Oh No Not Another Apocalypse Thread By Chrysostom

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From ChatGPT:

Is the Byzantine empire the millennial kingdom?

Short answer: No — mainstream historians and theologians do not identify the Byzantine Empire as the biblical “millennial kingdom.”
But some fringe or symbolic interpretations have tried to make that connection, and I can explain why.
 

chrysostom

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From ChatGPT:

Is the Byzantine empire the millennial kingdom?

Short answer: No — mainstream historians and theologians do not identify the Byzantine Empire as the biblical “millennial kingdom.”
But some fringe or symbolic interpretations have tried to make that connection, and I can explain why.
If it was the reign of Christ, why would it end?
 

Clete

Truth Smacker
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Then why are you participating in this thread?
Because you're saying things about scripture that are false. I don't just state that they are false though, I make the argument. Theology isn't about personal opinions. At least that's true the vast majority of the time. Most Christian have no concept at all of building their doctrine, whether eschatology or any other aspect of their theology, from first principles. They just play. They effectively treat God's word like it's their own personal theological Lego set. They cram various bricks together, some more mindlessly than others, and then try to pass it off as something brilliant.

In short, your doctrine is false because you ignore nearly every objective aspect of the passages you are interpreting. You ignore who is speaking, you ignore who that person is speaking to, you are willing to even ignore the normal definitions or common words if need be. When those things aren't ignored and instead are treated as the objective biblical facts that they are, your doctrine crumbles to dust without even needing to make any further argument. Just the intuitive implications alone are sufficient to pulverize nearly everything you believe.

That's the power of first principles. The more foundation the issue the more impactful an error related to that issue will be. That's how Calvinism, for example, disintegrates by simply refuting the singular unbiblical doctrine of immutability. The error you're making with your eschatology isn't quite so foundational as that, but it's plenty foundational enough. The issue of rightly dividing the word of truth is the fork in the road where you're eschatology made a dramatically important wrong turn. Everything after that was significantly off course and moving in the wrong direction.
 

chrysostom

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The issue of rightly dividing the word of truth is the fork in the road where you're eschatology made a dramatically important wrong turn.
Only ten translations of the Bible have "rightly dividing". 50 English translations do not and that includes all the Catholic ones. So you are asking me to do something that is not in the vast majority of the bibles. Your belief allows only the analysis of what Paul wrote.
 

Clete

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Only ten translations of the Bible have "rightly dividing".
All of them have the concept though. All of them - including the original!

The original Greek word is ὀρθοτομέω. Literally is mean to cut straight or to cut correctly. It is an idiomatic expression that mean to make a correct distinction or to handle properly.

50 English translations do not and that includes all the Catholic ones.
The words may be different but the meaning is preserved. In other words, there isn't any debate on what the phrase means, many modern translation committees simply don't use the phrase "rightly dividing" because modern English does not use the phrase “rightly dividing,” and committees prefer plain functional wording.

So you are asking me to do something that is not in the vast majority of the bibles. Your belief allows only the analysis of what Paul wrote.
The concept is in every single bible you've ever touched, seen, read or heard about. Pick any bible you wish. It's there and I suspect you know its there and knew it when you wrote this post. What were you doing - hoping I didn't really know what I was talking about and that I was too lazy to spend the 15 seconds it would take to look it up?

Or is it that you are here suggesting that your Catholic bible has a teaching somewhere in it that suggests that you're on solid theological ground when you ignore the context of the passages you are trying to understand?
 

chrysostom

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The words may be different but the meaning is preserved. In other words, there isn't any debate on what the phrase means,
So you are saying one who 'rightly divides' is the same as one who 'correctly handles the word of truth'. That would explain why we need 60 different translations.
 
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