Apocalyptic Fever
After repeated end-times embarrassments, how can the church rightly read the signs of the times?
On the eve of the third millennium of the Christian era, the church is again beset by apocalyptic speculators. In one of the more bizarre episodes, thousands of Korean Christians sold their property and left their families to await Jesus’ return on October 28. Reportedly, several expectant mothers in this group had abortions so as to be more easily raptured!
Closer to home, American evangelicals seem to have an insatiable appetite for end-time best sellers, such as Harold Camping’s 1994? which has gone through three printings since its September 8 release. Camping’s analysis of the Bible leads him to believe the world as we know it will end in 1994.
What are we to make of all this? As a convinced premillennialist who takes biblical prophecy seriously, I am wary of any attempt to overexplain the details of the end. Church history is littered with the tombstones of disappointed sky-watchers: second-century Montanists who predicted the New Jerusalem would descend upon the town of Pepuza; Saxon bishop Wulfstan who interpreted the Danish invasion of England (ca. 1010) as a sure sign the end was near; Thomas Mtintzer who led German peasants to revolt in 1525 because he saw the angels “sharpening their sickles” for a great harvest.
There is a mystery about the Second Coming that we must respect if we are to honor the One we eagerly await: “No one knows about the day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard. Be alert!” (Mark 13:32–33).
Still, for all the hysteria they have wrought, the prophecy-mongers of our time have at least kept faith with the fundamental promise of the visible return of Jesus Christ. A more perverse temptation is the overrealized eschatology of much mainline Protestantism. A noted scholar in this tradition explains why the blessed hope rings hollow to many: “[E]nd-time talk, which permeates the New Testament, is deeply incongruous with our intellectual world.… The world seems much too solid … to be ready for an ending.”
Though couched in contemporary lingo, such revisionism is very old. It goes back to the Hellenistic demythologizers, who asked, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised?” To which Peter, who had witnessed the Ascension and heard the angelic proclamation of the Parousia (Acts 1:11), replied: “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise.… He is patient.… But the day of the Lord will come like a thief” (2 Peter 3:3–10).
Bible-believing Christians, who have never abandoned this hope, should not be surprised if in times of social distress some of God’s people are misled by presumptuous teachings about our Lord’s return. The corrective is a more faithful searching of what God has promised concerning the consummation of all things. On a different point of doctrine, John Calvin put the balance nicely: “I desire only that we should not investigate what the Lord has left hidden in secret, nor neglect what he has brought out into the open, so that we may not be convicted of excessive curiosity on the one hand, or of excessive ingratitude on the other.”
The Second Coming will not cease to embarrass those who are so invested in this present age that they have forgotten we are also probationers of an eternal world. Yet in a society whose stability is increasingly uncertain, the church’s confession that Jesus Christ will come again to judge the quick and the dead has never been more relevant. Come, Lord Jesus!
By Timothy George, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama.
The Stakes Beyond The White House
As a young White House staffer and GOP platform drafter in the mid-1980s, I observed the posture of official Washington toward evangelicals. Evangelicals (or the “Christian Right”) were the people in the bleachers, booing or cheering the players on the field. They were viewed as people who could be manipulated through rhetoric and token gestures, such as trying once more to get school prayer on the agenda.
The 1992 GOP convention produced a powerful sense of deja vu. With the help of the latest national organization to presume to speak for all Christians, evangelicals again showed up in force, this time organized like members of a special-interest group. Again, symbolism triumphed over results-oriented politics as Christian activists attempted to make the platform more prolife than most prolifers, apparently on the theory that the platform’s “red meat” would erase any remaining skepticism toward an unpopular incumbent.
Many responsible evangelicals have worked hard in the fields of politics, and they are determined to continue. But they worry about being boxed in by a model of politics that marginalizes Christians and makes real results ever harder to achieve. Paradoxically, the growing militance and recognition of the Religious Right may make it harder to get a sincere debate going about values, even as Americans are ready for it, and harder to differentiate between real bigotry and efforts simply directed at stopping the Christian Right’s attempts to “take over” the Republican party.
At the root of our troubles is a long-ignored theological poverty that fails to educate Christians about the differing God-ordained roles for the church, the government, and civil society. The result has been a worrisome growth of heretical elements that, if not genuinely theocratic, certainly harbor some vague notion that America’s lost Christian heritage can be reclaimed through government.
Many view the election of Bill Clinton with incredulity. How, they wonder after having worked and prayed so hard, could a man who has pledged to sign an abortion-rights bill be elected to the nation’s highest office? But Clinton’s election makes some sense. In addition to the weaknesses of George Bush, it was the result, on the one hand, of a secular culture that has prized human autonomy above all else and, on the other, a Christian culture that remains as isolated and ineffectual as at any time in this century.
The silver lining in 1992 may be that it will bring about a long overdue reevaluation. The car evangelicals are now riding in needs more than a new paint job: what is needed is a new mode of transportation.
By Don Eberly, former congressional and White House aide, now involved in state policy.
Abandoning The Crusade
The paradox today is that while the church can be heard revving up its tanks on the political battlefield, it is unarmed in the cultural arena, where the real task of restoring our society’s values must be carried out. Politics reflects culture more than it shapes it. The church stands on one side of a vast cultural chasm. Evangelicals have failed to significantly penetrate the world of television, art, journalism, and academia, but not for lack of talent. The church has vast wealth, professional acumen, intellectual power, and spiritual and moral vitality, nearly all of which has been applied to building insulated evangelical institutions.
Attempts to move directly from cultural isolation to political domination are utterly without promise. For evangelicalism to be a force for renewal in American life, the following steps are essential:
In the realm of politics, we must abandon the crusader model for a new citizen-neighbor model. Crusades drive people from our faith and our politics. Politics is about disagreement, and people should have the freedom to reject our politics without rejecting our faith, and vice versa. As an organizing model, the national mass movement with polarizing labels and leaders is giving way to a new decentralized, face-to-face politics in which the focus is on ideas and values that work. This is a profound opportunity for visionary Christians, because the model of lay empowerment that is reforming the church can also revitalize society. High-profile preachers should remove themselves from party politics and turn instead to massive efforts to empower lay citizens who have more credibility to go forth and change the world beyond the church.
Evangelical leaders should demand that the term Christian Right be expunged from society’s vocabulary. This term, which was never chosen by evangelicals, positions the church as a peddler of ideology, rather than a force for renewal.
National organizations and leaders who presume to speak for all evangelicals should abandon the practice. Talk of “takeover,” as though evangelicals have a divine mandate to rule, should be stopped. A takeover will occur only when people rise to the top, like Daniel of old, on the basis of wisdom and competence. This will require persuasion, not polarization.
On the public-policy front, we must broaden our agenda beyond a few issues that a cynical public finds simplistic and narrow. Americans want real solutions to a range of social problems in which government indisputably has a direct role: cities, schools, crime, drugs, the underclass, and the national debt. Finally, evangelicals should direct their intellectual energies to developing new social strategies for a “post-politics” America in which many citizens accept that neither Republican nor Democratic programs have fundamentally affected the things we care about the most: better neighborhoods, a less vulgar culture, and strong families.
The highest priority is rehabilitating the family, particularly the institution of fatherhood. Changes in the tax code and the welfare system will not by themselves alter the attitudes of adults toward marriage and children. Rebuilding the family will require cultural strategies. Public policy, though important, is insufficient to the task. When we recognize this, our politics comes into balance and new visions for citizen action can emerge.
