Copyright 2023
by
Jerry Huerta
In “Exposing the Seven Heads of Revelation”[1] it
was confirmed that in Revelation 17 the scarlet beast “was” before the sixth
king and revives fully as the eighth.
And here is the mind which hath
wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And
there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet
come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space. And the beast that
was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into
perdition. (Revelation 17:9-11)
The proper reading of the passage undermines the preterist
and futurist’s interpretation of Revelation. In the preterists’ rendering, it
cannot be reasonably held that in John’s time, history confirms one emperor
preceded a sixth one and ended up living again as the eighth. In the futurist’s
reading, the antichrist or eighth king cannot have existed before the Roman
Empire, which is the king that “is” in their view.
The passage from Revelation is a conundrum that is only
solved by grasping that the Spirit took John to the future to witness the
judgment of the harlot Babylon and the kings are kingdoms commencing with
ancient Babylon. From this perspective, the king that “is” represents an entity
of our time (the beast rising out of the earth, and the seventh is the image
that it forms). From this perspective, the kings of the earth are already in
bed with the harlot, and the earth’s inhabitants are already intoxicated by her
doctrines, which is her “wine” (Jeremiah 51:7; Revelation 18:3).
And there came one of the seven
angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come
hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon
many waters: With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and
the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her
fornication. (Revelation 17:1-2)
The reason for the woman's condemnation is a matter of
debate. Some argue that it's because she was unfaithful to God, as mentioned in
Jeremiah 3:1-3, while others believe it's due to her corrupt nature, as
described in Nahum 3:1-5 when referring to Nineveh. The first viewpoint
suggests that she broke her covenant with God and its judgment time, while the
latter implies that she was wicked from the start. The solution to this dilemma
is revealed in the next chapter,
And he cried mightily with a strong
voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the
habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every
unclean and hateful bird. (Revelation 18:2)
Egeneto, translated “is become,” signifies a change
in condition, which substantiates Babylon in Revelation 17 is judged for her
infidelity to God, her fallen state, as in Jeremiah 3:1-3. Jeremiah 5:27 also
supports this rendering in the example where the prophet wrote, “as a cage is
full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit: therefore, they are become
great, and waxen rich,” concerning covenant violations. And the NT is not
silent about a great falling away before Christ’s return (Matthew 5:13, 24:12;
2 Thessalonians 2:1–12; 1 Timothy 4:1–3; Romans 14:10; 2 Corinthians 5:10).
Furthermore, the seventh and final church, Laodicea, is judged for just such a
fallen condition,
And unto the angel of the church of
the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true
witness, the beginning of the creation of God; I know thy works, that thou art
neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art
lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because
thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and
knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and
naked. (Revelation 3:14-17)
The state of being rich and increased with goods and yet
being wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked is a significant reason God’s
people were judged in the past, as witnessed in Jeremiah. The state is also
indicative of a market-driven society in which the merchants achieve elevated
status, which is also linked with the harlot Babylon,
For all nations have drunk of the
wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed
fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the
abundance of her delicacies. (Revelation 18:3)
The consequences of these links to past covenantal
violations and the harlot Babylon undermine the preterist and futurist’s
renderings. Preterists maintain the harlot represents the great city of Rome or
the ancient city of Jerusalem. Yet, pagan Rome did not “become” the habitation
of devils; inherently, it was pagan; they worshiped gods and goddesses. And the
partnership of the Church, God’s people, with the wealthy merchants of the
earth is a contemporary story, not a past one. The Jews
in Christ’s time could not be regarded as enriching the earth’s merchants; the
Roman Empire had enriched them. And feudalism destroyed the status of the
merchants when Rome fell. As for futurism, the enrichment of the merchants, for
the most part, has been ongoing for over two hundred years; it is not some
future phenomenon. The most extraordinary rise of the merchants is a
contemporary phenomenon commencing with the late eighteenth century that
continues to this day.
