# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1855 01 16_S82
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

82

to take for cover and shelter from the consuming fire of His holy nearness.

Though indeed in all these several judgments the order of sequence does not necessarily involve the order of time, still less can our eyes with certainty reckon out the picture in the clouds, and also what will be fully fulfilled only in the consummation which God has reserved to Himself is approximately repeated oftentimes; yet, if one is once to interpret, this interpretation too might be justified: that the first six seals embrace the time up to the migration of the nations. A recognizable goal is the victorious breakthrough of the public acknowledgment of Christ. A thorough conversion it is not, in general. The wrath of the Lamb (V. 16 and 17) shoots through the world. Men worship and bow before the power of the name of Jesus. The papacy then reaps the fruits of this mighty shock, which trembled on for centuries, as one may well regard it as caves and rocks on the mountains: for it indeed rests upon the old Roman dominion, and because it confers the Roman imperial dignity, the mountain leans upon it; the cave also fits excellently, because it arises at once with the division of the eastern and western Roman Empire, and the refuge which the servile trembling of the nations seeks in the legal ceremonial service of the Church is apparently supplied by the latter just at a time when it too is splitting.

The first four judgments then coincide with the fifth, which runs through them all into the first centuries, and need not have occurred in the order in which they are enumerated, as is especially clear from the fifth.

Note 1. The first seal might also be interpreted otherwise: either of the Church, so that it promises her victory (crown) under all the following plagues through the wide spread of the Gospel (bow); or of an enemy of the Roman Empire, as the first impulse to its fall, which would correspond to the sixth seal — perhaps of the Persians, against whose resistance the power of Rome first broke (for this speak the bow, the white garment as a sign of victory, as well as the last word: "to conquer," etc.); or finally of Constantine the Great, who conquered by the cross and, as it were, himself carried only a bow, since the deadly wounds were dealt not by his shot but by God's hand: this too is fitting and commends itself especially as a comforting picture, which moreover emerges unsought from all that happened until the overthrow of the old world, in the eyes of the Christians, for whom indeed such things are written. To this attaches the following as causes of the same purpose, to overthrow the idol altars in the heathen world and to bow every knee to Christ. Then the rest also appears not as a tribulation of the Church but as a preparation of the way.

Especially the words of V. 2: "and a crown was given unto him, and he went forth conquering, and to conquer" move me to adopt the latter interpretation. Yet I content myself to set this as a private opinion beside Luther's explanation.

Note 2. The 11th verse points prophetically into the time of the papacy. When everything was preparing for the overthrow of the heathen world, the number of the martyrs seemed to be full, but it was not yet, because the very altars which had been built over their bones already then served only to damp the spirit of the witnesses of blood ("under — the souls of them"), while they were honored with stones, but later, out of the temples in which they stood, dens of murderers have become.

The Seventh and Eighth Chapters.

"In the seventh and eighth chapters begins the revelation of spiritual tribulations, such as are manifold heresies. And again a picture of comfort is set forth beforehand, where the angel marks the Christians and restrains the four evil angels. That one may again be sure that Christendom will have even among the heretics pious angels and the pure Word. As also the angel with the censer, that is, with prayer, shows. Such good angels are the holy Fathers, as Spiridion, Athanasius, Hilarius, and the Council of Nicaea, and the like.

The first evil angel is Tatianus with his Encratites, who forbade marriage: likewise, who would be pious by works, like the Jews. For the doctrine of work-righteousness had to be the first against the Gospel, and probably remains also the last, without ever lacking new teachers and other new names, as Pelagians, etc.

The second is Marcion with his Cataphrygians, Manichees, Montanists, etc., who boast their spirit-business above all Scripture, and drive, like this burning mountain, between heaven and earth. As with us Münzer and the enthusiasts.

The third is Origen, who by philosophy and reason has embittered and corrupted the Scripture, as with us the high schools have hitherto done.

The fourth is Novatus with his Catharists, who denied repentance and would be the purest above others. Of this kind were the Donatists afterwards also; but our clergy are almost all four kinds at once: The learned, who know the histories, will be well able to reckon this out, for it would be too long to relate and prove it all." Luther.

The 7th chapter contains the announcement of the plague and the divine means of preservation against it; the 8th describes it more closely. That under it spiritual tribulations, namely false doctrines, are to be understood is evident from the picture under which it is presented in Chap. 7, v. 1, and the order already brings it with it. After the general promise of victory, Chap. 4 and 5, only the most conspicuous movements have come into the light of prophetic distant view, which were to shake the world and also painfully touch the children of God. Their final goal has been the glorification of the name of Christ, as the close of the previous chapter has shown. Now follow the struggles of the Church for God's honor, which retire far into the distance to the superficial contemplation of a mortal eye, to which we otherwise owe a glimpse into the history of the world, and even swim away in a sphere of clouds. These have in the previously mentioned bodily afflictions cast, as it were, their shadow upon the earth: for it is meet that also the ungodly multitude of the children of men, at least where it still has feeling, should for its part become aware of what God's kingdom is experiencing. As it was there a matter of thrones and dominions, of fatherland and all kinds of goods, so here also everything turns on scepter, home, inheritance, etc. But the strife is about the LORD'S government, about the eternal fatherland in heaven, about the pure doctrine as the nourishment and strength of souls.

With the "after this" in the 1st verse, therefore, no sequence of time is to be thought of. Rather the contemplation goes back farther than the beginning of the picture of the ages previously unrolled. Even in looking upon a landscape the eye may well first rest upon the mountain summits at the edge of the horizon, and thereafter follow the course of the stream on whose bank one stands.

Let us now take the miner's lamp which the Fathers set at the entrance, before, their day's work accomplished, they went to rest, and descend with it into the dark shafts. We marvel anew, but the treasures of wisdom and knowledge on which our eyes feast are old as the light that shows them to us; even the sinking and measuring of the passages the ancients have spared us.

Chap. 7, v. 1. The "four angels" are false teachers and their spirits. They "stand" ready to do harm. Observe how the devil who sends them behaves as God's ape. His chariot is to have four horses, as the LORD rides upon four cherubim. And as the Church is now built upon the Word: Go ye into all the world, etc., so he too will possess the four corners of the earth.

"The four winds of the earth" are the pure and sincere teachers of the Church. The image of the wind is taken from the rushing of the storm on the day of Pentecost, and shows at the same time the heavenly origin of the breath of life, which sustains Christendom through the bearers and organs of the Spirit, while the fact that their patron saints stand upon the earth already points to the impotence and the fall of the false prophets. The number 4 recalls Mark 16, 15 ("all the world").

"Earth" — "sea" and "tree" express the universality of the plague. No congregation, be it on the mainland (earth) or on an island (sea) or hide itself in the clefts of the rocks, in the solitude of the forest (tree), shall be spared; that is, outwardly the whole of Christendom will be reminded of the dominion of false doctrine, for example by the want of pure teachers.

If one will interpret, then the earth is perhaps the hereditary ground and soil, the sea the means of intercourse with the outside and of the extension of the borders, the tree the daily food and necessity. Without figure: In the Church, so far as it has already been built, there is no life, because the pure doctrine has been crowded out. So it stands also with its extension; there all manner of human sowing overgrows the good wheat. What else can be the consequence of this but that no right fruit grows any more, the souls find no wholesome nourishment, in short: a spiritual famine?