Whore of Babylon

I'm a liberal yet catholic, for some that's hard to understand. Once you get past the belief that many have that liberals don't believe in God, to be catholic with all of the many beliefs that the Church holds that are in conflict with liberal beliefs is unique I admit. That is not to say I support all of the things my church is against, I don't. However I prefer to stick with my faith "warts and all" so the saying goes rather than to go elsewhere. Does that make me a bad catholic? Probably to some but if God has issues with me he'll deal with me when we meet face to face. That said on to what bugged me enough to write about.

I post on a message board, excite sound off poll of the day. I have for several years. Sometimes religion comes up, I have no problem discussing religion. When I first started there I wasn't very sure about my faith, I was going thru a period of time when I questioned God's existance. However even then this tendency to Catholic bash bothered me. Last night there was a discussion about religion which turned to some anti-catholic stuff. One regular poster suggested I read Hunt's book "A woman rides the Beast", then later another poster made a semi joke that myself and another poster were the "Whores of Babylon".

So I started thinking.....and when I start to think I start to research...Now I'm pretty familiar with Revelations, but what I want to focus on here is how this whole Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon thing got started in the first place.

Martin Luther was not a fan of the Catholic Church, he and possibly Huss before him wanted to destroy the Catholic Church. Luther identified the sea beast as the Holy Roman Empire, and the land beast as the papacy. This is the first time the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy had been identified as the beasts in Revelation. Other Reformation leaders, especially Calvin, believed the same. The Reformation leaders soon developed a new school of interpretation. It held that Catholicism was an apostate church and was the whore of Babylon and had persecuted true Christians ever since Constantine's time, and that the papacy was antichrist.

What's amazing to me is that people buy this bs. Why did Luther write things like this? Well it doesn't take a rocket scientist (or an expert in theology) to figure that out. He wanted people to see the Catholic Church as evil and join him in leaving it. So what could you possibly focus on to convince people that the Catholic Church was so bad? Revelations, the book of the Bible that scares the majority of people. Luther felt he was living near the end of the millennium, the end of the world. It's obvious he was wrong on that one as the world didn't end. Yet today people like Hunt still support this type of misinformation.

There is some controversy as to who wrote Revelations, many believe it was John, some do not, but let's ask some other questions. When was Revelations written? Let's use the standard belief that Revelations was written after Jesus had been gone about 60 years, somewhere around 90 AD. Now when is it believed the Catholic Church started? The Catholic Church celebrates it's birthday on Pentecost Sunday. We believe it was on this day that the Church was born. The Jewish feast of Pentecost is celebrated 50 days after Passover, and Jews from all over would have gathered in Jerusalem for this feast. After Jesus died and rose from the dead, and after he ascended to His Father, 50 days after Passover, the Church was born by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But, did the pope and the vatican system even exist during the time Revelations was written? No, of course not. That did not happen until the early 300s AD. At the time of John the church was founded from the remaining Apostles and those that followed them. St John formed the episcopal office established in Asia Minor. So that would mean that the very man believed to have written Revelations also created what would be the Whore of Babylon? Sorry, but I don't buy that as a theory. Even if John didn't write Revelations, this theory still makes no sense since John was important to the creation of the early foundations.

So then the question Who really is the Whore of Babylon begs to be answered. If it's not what Luther tried to convince us of then who?

There are those who believe it Babylon means Pagan Rome. Then there are those who take it to mean a general interpretation, in the words of biblical scholar Robert W. Wall, she is: "The ‘global village’ of godless power, which determines daily life for every person at any time in human history". In Old Testament Scripture the ancient city of Babylon stood for the power structure of evil that opposed God. It is Babylon the Great versus the New Jerusalem. Just as the New Jerusalem represents the perfection and eternal state of the kingdom of God, Babylon the Great represents the kingdom of humanity, which is to be destroyed.

I believe it is that interpretation that Revelations warns us about. St. John isn't warning us about the Catholic Church, he's warning us about ourselves. What does Babylon the Great represent? It is a symbol that stands for all the ungodly religious-political-social-economic systems that humans have created. Babylon is simply "the world" (1 John 2:15). The world system depicted under this symbol would be that one that does not reflect God’s nature of love, and which in turn enslaves mankind.

It's unfortunate that Luther choose to try to suggest the Catholic Church as something evil for his own purposes. What is even more unfortunate is that this myth still continues today thru men like Hunt. This purposeful avoidance of what Revelations is really warning us of does nothing to help mankind. So perhaps the real question might be who's side was Luther and Hunt really on?

Some of the work I used to research this there were more but these are important ones:

http://www.catholic.com/library/Hunting_the_Whore_of_Babylon.asp

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08355a.htm

http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/534901

http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/RsvReve.html