Historiography
and ethics: the case with Bolton
History
always deals with the past. Adventists are historicists. It means that we do
not make predictions on prophecy as the Millerites did with William Miller
predicting that Christ will come in 1844 and He did not. Yes we use the same
historical analysis, yes we use the year-day principle for the 2300 evenings
and mornings [days = years], yes we use the same starting point already strongly
investigated and allocated on mathematical and astronomical reasons by Sir
Isaac Newton as 457 BCE, yes we do end in 1843/1844 A.D. with our calculation
too, but….We use the tabernacle typology as heavenly construct first and
earthly secondary mirror of that and the Book of Hebrews emphasizing the point
that Jesus went into the Most Holy in 1844 with a slight different function
added to His meditorial function in the first apartment since the cross. No
other denomination has this. The Reformers missed this. They died before it
happen. Should they have lived in our day on this side of 1844, Calvin and
Luther would be Adventists. That is my understanding of their truth-seeking
attitudes.
So
Adventists are using the history surrounding Ezra 7 for the dating of 457 BCE
to calculate the starting-point of the 2300 years prophecy of Daniel 8:14 but
also the same as the startingpoint for the precise prediction and fulfillment
of the coming of the Messiah Jesus Christ to be baptized in 27 A.D. and died in
31 A.D. as Daniel also predicted in Daniel 9:24-27. This aspect the Catholic
Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, other Reformers and Adventist agree 100%. Also using
the year-day principle.
Parting
ways was where Adventists continued to use the year-day principle consistently
also for the other longtime periods mentioned in Daniel, like the 1260 days or
years and the 1290 days or years and lastly the 1335 days or years of Daniel
12. For this history is necessary to explain what happened. Historicists delve
into history to find the data supporting and harmonizing with the prediction.
It is a tedious and careful research. Many errors were made in the history of interpretation
but if you have patience with humanity and researchers, finally they come clean
and right.
So
Adventists like history and they like analysis of history. Historiography is a
popular topic in Adventism. The Bible’s history was reality and past reality.
It really happened. It was not pie in the sky imaginations. Not a self-invented
“God” entity to whom humans attached their own pathos as Friedrich Engels and
Karl Marx also Siegmund Freud and Carl Jung and a host of Rationalists,
Atheists, Agnostics, Deists, will argue.
Agnostics
have no God dictating to them what history was, is and will be. They are “gods”
in their own minds and they dictate what future events or current ones should
be or would be. The same with Atheists or Nihilists. The “Dead to religion”
people. How does a Dead to Religion historian write history? Ask Othmar Keel
the great Iconography Researcher of the Ancient Near Eastern Cultures. Always
the Bible is wrong in his books and articles and presentations at conferences.
The Bible always stole ideas from the Ancient Near East. If one reads something
in Psalms about some animal, you need to look for iconographical depictions of
the animal in various Ancient Near Eastern cultures. So they found at Kuntillet
‘Ajrud a picture of a young boy playing a lyre and a Bes monster dressed figure
in fashion clothes with a phalanx between his legs or tail? with a writing in
Hebrew above it dating from the time of Daniel and Jeremiah saying: “Yahweh and
His Asherah…” Asherah was a female of all evil prostitution they had at that
time. Keel saw it and concluded that Yahweh probably had a wife in those days
in Israelite religion and history. Later the wife was dropped and He became
unmarried. And the scholars followed these ideas with consensus even in Society of Biblical Literature levels. I
as a young student was prompted to be impressed by this scholar at University. I
was not interested. I loved my Bible too much and the realism of biblical
events were too strongly in my system. Consensus look skew at me because we
were in different seating positions as far as views are concerned. I was
convinced in myself that this historian Othmar Keel created a skew
historiography and got the whole world researchers backing him. Atheists and
agnostic historians adored him. Cited him everywhere in their footnotes and
books and bibliography and continue to do so even today.
Then
Othmar Keel finally retired as professor Emeritus from University and announced
in a newspaper article published in German admitting that as a theology
professor in Iconography he was since 1968 until 2018 actually agnostic. He did
not believe in God.
