Top Tweets for #Counterreformation

(🧵1 of 3) “A History of the Changing Sentiment Regarding the Identity of Antichrist from 1517 - Present.” (⚠️ Are you hoodwinked by Jesuit misdirection?) ⏳STEP BACK IN TIME… ⌛️ It was a rough year for the Catholic Church in 1517. On Oct. 31st of that year Luther nailed his 95 theses document to the door of the Wittenberg Chapel on campus inviting the campus priest to debate/discuss these 95 points of contention professor Luther had with #TheChurch™️. This was not well received, and before long the #ProtestantReformation was born. Ecclesiastical authorities refused a discussion on these 95 points of contention with this Wittenberg priest and by 1521, during the time when the Church hunted down heretics to kill them, Luther began publishing pamphlets detailing how the pope fulfilled the requirements for the #SeatOfAntichrist. The Pope grew understandably tired of being called Antichrist by Luther and his ilk, and so mounted the #CounterReformation in 1534 by establishing the Society of Jesus under the direction of Ignatius of Loyola. The race was on to undermine the ideology of the Reformation by these esteemed intellectuals of the Catholic Church known as Jesuits. Nothing controversial so far, it’s basic church history. The ultimate goal of the counter reformation was to find a substitute for the Protestant antichrist, using the biblical antichrist criteria and advocating a new way of interpreting them which would lead to the identification of some other entity as the nefarious character. If successful, the Jesuits could eventually undermine all of Protestant Bible prophecy interpretation, and likely extinguish the protest entirely. ✅ Jesuit Priest - Francisco Ribera (1537-1591): And a glimmer of hope for accomplishing misdirection came by the pen of Jesuit Priest Francisco Ribera in his 1590 commentary on Revelation ‘In Sacrum Beati Ioannis Apostoli, & Evangelistiae Apocalypsin Commentarij.’ Ribera proposed that the first several chapters of Revelation pertained exclusively to Ancient Rome, and the rest of Revelation to a future 3 and 1/2 literal years immediately prior to the Second Coming of Jesus. It is said of Ribera: “He taught that Antichrist would be a single individual, who would rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, abolish the Christian religion, deny Christ, be received by the Jews, pretend to be God, and conquer the world—and all in this brief space of three and one-half years.” [Froom, The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, 2:489–490.] ✅ Jesuit Priest - Manuel de Lacunza (1731-1801): De Lacunza provided two major contributions to undermine Protestant prophetic understanding: 1. Lacunza wrote that there would be general apostasy of the Catholic Church which would make the church part of the Anti-Christ deception. 2.Lacunza stated Jesus will return TWICE in the #SecondComing. By his pen, the concept of the PreTrib Rapture is born. The church is raptured before the persecution of the #GreatTribulation so that they escape the reign of Ribera’s 3 and 1/2 year reign of Anti-Christ. The remainder of the souls who find salvation in Christ during the Great Tribulation are raptured by Him at the Second Coming. ✅ Presbyterian Preacher - Edvard Irving, later converted to Catholicism. By the early 1800’s, Ribera’s Bible commentary was collecting dust on the shelves of church libraries around the world and de Lacunza’s academic works in the Catholic Church had mostly been banned. A Presbyterian minister of the Church of Scotland named Edvard Irving discovered Lacunza’s chief work on prophecy titled ‘The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty,” and being deeply impressed by it, he translated it from Spanish into English himself in 1827. He then endeavored to teach de Lacunza’s theory on prophecy along with others far and wide in the English Language.