Page 203 - Daniel

history. The third view, which is the futuristic interpretation, is the only
one that provides the possibility of literal fulfillment of this prophecy.

It has been enthusiastically presented that the church is the fifth
kingdom of Daniel’s prophecy, that the Son of Man’s coming is His first
coming to the earth, and that the church is responsible for the decline of
the Roman Empire. But nothing is stranger to church history than this
interpretation. It is questionable whether the Roman Empire had any

serious opposition from the Christian church or that the growing power
of the church contributed in a major way to its downfall. Edward
Gibbon, in his classic work on the Roman Empire, gives “four principal
causes of the ruin of Rome, which continued to operate over a period of
more than a thousand years: 1. The injuries of time and nature. 2. The
hostile attacks of the barbarians and Christians. 3. The use and abuse of
the materials. 4. The domestic quarrels of the Romans.” 59

Undoubtedly, the church’s growing presence in the declining Roman
Empire was a factor in its history, and Gibbon includes “the rise,

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establishment, and sects of Christianity” in a detailed list of factors
contributing to the Empire’s decline and fall. Yet it is quite clear that the
church was not the major factor and in no way can be identified as a
sudden and catastrophic cause for the fall of the Roman Empire.
Although the church dominated Europe during the Middle Ages, its
power began to be disrupted by the Protestant Reformation at the very
time that the Roman Empire was gasping its last in the fifteenth century.

Although the power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church is
recognized by everyone, it does not fulfill the prophecy of Daniel 7:23,
that the fourth kingdom “shall devour the whole earth, and trample it
down, and break it to pieces.” This would require figurative
interpretation of prophecy far beyond any correspondence to the facts of
either prophecy or history.

Far better is the interpretation that does honor to the text and justifies
belief in its accuracy as prophetic revelation. This point of view contends
that the present church age is not included in the Old Testament’s

prophetic foreviews. The first and second comings of Christ are
frequently spoken of in the same breath, as for instance in Isaiah 61:1–2,
which Christ expounded in Luke 4:18–19. Significantly, Christ quoted
only the portion dealing with His first coming and stopped in the middle