[xzins]

Excellent article for your files.

Just to add to Warner's article:

Many of the Church Fathers since John have written of the mystery of the identity of the Anti-Christ.

If John had just known it, why hadn't he revealed it to them? Why all these puzzled early fathers still wondering who it WILL be? (Note future tense.)

[Buggman]

Good find. I'd thought about posting something similar to one of the other "preterist" threads, but I got distracted.

Preterism utterly fails on multiple fronts, but the dating of the Revelation is the final nail in the coffin.

[P-Marlowe]

I was reading an article the other day which suggested that the reason why the 4th century church decided to apply the book of Revelation to the events of 70AD rather than to future events is because the Roman Church had married itself to the Roman Government and the clear references to the evil Roman government just didn't sit right with the powers that be.

Obviously since the power of Rome was now the power of the church, they couldn't have a book predicting that the evil Roman Powers would be directly overthrown by Christ himself. It just didn't sit right.

Missler has said that while the Reformation reformed its views on soteriology and theology, they failed to make the necessary reforms to the Roman views on eschatology. IOW the preterist position is a throwback to the Holy Roman Empire eschatology. Earlier eschatology (prior to the marriage of the Roman government to the Roman Church) leaned towards a futurist interpretation and most of the early church fathers (prior to Augustine) held to the 95 AD date for the book of Revelation.