Is the Evangelical’s fascination with the End Times their undoing? Could this be the apostasy?
In this video I outline my journey with End Times theology (eschatology) and share a ‘thought experiment’ that I have been doing with my Evangelical family and friends (min 8).
Watch the video and let me know what you think.
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Is the way that the world runs today the way that is has to be?
Is the status quo the best that we can do?
In December 1999, I got a call from a newspaper reporter. They were calling pastors and religious leaders in our city to see what we were telling our people about Y2K.
When the article came out I was the only pastor who was telling their people not to worry and that the real fear was people panicking and doing stuff like pulling all of their money out of the banks.
This was especially odd because I was part of a denomination that majored on eschatology and was very end-times focused.
I had multiple friends in that group who made major purchases (like extra freezers) in preparation.
One close friend went in with another family and bought a trailer full of food and supplies and had it parked in a remote location … but then they had to worry about guns in order to protect the trailer in case of societal breakdown.
The alarm and drastic measures are telling. There is something about the way that we have been taught to read the Bible that makes us especially susceptible to panic. By calling the Bible ‘the word of god’(see W) and not distinguishing genres (see G) we end up creating a tight little system of end-times expectation that repeatedly fails us.
I became a bible-believing Christian during the cold-war era. Communist Russia was our biggest threat and ‘Christian’ bookstores and TV shows were filled with very specific projections about how current events lined up with biblical prophecy.
I was taught to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other – because they lined up!
Not understanding that apocalyptic literature in the Bible is a critique of their time and contemporary present order and a hope of future deliverance makes us vulnerable to panic in ours.
We are taught that apocalyptic elements in the Bible are predictive instead of prophetic critique and this is creating the problem that leaves us so susceptible.
In my short lifetime I have seen so many predictions come and go. I have seen layers and layers of moving onto the next thing a passage means without even acknowledging that 6 months ago we were told it was something different.
There is a sort of amnesia required to stick with this way of reading the Bible for more than a couple of years.
I have seen more than 40 antichrists come and go. Everyone from foreign leaders to Popes to Presidents have been said to be the Antichrist.
This exposes a second problem with eschatological expectation. Every time I hear the phrase ‘the Antichrist’ I know I am in trouble. The person has not done a close reading of the Bible.
If you read the 4 passages in the New Testament[1] in which this phrase appears you will be left asking why we think that a world leader is this character. The answer is that in eschatological readings there is a great deal of amalgamation.
Amalgamation happens when you take a character like ‘antichrist’ and blend it with an Old Testament character like ‘the prince’ from Daniel 9 or a the bad-guy from Revelation 13. You take all of the villains in all of apocalyptic literature and meld them into one super-baddy.
I just had a talk this weekend with a denomination leader about how end-times expectations have changed in their lifetime. We talked about young leaders and how different their eschatology is from 50 years ago.
My hope for the next 3 decades is that sincere people of faith get fatigued on this unfulfilling way to read the Bible and this next generation is released and empowered with an understanding of genre that does not leave them susceptible and vulnerable to panic over sensations like y2k and franchises like Left Behind.
The world is in too great a need for really great people to be distracted by thinking that apocalyptic is A) predictive and B) about the 21st century.
Here we have 2 crippling problems to confront – and the problem is that they compound the effect of each other intensely.
The more minor problem is the one that we have touched on above: a loss of the prophetic or our Christian imagination.
The major, and more hideous problem, is something called “final forms”. We live in an era where systems have become so solidified, concrete, and assumed that are assumed to be ends in themselves.
They are final forms that, once invented or introduced, are here to stay.
And there is an ominous implication:
The faith we have today cannot be reexamined, tinkered with, or questioned. It is written in stone and unchanging.
In fact, it gets worse – true Christianity was found in the early church and the answer to our current problems is to get ‘back’ to that kind of a faith.
We live in the odd hybrid space where we live in the ‘end’ – the world in its final form – imagined to be the pinnacle of history … and a sort of primitivism or originalism that looks ‘the’ early church, the founding fathers, pure democracy, and raw capitalism.
The danger is two-fold:
The church, the law, the nation, the economy (and so many other categories of life) are severely complicated evolutionary adaptations in their current configurations.
So I want to end the way that I began this entry:
Is the way that the world runs today the way that is has to be?
Is the status quo the best that we can do?
What would it take for the world to work a different way?
Are small adjustments to the current system the most we can hope for?
Is it enough to make the current arrangement slightly more just?
