What are Futurism and Preterism?
The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology says that futurism “argues that Revelation looks beyond the first century to the period immediately before the end times. Thus the book was not written for those who received it, but for those living much later. Jesuit scholars after the Reformation refined this approach to prove that current attempts to identify the Pope as the Antichrist could not possibly be true since the Antichrist will not be revealed until far into the future, just before the Parousia (Christ’s Second Coming).”i The same book explains that preterism sees Revelation only in terms of its immediate historical context: Revelation [is] described [as] the plight of Christians in the late first century, and its apocalyptic symbols pointed directly to [the city of] Rome as the church’s persecutor…Most modern [preterist] interpreters…insist that the book was never intended to predict conditions or events beyond the first century.ii According to futurism, the Antichrist is still to c