With the rise of the papacy and feudalism, the merchants of
the earth suffered a societal downfall. Before feudalism, the merchants of the
Mediterranean region had attained great status through the Roman Empire. A
secularist, lawyer, law professor, and author Michael Tigar wrote a book
concerning the rise of capitalism in which he comments,
To regard Roman legal concepts as
applicable to “all peoples” was not so formidable a conceit. Between 280 B.C.
and the destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War in 146 B.C., Rome had
forcibly conquered most of the lands bordering on the Mediterranean. A
village-based agricultural economy was rapidly being replaced by the class
structure of the Empire, in which the dominant figures
were traders, bankers, merchants, landowners, and the military power which
protected their interests. The labor force which fueled this system was
slave or half-free, recruited mainly from the conquered and colonized peoples.
The power of the ruling class could commit the Roman state to the enforcement
of a commercial law which permitted trade.[2]
(It must be noted here that all past empires, such as the
Babylonian, Persian, and Greek, were obtained through religion, raising the
status of the merchants, and facilitating war.[3]) With
the fall of Rome, the Western dominion became feudal. It returned to a
village-based agricultural economy in which the merchants became social
outcasts, which was upheld by the papacy. “Profit-taking was considered a form
of usury, and the merchant’s soul was thought to be in jeopardy.”[4] As
this stage developed the merchants, ultimately identified as the “bourgeois”
for city dweller, were not content with their status but continually fomented
rebellion to improve their status again,
merchants, town dwellers, or
bourgeois— call them what you will— were advancing by open revolution,
subversion, and economic chicanery ill-understood by their “betters.” All four
groups were either outside the law or against it.[5]
This essay will focus on the role of merchants as an
antagonist in the narrative of Revelation, particularly their association with
the harlot. While the history of their rise since the fall of Rome is not
within the scope of this essay, a market-driven society is a crucial part of
the narration of Revelation. In this story, the rich merchants and the harlot
Babylon play a significant role as antagonists at the return of Christ. Tigar's
work sheds light on these merchants’ modern rise to power,
Finally, there are the laws that
the merchants made for themselves, the legal system they fashioned to serve
their own interests. First they set up tribunals to settle disputes among
themselves, then wrested or cajoled concessions from spiritual and temporal
princes in order to establish zones of free commerce, and finally— over a
period of centuries— swept to power over nations.[6]
Under feudalism, the papacy struggled with the merchants. In
modern times the Protestants secularized society, which enriched the merchants.
Sociologist George M. Thomas writes of this phenomenon,
The Protestant Reformation in
addressing specifically religious issues raised by the nature of the feudal
church articulated a rational cosmos… Ecclesiastical bureaucracy was
delegitimated at several levels, resulting in a transfer of authority to the
secular state and local institutions… The reformation found its first alliance
with the territorial prince, partly because of a mutual interest in undermining
imperial church authority, but basically because of a similar ontology based on
rationalizing principles and common acceptance of a rational central authority.
