Description

We’ve looked at how and why Christianity lost the kingdom message; in this episode you’ll learn how we got it back.  Over the last five hundred years, three different movements have made significant strides in recovering the kingdom: the Anabaptists (16th century), the Adventists (19th century), and liberal scholars (20th century).  In this lecture you’ll get a brief overview of each of these groups and see a bit about how they learned about the kingdom and did their part to restore it.

This is lecture 14 of the Kingdom of God class, originally taught at the Atlanta Bible College.  To take this class for credit, please contact ABC so you can do the work necessary for a grade.

Notes:

(16th c.) Anabaptists and Radicals Rediscover the Kingdom

• in the 1440s, the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press led to the reexamination of traditional Catholic doctrines
• the bible revolution initiated a new interest in doctrine
• 1454 Gutenberg Bible (Latin)
• 1516 Erasmus’ Greek NT
• 1522 Luther’s German NT
• 1526 Tyndale’s English NT
• 1534 Luther’s German Bible
• 1535 Coverdale English Bible

George Williams: “Because the New Testament uses the euphemism of sleep, the term soul sleep (Seelenschlaf) is often encountered in the sixteenth century. It will be sharply opposed by Calvin in his first theological work, Psychopannychia (1534; Strasburg ed., 1542).  This important work against Anabaptists and perhaps Servetus supplies our generic term psychopannychism in the present narration for that full range of Christian views not in line with the decree on the natural immortality of the soul of the V Lateran Council and of Calvin himself who would come to hold to the continued consciousness of the departed souls, as saints ‘under the alter’ (Rev 6.9-11), participants as the elect in the invisible Church, awaiting the Last Judgment.  Luther, for his part, was himself, at the outset of his scriptural career as reformer a psychopannychist, as was his most renowned English follower, the Bible translator, William Tyndale.”[1]

• why do you think Calvin wrote this book?
  • his book, Psychopannychia, fought against people who believed in the sleep of the dead
  • this means sufficient people believed in this idea that he felt it was the first doctrine he had to attack!
• apocalypticism vs. millennialism vs. millenarianism
  • active apocalypticism (Melchior Hoffman and the Munster debacle)
  • passive apocalypticism

George Williams: “Not only psychopannychism but also Antitrinitarianism was to find its fullest ecclesial expression in Polish Socinianism and Hungarian Unitarianism. The leaders of these two parallel and closely interrelated movements…were Italians or palpably dependent upon Italians.”[2]

• these 2 groups combined sleep of the dead w/ biblical unitarianism
  • Polish Socinians, Hungarian Unitarians

(19th c.) Adventists and Restorationists

William Miller (1782-1849)

• father of Adventism
  • Adventism: movement based on rediscovery of the return of Christ
  • Adventist: someone who believes Jesus is coming back and usually also believes in conditional immortality
• American Baptist who preached in upstate New York (Hampton, east of Lake George on VT border)
• studied prophecies of Daniel and used day-year method
• in 1822 he predicted Christ would come by 1843 (made public in 1831)
• submitted 16 articles to