I was browsing ebooks on Amazon and their algorithm pointed me to the book “The 70 Weeks” by Robert Caringola. I never heard this man’s name, so I doubted he was an Adventist, and sure enough he is not. But he shares our understanding of the 70 weeks prophecy, as well as our historicist approach to interpreting prophecy.
Not only is Caringola not an Adventist, he did not learn the 70 weeks prophecy from an Adventist. He learned it in 1981 in England, from a Pentecostal minister in Farringdon, Sunderland, named David Campbell. Likewise, David Campbell seems to have gotten it not from an Adventist but from Henry Grattan Guinness who, although little remembered today, was a major figure in late 19th Century English Protestantism. Several of Guinness’s books are available online, and reading them is much like reading any Seventh-day Adventist writer of the same era.
Obviously, there are Christian theologians out there who know nothing about Adventism but who reject preterism and futurism for the same reason we do—they are Jesuit inventions designed to point the finger of prophecy away from the papacy.
In the foreword, Charles Jennings tells us that the 70 weeks prophecy is “the greatest and most significant Messianic prophecy found within the pages of the Canon of divinely inspired Scripture” and yet:
The Seventy Weeks of Daniel has been so abused and misused by Futurist prophecy “experts” that in many cases it has constituted the raping of sacred Scripture. In their ignorance, but most often, their deliberate blindness, the modern prophecy “experts” continue to espouse the lifeless theories of the Jesuits and their evangelical converts.
In his plain and straightforward approach, the author clearly explains the truth of Scripture that was once known and believed by the saints of long-ago and the stalwarts of the Protestant Reformation. . . . In this modern religious environment when cowardice has invaded the pulpit, the Historicist approach to the study of eschatology is a bold return to the faith of the ancient Hebrew Prophets, the first-century Apostles, and the fathers of the Protestant Reformation.
In exposing the falsehood of dispensational futurism, the author of this book has done a great service to all Christendom by bringing to the light of day the Historicist viewpoint which has been pushed out of reach of most Christians by misguided ‘men of the cloth.
A hearty “Amen!” to that, and yet we’ve not even begun the book.
Caringola writes, “The seventy weeks reveal to mankind the exact year that Messiah the Prince came, appearing on the earth in His public ministry.” “Daniel’s seventy weeks began in the days of the Medo-Persian empire, under the reign of King Artaxerxes I. The time measure began in the year 457 B.C.”
Why then do so many Bible-believing Christians not understand this? Because they have been brain-washed into believing futurism. And where does futurism come from? “You will be shocked,” writes, Caringola, “to discover that Rome’s Jesuits are responsible for birthing both of the most commonly held eschatological positions taught today.”
The Jesuits taught preterism and futurism specifically to hide the central fact revealed by the historicist approach to prophecy: the man of sin, the anti-Christ is the papacy. That the anti-Christ would emerge from the Latin church was understood by the pre-Nicene fathers, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus. And of course the Reformers—Luther, Calvin, etc.—knew that the papacy was the anti-Christ.
The day-year principle of prophetic interpretation, with its spanning of the middle ages, fingers the papacy. Writes Caringola,
“Antichrist was understood to be a dynasty of men who would fulfill the role of the ‘little horn’ in Daniel chapter seven, and ‘persecute the saints of the most high…until a time, and times, and the dividing of time.’ This is calculated to be 1,260 days. But, as we will discover on our journey for prophetic truth, in prophecies other than the seventy weeks, days can and do stand for years!
“Futurism was formulated in the heat of Reformation and Counter-Reformation fury. It is designed for one purpose only: safeguarding the papacy from the scathing attacks of the Protestants!”
Caringola explains how the Jesuits, Francisco Ribera (1537 - 1591) and Robert Bellarmine (1542-1591) founded futurism, whereas another Jesuit, Luis de Alcazar, founded preterism. It was Ribera who introduced the error that Daniel 9’s 70th week was still in the future, exactly the scenario painted by Hal Lindsey and more recent futurist expositors.
Who brought these views into Protestantism? In the early 19th Century, most Protestant theologians and prophecy expositors were still historicists. Around 1826, S.R. Maitland (1792-1866), librarian to the Archbishop of Canterbury, discovered these writings in the library of the Church of England and published them in tract form. This roughly corresponded to the “Oxford Movement” of the 1830s, the purpose of which was to de-Protestantize the Church of England and thereby Great Britain herself. Error began pouring into Britain’s Protestant mainstream.
Maitland was magnified and popularized by John Nelson Darby, of the Plymouth Brethren. Darby wrote several volumes promoting this view of prophecy, and he influence many people, most notably Cyrus Ingerson Scofield. Scofield’s annotated reference Bible adopted futurism and dispensationalism, and this view of prophecy gradually became the dominant view in evangelicalism on both sides of the Atlantic.
Caringola has dispensed with the dispensationalists; he believes momentum against the dispensationalists is building, and hopes there will be a return to the views of previous expositors, such as H. G. Guinness, who wrote:
Is not the Papacy sufficiently diverse from all the rest of the kingdoms of western Europe to identify it as the little horn? What other ruling monarch of Christendom ever pretended to apostolic authority, or ruled men in the name of God? Does the pope dress in royal robes? Nay, but in priestly garments. Does he wear a crown? Nay, but a triple tiara, to show that he reigns in heaven, earth, and hell! Does he wield a sceptre? Nay, but a crosier or crook, to show that he is the good shepherd of the Church. Do his subjects kiss his hand? Nay, but his toe! Verily this power is “diverse” from the rest, both in great things and in little. It is small in size, gigantic in its pretensions.
Caringola doesn’t understand everything just as Seventh-day Adventists do. He errs, for example, in throwing the baby of the tribulation out with the bathwater of the dispensationalist pre-tribulation rapture; but Scripture is clear that believers will experience a terrible time of trouble just before the Second Coming. (Mat. 24:21-22; Daniel 12:1)
On the whole, however, this is an amazingly good book. God will not allow Adventists to hoard all the truth. Almost all of what we believe is out there, believed by a few other Christians. If we don’t teach it loud and long, the rocks will cry out.