The spread of the Reformation throughout the town councils must be interpreted
in the larger political contexts of its isomorphism with
the prince as well as with the town’s increasing dependence on the
incorporation into the central authority.[7]
Ontology is the philosophical argument that upholds a
worldview. Rationalism is a worldview that attempts to exclude
religion and irrational responses in determining the organization of society,
which ultimately secularizes society. Thomas reveals that the politics of the
Protestants and the princes were isomorphic, similar in form and relations, in
their advancement of a bureaucracy in which “the dominant figures were traders,
bankers, merchants, landowners, and the military power which protected their
interests.” An article in The Quarterly Journal of Economics by authors Davide
Cantoni, Jeremiah Dittmar, and Noam Yuchtman substantiates the same,
While the Reformation was a
religious movement, we find that its unintended consequence was to promote
economic secularization: a significant shift in the balance of power toward
secular authorities and a sharp and immediate reallocation of resources toward
secular purposes… the pre-Reformation era can be understood as an equilibrium
in which a monopolist religious producer (the Catholic Church) provided
political legitimacy to secular authorities at a high price—charged in the form
of control over resources, tax exemptions, and some degree of political power.2
The Reformation represented a competitive shock in the market for salvation…
Protestant reformers offered a popular, lower-cost alternative to the Catholic
Church. Crucially, this shock to the market for salvation also affected the
market for political legitimacy. During the Reformation, the value of Catholic
legitimacy fell and the bargaining power of secular rulers vis- ` a-vis
religious elites rose. Protestant reformers’ need to strike a bargain with
secular lords meant they would accept a lower price in exchange for conferring
legitimacy. Where Protestants were willing to grant secular authorities
extensive control of church resources, the need to maintain doctrinal
consistency restricted the bargains Catholics could offer.[8]
Historian Eric J. Hobsbawm also affirms the lack of pushback
from the Protestants against the merchant’s rise to power and secularization,
And yet within Christianity there
were signs of counter-attack again the advance of secularization. Not so much
in the Protestant world… as among the Catholics.[9]
According to historians like Thomas, secularism followed
individualism. Individualism rebelled against authority for autonomy,
citizenship, and the franchise, which had a significant impact, especially
during the First and Second Great Awakenings in America. The Protestant creed
on priesthood challenged authority when the Enlightenment did the same. Both
facilitated the merchants’ restructuring of society, demoting the Church to the
private sphere. Individualism placed a new emphasis on autonomy, challenging
“communal obligations” that hindered the pursuit of
status through wealth and economic growth. Professor Bernard Bailyn, an expert in early American history, has
written about this shift away from communal obligations during commercial
struggles between the orthodox Puritans and merchants,
the first generation Puritan
merchants agreed that religious considerations were highly relevant to the
conduct of trade, that commerce, being one of the many forms of human
intercourse, required control by moral laws. But some of the newly arrived
merchants, as they assumed power over the exchange of goods, felt the
restrictive effect of these ideas when acted upon by a determined ministry and
magistracy. In their confused reaction to ethical control as well as in the
progress of their business enterprises lay seeds of social change.[10]
Bailyn explains that Christian ministry and magistracy aimed
to foster a close-knit community where everyone cared for each other’s welfare.
However, the liberal Protestants supported the merchants’ liberal economic
worldviews. Bernard reveals that, ultimately, it was the liberal merchants who
emerged victorious,
moral injunctions against taking
advantage of a neighbor’s distress and violating the laws of justice in
business dealings lost their urgency.[11]
In the early days of the nation’s establishment and the
onset of the Industrial Revolution, merchants continued to gain economic
hegemony while diminishing the Church’s influence in the public square. As
Thomas revealed, this trend had started with the Protestants’ intercourse with
princes to vanquish papal authority while advancing their own. This intercourse
is the harlot’s fornication in Revelation. As Bernard reveals, this trend found
its way to America, and Thomas reveals that revivalism advanced it. Both
Thomas, Tigar, and Bailyn agree with a professor of sociology George M. Thomas’
view that the rise of merchants led to a decline in communal responsibilities
starting with the late eighteenth century,
With the American polity already
showing high levels of individualism, market penetration in the North and
Midwest resulted in an intensification of individualistic nationalism…
Rationalization undermined local communal obligations, and rational authority
was located diffusely in the nation and national institutions such as law and
elections. Individualism and rationality were directly coded into the conception
of the people, primarily through the categories of citizenship, progress, and
civilization. Thus, as in other such systems, the concept of the individual was
abstract and collectivized as the people and nation, and individual happiness
entered social accounting as the collective good or economic growth… Despite
the somewhat secular nature of the changes, to a great extent they were brought
about by religious movements, and revivalism was one of the most successful.