History
analysis and study without God. All in the consensus boards of Theological
societies like sheep in the whole Theological world followed him. Except
Adventists because we are Biblicists and Fundamentalists, words that agnostics
like James Barr hated and fought against. He was also a Baal prophet in
Theology, is my perception of his work. Even from student years I could see
that. Never changed my opinion regarding him.
Modern
historians are guided in their historiography by their epistemology (I am
agnostic and do not believe in any god or God mentality) which is the natural outcome
of their ontology (the lifestyle and way they eat their snails, lobsters,
dogfood sometimes, frog-eggs or anything, their free sexual views and
behaviors, their alcohol and drug consumption habits and smoking habits and
more) things the Bible condemns, so how can you support something in the Bible
when your lifestyle is clashing with it? One professor in my past was teaching
me biblical Greek and would smoke over the Greek text of Metzger with his
finger pointing in Luke and making an exegesis while every now and then push
the cigarette ashes from the pages. So lifestyle do affect how we think and how
we think affect how we decide to do things or like things or dislike things,
how we choose to spite some and reward our own fans, whether we are going to
cite in our dissertations and books and articles Martin Heidegger or Spinoza
and not Isaac Newton and not Hengstenberg or Keel and Delitzsch, whether it
will be Rudolph Bultmann rather than Gerhard Hasel, atheists rather than
faithful scholars, Evolutionists rather than Creationists. It makes a
difference going all the way back to the level of “I do what I like and no one
and no God will tell me what I should or shouldn’t do” as Richard Dawkins repeatedly
spit out in his talks as militant atheist and agnostic.
The
descriptive task of a historiographer is with a baggage of preconceived ideas,
of presuppositions, of rebellious attitudes, of hate-speech to religion or God
or those who profess Him, of the collection of negative adjectives and jargon
protesting against any attempt to evangelize and convince the historian of his
skewness or misjudgments.
I
agree with Gerhard Hasel who in my conversation with him was pointing out that
the atheists and agnostic live in a micro-cosmic world since they cut out God
and existence in the Universe. Adventists operate with a macro-cosmic view that
includes and do not excludes the existence of heavenly beings like the Trinity,
angels and humans resurrected functionally like Henoch, Moses and Elijah. Atheists
reality is minimalist and Adventist Biblicist
reality is maximalist. It does make a
difference in historiography.
Memoirs of
rulers
is a genre that is common since the beginning of man. Someone was keeping exact
records of what happened between David and Bathseba and the killing of Uriah
described in Samuel. The revelation of these David-leaks or Samuel-leaks was
done according to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as the Editor of the whole
Word of God. After all, it is His Word and He chose this embarrassment to be
open in public. The revelations of David’s sin happened while he was ruler and
while the process was going on. The Prophet Nathan came to David to reveal his
problem to him. It is recorded in minute detail in Samuel. No stone unturned
and nothing left out. The remarkable thing is that King David did not try to
diminish the revelation. He knew it was so. It was not just table-talks of
commoners about their king. It was real actions that were totally true. There
was no room for revenge writing, selfish gain objectives, self-justifying
motives, and other opportunistic gain ideas. No monetary deals for publication
of memoirs temptations. It was David’s “The Room Where it Happened”.
Co-edited
by the Holy Spirit.
