As we noted, Conrad Vine was at Country Life Church on the weekend of June 27 and 28. In Conrad’s Friday evening address, he discussed the “three horns.”
Adventist prophetic interpretation holds that the pagan Roman Empire was overtaken by, and divided among, ten “barbarian” tribes, represented by ten horns. The prophet Daniel tells that a “little horn” speaking boastfully uprooted three of these kingdoms:
“While I was thinking about the horns, there before me was another horn, a little one, which came up among them; and three of the first horns were uprooted before it. This horn had eyes like the eyes of a human being and a mouth that spoke boastfully.” Dan. 7:8
The context shows that the little horn was papal Rome, but which three horns did the the papacy uproot?
This was a source of controversy in early Adventism; ironically, it was one of the items discussed in the 1888 General Conference session in Minneapolis, where a majority of the delegates rejected Jones and Waggoner’s message of righteousness by faith, which Ellen White believed would lead to the the latter rain, the “Loud Cry,” the finishing of the work, and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
Adventists eventually settled on the Heruli, Ostrogoths, and Vandals as the three tribes that the papacy uprooted, but in this lecture, Conrad Vine argues that the three tribes were the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, and the Visigoths. The Franks under Clovis defeated the Visigoths around 508 AD, The Vandals and then the Ostrogoths were defeated by Emperor Theodosius’ remarkably capable general Belisarius.
As Elder Vine points out, the reason for the hostility against the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and Vandals is that these tribes were Arian Christians; they did not subscribe to the Nicene Creed. More to the point, the kings of these “barbarian” tribes had a much more Christ-like attitude toward freedom of conscience than did the Catholic bishops, holding that the role of kings was to keep the peace, not to force the conscience with regard to the fine points of Christian doctrine. By contrast, the bishops of the church wanted their secular rulers to use the power of the throne to enforce orthodox christology. So at the heart of the the uprooting of the three “horns” was a struggle over freedom of conscience; the Arians believed in freedom of conscience, the Nicene Creed Catholics did not.
The uprooting of the last of the three “horns,” the Ostrogoths, was accomplished when Belisarius, in the course of successfully defending Rome from an Ostrogoth siege during the winter of 537-538 AD, deposed the pope chosen by the Arian Ostrogoths, Silverius, and replaced him with Vigilius. Hence, 538 AD marks the beginning of the 1260 years (also called the 42 months, and the “time, times, and half a time”—Dan. 7:25; 12:7; Rev. 11:2-3; 12:6, 14; 13:5) of papal supremacy, which ended in 1798, when revolutionary France deposed Pope Pius VI.
My own commentary (Conrad Vine did NOT say this): It is interesting that the pioneers who worked out this area of prophecy were mostly Arians, so they had no trouble seeing the christologically orthodox Catholics as the “bad guys” and the Arians as the “good guys.” Between about 1890 and 1980 the SDA Church gradually moved from Arianism to strong Trinitarianism, but today there is a backlash against the Trinity or, at a minimum, the wording of fundamental belief number two (which wording is nowhere found in Scripture). The church is trying to keep this conversation on a subterranean level, but if you browse youtube, you will find hundreds of videos posted by groups such as “The Seventh-day Church of Revelation.” An Arian of my acquaintance attended Conrad’s lecture at the Country Life Church, and afterward we discussed how this view of prophecy feeds into the new anti-Trinitarian sentiment. (Again, this paragraph contains my thoughts, NOT those of Conrad Vine.)