In contrast to his interpretation of
the seven seals, Chytraeus’ exegesis of Apc 12 is very much his own. He sees
the text as expounding both the story of the original sin (after Primasius) and
the spiritual struggle that the church undergoes every day because of the
original sin. He begins by reminding his readers, after Primasius, that the
serpent who seduced Eve was the devil and that Gen. 3.15 contains a prophecy of
lasting enmity between the woman’s and the serpent’s brood, with the woman’s
brood crushing the serpent’s head.
The devil is not confined to the
Scripture, warns Chytraeus. Contrary to what some think, it is not an empty
name used to frighten people, but a real adversary who chooses as his targets
pious people in the church. Not only a commentary on Gen. 3.15, Apc 12 is also
a warning to the faithful on how to avoid the snares of the devil. (Explicatio,
1564, 233)
Chytraeus divides the chapter into
three parts: a description of the chief protagonists, that is, the church and
the devil; the battle against the devil waged by Michael—that is, Christ—and
his victory, which guarantees that the faithful will be victorious in all
subsequent battles against the devil; and the devi’s incursions against the
church.
The orientation of Chytraeus’ exegesis
is very strongly Christocentric, which means that, although he announces the
woman as representing the church, he is finally obliged to also see her as a
symbol of the Virgin Mary. His initial interpretation is again reminiscent of
Bullinger’s: The church is pregnant with Christ in the sense of wanting him to
be born. (Explicatio, 1564, 234-235) However, the similarity with
Bullinger stopes here: Chytraeus goes on to say that the devil persecutes the
church in various ways, so that it is constantly expelled from various parts of
the world. Just as the church once found refuge in the desert among the
gentiles, so now it has found refuge for 1,260 days on the islands of the
Baltic Sea. The attempt to flatter the king of Sweden is woven very skillfully
into the traditional exegesis of the church finding refuse among the gentiles.
However, the description of the birth in Apc 12.5 refers not to the church,
insists Chytraeus, but to the birth of the human Jesus The woman in that verse
is therefore necessarily the Virgin Mary. (Irena Backus, Reformation
Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg [Oxford Studies
in Historical Theology; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 126)