Immanuel Kant and secular apocalyptic and
William Miller and biblical apocalyptic
Metusaleh means, when he dies it shall
come. When Metusaleh died the flood came. Immanuel Kant wrote in 1794 a book Das
Ende aller Dinge. The end of all things. When the church stop to exist and stop to
be authority over everything, then the End of all things will come. The Catholic Church which was very
authoritative and persecuting people stopped to be ruler in 1798. How true and
close was Immanuel Kant in his prognosis. Kant felt that if the church stops to
exist, stop to be caring and lovable, then people will free themselves from it
and rebel against it and the End is there and in his view a better future. This is how Satan think and how Satan
talks. The church administration will stop to
exist in the Time of Trouble that is ahead of us just before Christ come on the
clouds. It is the long-expected return of the
Messiah from heaven to earth and not silently arising in some country as some
expects. Kant wanted to change eschato-logy to
eschato-ethiclogy. People have tried all kinds of things like changing it to
eschato-Christology. The biblical picture is simple and clear and one should
follow the 14 rules spelled out by William Miller after his conversion in 1816
after 911 of that year. Four years later after Kant wrote this
essay the Catholic church received its deadly wound. Secularism took reign in
all countries and Kant was partly right. A religion that robs people of their
freedom of choice, even contra-religion freedom, is dictatorship. Kant started then secular end-time
thinking and influenced many like Goethe, Schiller (writer of ode of joy)
Beethhoven, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Fichte, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Derrida. All
working for Satan. Their biographies reveal that their lives were just wine,
women and song. Zero religion. God switched on William Miller in 1816 and
he influenced the Whites, Bates, Litch, Edson, Andrews, Loughborough, Smith and
others with the biblical end-time thinking. So we see that two streams of eschatology appeared
during the rise of Millerism or Adventism fever, true eschatology expectations of
Miller and his people and secular eschatological descriptions of Kant and his
boys. The translator of Kant’s book gave this
information:
“Das Ende aller Dinge was first published in June 1794 in the Berlinische
Monatschrift 23, pp. 495–522.. By 1792 J. E. Biester, editor of the Berlinische
Monatschrift, had moved his publication to Jena to avoid the Prussian religious
censors. On April 10, 1794, Kant wrote him criticizing the political philosophy
of the Hanover conservative August Rehberg and connecting it with the
censorship activities of Hermes and Hillmer, who “have taken their positions as
overseers of secondary schools and have thereby acquired influence over the
universities with respect to how and what is supposed to be taught there.” Then
he abruptly ends the letter with this final paragraph: “The essay I will send
you soon is entitled ‘The End of All Things,’ which will be partly plaintive
and partly funny to read” (AK 11:496–7). Having endured the difficulties with the censors in
getting the Religion published, Kant's outlook was anything but sanguine
regarding the prospects for free thought and discussion of religious topics in
Prussia. “The End of All Things” is a plea for Christians to be true to what is
best in their religion by adopting a “liberal” way of thinking; but because it
is a plea directed at the Prussian religious authorities, it is one Kant
expects to fall on deaf ears. Thus it is couched in the form of a sly, bitter
satire, which approaches its political theme only indirectly”. https://archive.org/stream/essaysandtreati00kantgoog/essaysandtreati00kantgoog_djvu.txt
Source
for Aufklahrung understanding of Apokaliptics,
see Ferdinand Schoningh, Apokalyptik in
Antike und Aufklärung,
Editors Jürgen
Brokoff and Bernd U. Schipper. Zurich: 2004.