Remember, you heard it here: The end of the world is near.
That’s hardly news for the Christians who read the Bible as prophecy and are certain the Second Coming of Christ is imminent-or students of such beliefs.
For those of us who don’t hold these views and are generally uninformed about them, there are reasons to brush up and broaden what we know.
Scholars say the close-at-hand close of the millennium is stirring the eschatological pot. (As we learned long ago, eschatology is a branch of theology involved with history’s final days.)
This suggests that folks convinced that the curtain-coming-down process is near, although they’re a minority of Christians, will be increasingly conspicuous and in some instances may generate public concern.
As if they haven’t already, witness the lethal FBI and ATF attacks on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
Critics contend that a peaceful conclusion was likely if federal law-enforcement officials had understood leader David Koresh’s apocalyptic vision drawn from the Book of Revelation, a rich source of signs for the prophetically inclined.
That in turn may have prevented the Oklahoma City bombing, which appears motivated to a significant degree by the Waco raid.
In the current Christianity Today, the superb evangelical magazine, an article asserts that the apocalyptic language used by many anti-government militias now in the spotlight have caused “the line between evangelical Armageddon symbolism and that of millennial views distorted by conspiracy and racist theories” to be “frighteningly blurred.”
The article continues: “For outsiders, it can be difficult to tell the difference between orthodox Christian teachings and the militias’ belief systems.”
As complicated as it may be, scholars say that delving into the origins and permutations of Christian eschatology can tell us much about how Western culture has thought about good and evil.
Because of its complexities-and its appeal-we’ll devote more than a column to the topic. Our first guide is Timothy Weber, professor of church history at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville and author of “Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming” (University of Chicago Press), a revision of which by another publisher is set for next year.
He starts by noting those who see the Bible as blueprint and timetable for the Second Coming and those who don’t. The latter includes the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches and mainline Protestant denominations.
Evangelicals? “It’s hard to generalize because the movement is so diverse,” he says. “Some have eschatological interests, some don’t. But it’s safe to say those in the fundamentalist wing are more interested than anybody.”
Key terms: Dispensationalism, pre- and post-millennialism.
“Dispensationalism is America’s favorite kind of apocalyptic view,” Weber says. “It was almost universally adopted by fundamentalists in the 1920s, but it was actually developed in the 1830s and ’40s, largely by an English preacher named John Nelson Darby, a member of the Plymouth Brethren.”
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Darby, who made seven visits to this country from 1862 to 1877, broke world history into seven epochs or dispensations. We’re in the sixth. The last is when Christ returns to defeat Satan and the Antichrist and establish the millennium-1,000 years of heaven on Earth-before finally halting the entire enterprise of human history.
Thus, dispensationalism is pre-millennial.
The majority of American evangelicals before the Civil War were post-millennialists, believing Christians had to complete the dirty work of destroying evil and ushering in Christianity before Christ returned to wrap things up.
For Weber, pre-millennialism is less a model of biblical intepretation than a worldview: “When society looks as if it’s falling apart, it becomes potent. This view surged after the Civil War, when there were economic and racial crises, an influx of immigrants, and the cities were dangerous.
“And it surged again in the early part of this century as a way of resisting the modernism of Darwinism, Freud and liberal biblical criticism and maintaining the authority of the Bible.
“Ironically, even though dispensationalists condemned biblical criticism as elitist, theirs was a complicated system that few could understand.
“Yet in a world that seems to be falling apart and out of control, it seems the ultimate answer, assuring that Christ will return, that God is in control of this mess and will ultimately win.
“No matter that the details don’t exactly fit. The dispensationalists simply retool and fine-tune the system to make it come out right.”
In the next installment, a look at the prevailing apocalyptic scenario, its biblical basis, the Antichrist and mainstream views. God willing.