[1] For instance, 1 John 2:22 says “ Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a person is the antichrist—denying the Father and the Son.”
A short video (5 min) about how progressives and liberals not only believe different things than conservatives and evangelicals … but they believe them differently.
From Missions to Eschatology -they both believe different things and they hold those beliefs differently.
Let me know your thoughts.
End Times prophecy was a major focus in the first half of my ministry. My call to ministry came in 1991 and I was immediately caught up into cold-war epic readings of Biblical prophecy in the Old and New Testament (as we called them back then.)
I had them all memorized. I subscribed to End Times magazines. I watched weekly TV programs that read the news in one hand and the Bible in the other.
I was trained and ordained in a denomination that has the 2nd Coming of Christ as one of its 4 major themes. As a young pastor, I would lead weekend seminars to help people understand the timelines of our times, complete with wall-charts.
If you are not familiar with this sub-culture of Christianity then you may not understand some of the news happening right now. You may look at the Evangelical support of the current President or the zeal over what is happening in Jerusalem right now and wonder what you are missing.
Last night, I got to hang out with some of my favorite conversation partners. This year we went through the ABC’s of Faith in Sunday school and 3 themes kept coming up:
Genre: Genre is by far the most important thing about the Bible that many people who claim to be ‘Bible-believing’ don’t know. Nothing matters more than genre when it comes to reading the Bible.
Simply stated, one must read a poem differently than history, prophecy differently than a gospel, a letter (epistle) differently than apocalyptic literature. When people claim, “the Bible says …” it can be a bit of a misnomer.
It would be like reading a newspaper and taking the weather forecast, the police report, the comic section, and the opinion column as A) equal and B) literal.
Revelation: I love the book of Revelation. I study it all the time. I am inspired by it and challenged by it and am constantly referring to imagery within it.
The only thing I dislike is what most people do with the book of Revelation.
The early audience for that book would have taken great consolation and comfort from it. The sad thing is that we should be writing things like the book Revelation for our time – but don’t because we think that John’s letter is about our time!
Y2K: this event is emblematic of the apocalyptic mindset. As I said earlier, I became a bible-believing Christian during the cold-war era. Communist Russia was our biggest threat and ‘Christian’ bookstores and TV shows were filled with very specific projections about how current events lined up with biblical prophecy.
Not understanding that apocalyptic literature in the Bible is a critique of their time and that era’s order and a hope of future deliverance makes us vulnerable to panic in ours.
Now here is where things get wonky. You may think “so what – charismatics and evangelicals ignore genre and read things out of context – big deal.” But you are missing an important extra ingredient! The longer these things don’t come to pass the more that some have begun to work on them behind the scenes in order to help them come to pass.
The longer these prophecies go unfilled (in their reading) the more effort they put into helping fulfill them.
In my next post, I will tell you how a misreading of Daniel 9 “the prophecy of the 70 weeks” means that the Muslim ‘Dome of the Rock’ in Jerusalem is a major focus because eventually (according to prophecy) that temple mount has be returned to its former (and future) function for the Jewish people.
You might think that this stuff sounds silly, but I am hoping to let you see behind the scenes to how consequential this way of reading the Bible is to our current world. Imagine if you thought that all of this long-expected stuff was going to happen in your lifetime and that God has fore-ordained it (or at least foreseen it) before the foundations of the world. The Bible, seen this way, is a history book written before hand by an all-knowing all-powerful God.
Hopefully that helps you understand the evangelical support for the current President and this move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem. It’s not trivia – it deadly serious.
This is not the end of the world – just the end of this way of BEING the world.
Buckle up for a wild ride.
Here is the audio for Sunday School podcast http://vermonthillsumc.org/podcast/y-is-for-y2k-2/
You can also listen on Itunes and Stitcher. Read the preview here (link) or the PDF (Y is for Y2K (preview))
Just remember: prophets don’t tell the future so much as they tell the truth in interesting ways.
Is the way that the world runs today the way that is has to be?
What would it take for the world to work a different way?
Can you imagine something better than democracy or an economic system after capitalism?
Is society in its final form?
[We are nearing the end of the ABCs of Faith in Sunday School . Listen to previous discussions here] Expanded PDF : Y is for Y2K (preview)
From 1991-2003, I was taught to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other – I no longer believe that.
In my short lifetime I have seen so many predictions come and go. I have seen layers and layers of moving onto the next thing a passage means without even acknowledging that 6 months ago we were told it was something different.
I just had a talk this weekend with a denomination leader about how end-times expectations have changed in their lifetime. We talked about young leaders and how different their eschatology is from 50 years ago.
