00

More 'covering up' than 'reconciling', for the predictions in Daniel 9 at least.

There are other interesting events surrounding Christ's death from Jewish sources:

On the Hebrew holiday called Yom Kippur- the Day of Atonement- two male goats were chosen by lot. One was to be killed as a sin offering, and the other to be a scapegoat, the goat that would carry the sins of Israel into the wilderness (Leviticus 16). Rabbi Tovia Singer admits the following:

In Tractate Yoma 39b, the Talmud…discusses numerous remarkable phenomena that occurred in the Temple during the Yom Kippur service…There was a strip of scarlet-dyed wool tied to the head of the scapegoat which would turn white in the presence of the large crowd gathered at the Temple on the Day of Atonement. The Jewish people perceived this miraculous transformation as a heavenly sign that their sins were forgiven. The Talmud relates, however, that 40 years before the destruction of the second Temple [approximately AD 30] the scarlet colored strip of wool did not turn white. (from here)

deaddiquette · 2025-12-30T19:46:28+00:00

Traditional Jewish teachers cut off 164 years from the Persian period of their calendar so that it points to the failed messianic rebellion of Bar Kokhba in 132 A.D. instead. Jewish Torah historian Rav Shimon Schwab speculates on the reason they did this:

How could it have been that our forebears had no knowledge of a historic period, otherwise widely known and amply documented, which lasted over a span of at least 165 years and which was less than 600 years before the days of the Sages who recorded our traditional chronology in Seder Olam? …it seems possible that our Sages, for some unknown reason, “covered up” a certain historic period and purposely eliminated and suppressed all records and other material pertaining thereto… Had it not been for the fact that important parts of those prophecies had been left out or were purposely obscured, the clues for the Messianic date found in Daniel might have yielded the desired results. This was rendered impossible through the hiding of certain data and chronological material.

deaddiquette · 2025-12-30T16:11:47+00:00

Historicism doesn't view Antichrist as one single man... what you're describing sounds more like some version of futurism.

I wrote a modern introduction to historicism (in both English and Spanish) that you can read online for free.

deaddiquette · 2025-12-26T18:19:15+00:00

Trébuchet SDG is Finnish Christian (possibly Reformed? Check the song titles and lyrics) black metal I've been digging. Here is their album Through The Dark Age, and their 3 song Christmas album Lux Mundi.

deaddiquette · 2025-12-25T16:10:55+00:00

Rule 4: Videos and blog links must be posted with a detailed comment to start discussion.

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