brother andrew,

In response to your remarks: "The possibility that the church itself might become corrupt and oppressive is simply beyond the horizon of realistic prophecy."

I would challenge your usage of realistic here.  Prophecy is the supernatural means of God’s revealing His will in the administration of the covenant with His people (e.g., Dt.18:14-22; cf. 13:1-5).  Certainly many if not most predictions were relatively immediate, but there is nothing un-realistic about the idea of the prophet’s visions transcending their immediate historial, political and cultural situation (even if it is couched in their historico-linguistic context).  As you admit in the case of Daniel, so with Isaiah (predicting the fall of Babylon, the rise of Persia or at least Cyrus who would be God’s ‘anointed one’ to bring Judah back to the land, and beyond that to a new heavens and earth), and so with Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel, etc. with the inauguration of the new covenant and the ensuing new testament realities of Pentecost, etc..  Indeed, your view, as stated here, undercuts the entire NT,  which understands itself (as the record of the ‘Christ event’ and its redemptive-historical implications) as the fulfillment of ‘all the prophets ‘.   

On the basis of your tenatively proposed principle, you write: "So prophecy will say something about the Rome that the church encounters or can imagine encountering but not the Rome of a corrupt medieval papacy, or the Rome of Mussolini, or the Rome of the European Union."

As I said above, it is difficult to so delimit the OT prophets - I would not then want to so constrain the prophetic visions of NT apostles.  However, I would add that in an important sense the Rome of Claudius or Nero was very different from the Rome of Domitian or Trajan.  I agree with you andrew that the references in Revelation to the beast insisting that all men bear his ‘mark’ (13:4, 15-17; 14:9; 16:2; 19:20) or be put to death (13:15-17; 14:9; 16:2; 19:20; 20:4) can be reasonably interpreted only in terms of the development of the imperial cult.  However, though the imperial cult was firmly established by his time, Nero’s perseuction against Christians was not the result of the imperial cult, but Nero’s need for a scapegoat for the great fire in Rome.  It was not until Domitian that failure to honor the emperor as god became a political offense and, as Kummel states, "persecution of Christians by the state on religious grounds took place for the first time."  The is one reason why most commentators place the composition of the Apocalypse after AD 70, during or slightly before (when the ‘writing was on the wall’, so to speak) Domitian’s reign (81-96) (cf., the testimony of Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Victorinus, Eusebius, and Jerome).