My hope for the next 3 decades is that sincere people of faith get fatigued on this unfulfillingway to read the Bible and this next generation is released and empowered with an understanding of genre that does not leave them susceptible and vulnerable to panic over sensations like y2k and franchises like Left Behind.
The world is in too great a need for really great people to be distracted by thinking that apocalyptic is A) predictive and B) about the 21st century.
Here we have 2 crippling problems to confront – and the problem is that they compound the effect of each other intensely.
The more minor problem is the one that we have touched on above: a loss of the prophetic or our Christian imagination.
The major, and more hideous problem, is something called “final forms”. We live in an era where systems have become so solidified, concrete, and assumed that are assumed to be ends in themselves.
They are final forms that, once invented or introduced, are here to stay.
And there is an ominous implication:
The faith we have today cannot be reexamined, tinkered with, or questioned. It is written in stone and unchanging.
In fact, it gets worse – true Christianity was found in the early church and the answer to our current problems is to get ‘back’ to that kind of a faith – sort of a ‘make religion great again’ mentality.
Come this Sunday at 9 to hear the rest … Art for the series by Jesse Turri
How many hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A number that you probably haven’t even heard of.
Several years ago, I became concerned about the fading awareness of the atomic age. Growing up in the 1980s, the ‘cold war’ loomed over our politics and our evangelical Christianity. Thirty years later, the post-9/11 world sent me in search of theological addresses of some of my concerns and this is when I stumbled into Theology for a Nuclear Age by Gordon D. Kaufman. While Kaufman’s larger work is outside the scope of my particular theological project, I connect with his concern about the nuclear age very deeply.
It has now been more than 70 years since the bombs were dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is odd that Kaufman wrote in the 1980s – 35 years later – and I read his work almost 30 years after they were written. There is something oddly symmetrical about the reality of ‘the bomb’ becoming an issue again 70 years after its devastating power was first unleashed. I have been reading all of this nuclear theology for the past 5 years partly to exercise my own demons on the issue but partly because I feared that it would become a concern again with our global geo-politics.
The recent US elections have elevated nuclear war to a crisis level again.
My fascination with theological implications of the nuclear age is like being into a vintage band that has only recently come into popularity – thus the hipster joke above.
What follows below, and in the next several posts, will be selections of Kaufman edited or summarized into blog format. The book is a thin 63 pages and my hope is to whet your appetite to pick it up and join me in this consideration.
In a previous address Kaufman had suggested … that the nuclear age into which humankind has now moved – an age in which it is possible we may utterly destroy not only civilization but humanity itself – challenges scholars in theology and in the study of religion to do some radical re-thinking about our discipline and about some of the presuppositions taken for granted in our work. (vii)
There is a new situation in which humanity now finds itself – in which we are able, by the mere press of a button, to destroy our entire world as well as humankind itself – isn’t in a significant way ‘out of sync’ with the central traditional claim about God’s sovereignty over the world. (ix)
The religious eschatology of the West was undergirded by faith in an active creator and governor of history … and the end of history – whether viewed as ultimate catastrophe or ultimate salvation – was to be God’s climactic act. (3)
An end brought about by nuclear holocaust must be conceived primarily not as God’s doing but as ours. The possibility that we will obliterate all future human life is so novel and strange that it is difficult for us to grasp what we are up against. Human kind was never believed to have the power utterly to destroy itself; that power lay with God alone. Many, such as Karl Barth, say that this utterly calamitous self-destruction of humanity will never be allowed to occur. (4-7)
While it is my prayer that this is true … I am deeply convicted that we need to adjust the way that we think about our concept of ‘god’ in light of the new possibility and threat. If folks want to cling to classic/antiquated notions of a BIG GOD, I am fine with that (I really am). They will need to justify those claims again in this new era and not simply parrot formulations of previous centuries. Claims regarding GOD’s power and intervention cannot be grandfathered in to the emerging reality carte blanc.
This video is an experiment to tailor eschatology for an evangelical audience. A pastor requested that I customize my previous EndTimes theory to a specific crowd.
Let me know what you think! I’m afraid that it comes off like a 3 hour class crammed into 12 minutes … because that is exactly the case … 
10 minutes on End Times!
Here are 4 things that you will want to reference:
1) Best book on Revelation: Chalice Commentary by Farmer – it will become your favorite
2) Partial reasoning of the 1968-1973 change: Continue reading “10 Minutes on End Times”
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 