Character
Assassination is a genre in literature. It is interesting to
see the role of gossip in downplaying the power of monarchies as well as the papal
power during and after the French Revolution. It is the role that media played
in the transformation of power. The Paradigm shift of the Holy Roman Empire to
the Secular Worldly Powers of France and the USA is a recognition that France
really acted properly on USA advice. The token of appreciation for this: the
Statue of Liberty in New York. Media
and public opinion became actors in their own right. Suppression of views or
persecution of religious views for example went on for nearly 1260 years since
the Ostrogoths took Rome in Mid-March of 538. That was the transition of Rome
from Pagan Rome to the Holy Roman Empire or Papal Rome that was to dominate the
scene until Berthier brought the pope to France in 1798. Slanderous
publications attacking the Dutch politician William V was spreading gossip
about him in 1781. Since 1789 in France and elsewhere, the parties started to
attack each other with attacking the personal lives. The
phenomenon of character assassination before and after the French Revolution
did not stop. Whereas before it was focused sometimes on the Monarchy or Papacy,
after 1798 it was focused on parties involved in the struggle. Someone had to
be attacked and attacking had to continue. All
this is described by Edwina Hagen (2012-2013) published as chapter 10 in the
Book by Martijn Iks and Erik Shiraev in 2014 called Character Assassinations Througout the Ages. This
is the correct perception of this phenomenon. It is since the start of this
world with our first parents. Adam was blaming his wife and his wife was
blaming the snake but really, reading the Scripture closely, we discover with
Ellen White in her classic Patriarch and Prophets that the rebellion and gossip
or character assassination modus operandi
was invented by Lucifer in heaven. Rebelling against God he convinced one third
of the angels to follow him. He was outcasted from Heaven and lurking in the
Garden of Eden near the forbidden tree used the snake as his instrument of
deception to the human race. Lucifer in his words to Eve tried to assassinate
the character of God. The Ten Commandments is the character of God in ten
points. All of them. Studying the ten commandments gives us the full picture of
what God expects from us in relation to each other and to Him. When
one is surprised by the role of character assassination in heaven, then in Eden
and said above to be at play before the fall of the papacy and the Dutch and
French Revolutions, thus before 1798 and realize it did not stop there after
that, one asks what role did it play with the downfall of the Roman Empire in
538? The
answer is the role of the prolific writer and gossiper and lawyer Procopius who
was working for the general of Justinian, Belisarius until about 540 for the
last time. His book Secret History
was written to expose the evils of Justinian and his wife Theodora but he did
not want to publish it until the emperor died out of fear that he may lose his
life. Most scholars believe it was written around 550. It was a Paradigm Shift
that occurred in 538 with Justinian more interested in Theology than in being a
Soldier and he started to publish on coins himself standing with an earth and
cross in his hand. A very similar style of coin was also found with Constantine
the Great. This is why the real fall of Rome is 538 and it is also the starting
calculation point for the Holy Roman Empire and it would continue until 1798
with the capture of the papacy by Napoleon’s troops. Just
like Procopius, Bolton was also standing where only a few are privileged to
stand. He also was silently and secretly keeping notes and observed with technical
focus piercing into every event not to miss anything. Unlike Procopius who
decided to publish the End of the Roman Empire as the characters of Justinian
and his wife Theodora, after the death of the emperor, Bolton went ahead with
Simon and Schuster and published character assassination while Trump is still
in office. Bolton
said in an interview on Tuesday 23rd of 2020 that he wrote the book
for the liberals and conservatives and anyone with no philosophy in mind. It is
hard to believe how anyone can write something without a philosophy. Let us say
philosophy was playing a silent navigating part but he did not interfere with
those strong currents in his thinking. He is known to be a Lutheran by religion
but how religious he is, is not clear. Some of the events or people involved is
not fact-checked and not correct or may not be correct. Some things are his side
of the coin based on the eye of the beholder. Now the most devastating admission
of Bolton is that he says he kept notes but that he burnt them at one point.
Thus, he relied on his “good memory” to use his words, to write the Book. That
raises a yellow card. It
may be that the Book is a revenge against Trump for kicking him out of his
office. One thing is for certain, Trump faces five pistons against him for
re-election: Corona, BLM, Bolton’s Book and the corruption of postal mail
election, and finally Daniel 11:45 statement that the one who moved the embassy
from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem “will come to his end and no one for him”. Whether
that will happen in November this year, or after his next term or during,
remains to be seen. The Time of Trouble
is to follow after that and judging by the role the marxistic coated BLM (see the
Youtube of Voddie Baucham with even Martin Luther King as a Marxist) is
operating, the Time of Trouble works
on a lawless gut-feeling mechanism maybe? A primitive reaction of borderless and
limitless revenge with a love of anarchism. The
antidote for BLM is of course ALM (all lives matters) but better still BTM:
Biblical Truth Matters. (Koot
van Wyk reflecting on 25th of June 2020)