Revival religion embraced the new ontology, articulating it within already
individualistic nationalism. In some respects, revivalism manifested
secularization. Deism in many ways was built into main stream Christianity by
revivalism’s viewing God as the creator of a mechanical universe. Nature was
reified as “natural resources” which individuals were to use to produce he
Kingdom of God through rational action.[12]
Thomas revealed that the previously mentioned ideologies
shaped society to believe that affluence in goods and services was the basis of
“happiness,” which enriched the merchants of the earth. Here we have the motive
for Christ’s denunciation to the Church in Laodicea. This movement by the
Protestants to secularize society would ultimately lead to disestablishment in
America and the marketing of religion. Reformed evangelical theologian Mark A.
Noll reveals that disestablishment, the separation of church and state, compelled
the denominations to “compete for adherents, rather than being assigned
responsibility for parishioners as had been the almost universal European
pattern.”[13]
Noll elaborates further on this market-driven competition
for adherents,
The primary way the churches
accomplished this task was through the techniques of revival— direct, fervent
address aimed at convincing, convicting, and enlisting the individual. As Finke
describes it, this process led to “a religious market that caters to the
individual and makes religion an individual decision. Though religion is still
a group phenomenon, which relies on the support, control and rewards of the
local church, the open market stresses personal conversion and faith. Once
again, the religious decision is an individual decision set in the context of a
religious market with a wide array of diversity— a diversity that is assured by
the diversity of the population and the lack of religious regulation.”[14]
According to Noll, the phenomenon of religious revival
marketed the popular idea of salvation as an individual choice, amongst other
goods and services, making Arminianism profitable. Noll continued to delve into
the topic of revivalism riding upon disestablishment and its influence,
This combination of revivalism and
disestablishment had effects whose importance cannot be exaggerated. Analyzed
positively, the combination gave the American churches a new dynamism, a new
effectiveness in fulfilling the Great Commission, and a new vitality in
bringing the gospel to the people. Analyzed negatively, the combination of
revivalism and disestablishment meant that pragmatic concerns would prevail
over principle. What the churches required were results— new adherents— or they
would simply go out of business. Thus, the production of results had to
override all other considerations.[15]
Noll accurately observed that the Church's enthusiasm for
revivalism was tied to the Great Commission's ethos. However, Noll goes on to
reveal that the evangelicals were indifferent to the economic injustices of the
day, which he proceeds to catalog,
“liberal” in the context of the
nineteenth century, historians mean the tradition of individualism and market
freedom associated with John Locke and especially Adam Smith… The point again
is not whether evangelicals should have embraced liberal economic practice, for
a case can be made for the compatibility between evangelical Christianity and
moderate forms of market economy. The point is rather how evangelicals embraced
liberal economic practice. Again this was done without a great deal of thought.
But precisely in the antebellum period, before attention was drawn to the
economy as a moral problem, was when such thinking was needed. The most
important economic questions of the day dealt with the early growth of
industrialization. What kinds of obligations did capital and labor owe to each
other? How would the growth of large industries, first in textiles and then in
railroads, affect community life or provisions for the
disabled, aged, and infirm? Each of these questions, and many more like
them, posed a potential threat to Christian witness and to public morality.
Each of them was also the sort that could be answered only by those who had
thought through principles of Scripture, who had struggled to see how the
truths of creation, fall, and redemption applied to groups as well as to
individuals. Unfortunately, there was very little of such thinking.[16]
It must be noted that these injustices were occurring in the
quickly industrializing areas, such as the North Eastern part of the country.
