Mystery Babylon as an Adulteress

The more technical arguments for making Mystery Babylon Jerusalem don't hold up at all.  What does hold up are the more thematic connections to themes in the Hebrew Bible about her as a wife of YHWH engaged in Harlotry with The World.

The problem is a lot of Christians are uncomfortable with accepting that that could be us, we think The Church is supposed to the one people of God who won't fall into the same pitfalls that Samaria and Jerusalem fell into.  Even when more fringe elements are criticizing the mainstream Church it's usually in the context of wanting to deny that they actually count as The Church, as legitimately part of the Body and Bride of Christ.

So Protestants and Evangelicals and Torah Keepers point out the ways in which Mystery Babylon can apply to the Catholic Church, but are unwilling to see how we've been guilty of the same basic sins in our own way.

I'm not an Historicist in remotely the traditional sense.  But I do think it's fascinating how the clues in Revelation about Mystery Babylon both point to Rome and to her being either The or A Church.  Meaning on some level however indirectly this book that even the most skeptical critics can't date to later then the mid second century predicted Rome becoming Christian.

The Revelation is drawing on Old Testament imagery, but it's directed at The Church, at Seven Churches in Asia Minor.  And the Jezebel of Thyatira is associated with a lot of the same imagery as the Harlot of Revelation 17.

However the time when Rome became Christian is also the time when OG Rome on the Tiber River ceases to be the only candidate for who Rome is, because that is when Constantinople was founded.

In my view the only cities eligible to be considered candidates for the Seven Hilled city of Revelation are ones that define themselves that way as a positive because they want to be seen as an heir to Rome.  The main three candidates are modern Rome, Constantinople/Istanbul and Moscow.

God's judgments are for correction, this Harlot no matter who she is should not be seen as being permanently rejected, this all goes back to Ezekiel 16.

I have to admit I've spent much of the last year or two trying to be convinced of a form of Post-Millennialism, The Revivalist form however is the only form I'd accept.  I don't want to be a Prophet of Doom predicting this world has to get a lot worse before it can get better.

And I understand the Post-Mil and Partial Preterist arguments about Revelation 20.  But in my look at Church History I see the Church as fitting the Revivalist Post-Mill interpretation of that Chapter for a lot less then a Thousand years, not more.  We were a Camp set apart and separate from The World not even three hundred years.  Only the Ancient Church of the East (often misleadingly called Nestorians) even came close to being like that for a full thousand years.

What I have become more open to are elements of Historicism, but not the Day=Year theory, so if someone has a form of it that works without that nonsense, point me to it and I'll give it a shot.