It was not the evangelicals that ministered to these domains but the “established”
or leading churches, where they had imbibed the worldly doctrine of the
Enlightenment for some time. American evangelical author Nancy R. Pearcey
comments on these “established” churches,
the established churches tended to
be the first to drift into theological liberalism. The wealthier the church,
the more likely its clergy were to enjoy social status and formal academic
training— and thus also the more likely to welcome the liberalism emerging from
European universities at the time. Well before the American Revolution, leading
scholars at Harvard and Yale had become Unitarian. Instead of exhorting their
congregations to repent and be saved, they delivered elegantly styled lectures
on “reasonable religion,” with the supernatural elements increasingly stripped
away. When the First and Second Great Awakenings broke out, the liberal clergy
firmly opposed them, declaring themselves on the side of “Reason” against the
revivalists’ “religion of the heart.”[17]
The established American churches ministered to city
dwellers, traders, bankers, merchants, and real estate brokers. As Thomas
commented, these Protestants had “articulated a rational cosmos,” a deist
ontology, acknowledging only mechanical principles set by God in accord with
the Enlightenment. Pearcey suggests that the established Protestant churches
garnered wealth and status by legitimizing the city dwellers, traders, bankers,
merchants, and real estate brokers. Here is where it is written,
And the woman was arrayed in purple
and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having
a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her
fornication. (Revelation 17:4)
According to Pearcey, the evangelicals provided spiritual
guidance to the pioneers in the wilderness. However, she also acknowledges that
for various reasons, they tended to focus more on emotions rather than theology
and doctrine, leading to a neglect of the cognitive aspect of belief.[18]
Both Noll and Pearcey view this anti-intellectualism negatively. Christianity
was unable or unwilling to prevent the emergence of educated merchants in
modern times, as warned against in the scriptures. Pearcey revealed that,
Many evangelicals uncritically
absorbed the individualism that was coming into vogue in American political
life, and simply transferred it to the church.[19]
As previously stated, the partnership of the Church, God’s
people, with the wealthy merchants of the earth is a contemporary story, not a
past one. The Jews in Christ’s time could not be regarded as enriching the
earth’s merchants; the Roman Empire had enriched them. And feudalism destroyed
the status of the merchants when Rome fell. As for futurism, the enrichment of
the merchants, for the most part, has been ongoing for over two hundred years;
it is not some future phenomenon. The most extraordinary rise of the merchants
is a contemporary phenomenon commencing with the late eighteenth century that
continues to this day. And the numerous authors cited in the paper reveal that
it was the Protestants that had a great deal to do with that rise.
Religion is no longer considered
the source of serious truth claims that could potentially conflict with public
agendas. The private realm has been reduced to an “innocuous ‘play area’,” says
Peter Berger, where religion is acceptable for people who need that kind of
crutch— but where it won’t upset any important apple carts in the larger world
of politics and economics.[20]
[1] Jerry
Huerta, Exposing the Seven Heads of Revelation, https://www.academia.edu/94187668/Exposing_the_Seven_Heads_of_Revelation_by_Jerry_Huerta_copyright_2023
[2] Michael
Tigar, Law and the Rise of Capitalism, Monthly Review Press (June 1,
2000) 28 0f 348
[3]
Marsue and Jerry Huerta, Thy Kingdom Come; Re-evaluating the Historicists
Interpretation of the Revelation, Booktrail Publishing (January 4, 2022)
[4] Tigar,
Law and the Rise of Capitalism, 21 of 348
[7] George
M. Thomas, Revivalism and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press; Revised
edition (January 19, 1998), 147
[8] Davide
Cantoni, Jeremiah Dittmar, and Noam Yuchtman, “Religious Competition and
Reallocation: The Political Economy of Secularization in the Protestant
Reformation,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2018, 2037–2096.
[9] E.
J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (New American Library, 303
Inc., New York, N.Y., 1979), 261.
[10] Bernard
Bailyn, The New England Merchants In The Seventeenth Century, Harvard
University Press; Revised ed. edition (November 15, 1979), 21
[12] George
M. Thomas, Revivalism and Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation Building,
and the Market in the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of
Chicago Press, January 19, 1998), 63
[13]
Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (p. 91). Eerdmans.
Kindle Edition.
[17]
Nancy R. Pearcey, TOTAL TRUTH Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural
Captivity, Crossway; Study Guide edition (February 28, 2008), 261
[20] Ibid.,
68
This post is a postscript to the book above, which is available here.
