After Dispensationalism (eBook)

PART 1

THE WORLD OF END-TIMES TEACHING

1

END-TIMES PREDICTION THROUGH THE AGES

RECENT PREDICTIONS OF THE END OF THE WORLD

End-times enthusiasm seems to erupt every few decades, and not only among evangelical Protestants. In the latest round, in 2010 pop culture turned to the ancient “Mayan calendar” that predicted the end of the world on December 21, 2012. The world, however, still exists. It seems the foreseen end had more to do with our misunderstanding of how one ancient civilization tracked time.

Mayans employed several overlapping means of reckoning dates. The Calendar Round was a cyclical calendar that endlessly repeated in units of fifty-two years. While this calendar is suitable for tracking basic events (indeed, a form remains in use today), it didn’t and doesn’t provide unique dates beyond its cycle. It cannot point to events more than a half-century into the past or future. To move outside the cycle, whether for dates on monuments or historical reckoning, the Maya developed the Long Count Calendar, which took its starting point from their date for creation (August 11, 3114 BC). This calendar was at the center of the speculation around 2012 and the end of the world. The Long Calendar’s basic unit, the tun, roughly corresponds to a solar year. It also measures entire eras, called bak’tun, which lasted 144,000 days or 394.3 years. When one bak’tun ended, another was simply added. The Maya believed that three worlds had preceded their own and that the third of those worlds had ended after thirteen bak’tuns.1 December 21, 2012, marked the end of the thirteenth bak’tun since creation of their world in 3114 BC.

As the fateful date approached, bizarre internet- and New Age-fueled speculation emerged. What would happen on December 21? A new dawn in which the world would be renewed? A catastrophic reversal of earth’s magnetic field? A visitation by beings from the planet “Nibiru,” or Earth joining an extraterrestrial federation?2 The Maya left no mythic texts revealing what they thought would accompany the close of the thirteenth bak’tun.

Eager to leverage the free publicity around all things Mayan, Hollywood responded with the John Cusack vehicle 2012, a story of global catastrophe foretold by an ancient civilization. Museums in North America and elsewhere took stock of their Mesoamerican collections and launched exhibits on Mayan civilization and chronology.3 Even Christian TV preachers took advantage of the Mayan phenomenon. Noted end-times preacher Jack Van Impe produced two DVDs, World War III: 2012? and December 21st 2012: History’s Final Day?, in which he cautiously suggests that 2012 might mark the beginning of a period of turmoil known as the great tribulation.

But what about the Mayans themselves? Some Mayan inscriptions recently discovered in Guatemala refer to dates beyond the thirteenth bak’tun. Were they alive today, the Mayans would have done what so many of us do on January 1: hung up a new calendar. The Mayan sensation was harmless in the end. At worst, it parted many North Americans from their money in theaters and museum gift shops.

The fallout from the end-times predictions made a year earlier by Christian broadcaster Harold Camping of the US-based Family Radio ministry was graver. A civil engineer and Bible teacher, Camping cofounded Family Stations, Inc., or Family Radio, in 1959. From a single FM station in San Francisco, Family Radio eventually grew to sixty-five US radio stations and a shortwave facility. Camping’s eschatological interests intensified in the 1980s. When he began to teach that the church age had ended and that all existing churches were apostate, many evangelicals and other Christians distanced themselves from his ministry.4

His first prediction of the end is found in a 1992 book that employed numerology and allegorical interpretation to determine that Christ would return to earth sometime in September 1994.5 Undefeated by his failure, Camping continued to study Scripture. By 2005 he felt confident enough to announce that on May 21, 2011, Christ would rescue the saved from five months of torment, with final global destruction on October 21. As the May date loomed, Family Radio sponsored a nationwide media campaign announcing the coming rapture of believers and the destruction of the earth and its remaining inhabitants. Billboards blaring, “Judgment Day, May 21. The Bible Guarantees It!” sprang up across America while the ministry’s friends held signs and distributed tracts warning of “The End.” When May 21 came and went, Camping responded through his Family Radio call-in program, Open Forum. Christ had indeed returned, he said, but in an unexpected, mystical way. Explaining the absence of torment as an example of God’s mercy,6 Camping insisted that the world would still be destroyed on October 21. After that date too passed uneventfully, Camping resigned as head of Family Radio and pledged to refrain from any further end-times predictions.

The spectacular failure of Camping’s predictions came at a cost for Camping specifically and Christian churches in general. Not only had the ministry squandered millions of dollars on advertising, but the failed predictions gave rise to widespread ridicule of Christians generally—touching even those churches that had critiqued Camping and which he had attacked as apostate.

The New Age friends of the Maya and Bible teachers such as Harold Camping are just the latest in a long line of end-times prognosticators that began long before the advent of mass media and the internet. The catalyst for this obsession—for with some, that is what it truly is—can be found in Jesus’s last words in the New Testament, “Yes, I am coming soon” (Rev 22:20). This promise of return, coming at the end of a book pregnant with turmoil, persecution, and deliverance, seeded in Christianity both end-time expectation and an ongoing interest in what Scripture has to say about Christ’s return. For millions of Christians globally, time has dimmed neither.

While there have been periods in which Christians have settled into a sense of comfort with the world, Christianity’s history is peppered with periods of intense apocalyptic speculation. Examining these different episodes can remind us that recent conjecture is nothing new and help us approach the future with a more sober and helpful understanding of the end and how we should live in anticipation of the return of Christ.

END-TIMES SPECULATION THROUGH THE AGES

RABBINIC ESCHATOLOGY

From the beginning, Christian end-times speculation has been inextricably linked to both studying Scripture and counting time. It sprang from a rich seedbed of messianic expectation that featured prominently in first- and second-century AD Judaism. Several factors coalesced to intensify Jewish messianic interest during this period. A widely held view associated the world’s lifespan with the days of creation. Interpreted according to a formula derived from Psalm 90:4—“A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by”—the result (with some variation) was an understanding that the world would exist for a period of six thousand years, corresponding to the six days in which God created, followed by one thousand years of rest, parallel to the Sabbath, on which God rested (fig. 1.1).7 Connected to this was the view that as the end approached, there would be increasing warfare, tribulation, heresy, and unfaithfulness that would signal the arrival of the Messiah, the “Son of David,” as God intervened to usher in the Sabbath (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 97a).8

The date of Messiah’s arrival was a matter of some rabbinic debate. Some authorities foresaw Messiah’s arrival anytime in the final third of earth’s existence: “A Tannaite authority of the house of Elijah [said], ‘For six thousand years the world will exist. For two thousand it will be desolate, two thousand years [will be the time of] Torah, and two thousand years will be the days of the Messiah’ ” (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 97a; also Babylonian Talmud Avodah Zarah 9a; Babylonian Talmud Rosh Hashanah 31a).9 First-century AD historian Josephus believed the world was already five thousand years old, on the cusp of Messiah’s appearing (Against Apion 1.1; see fig. 1.2). Combined with the harsh reality of subservience to Rome, this chronology made the period ripe for messianic expectation. Josephus records the rise of several charismatic figures who attempted to break the Roman yoke,10 any of whom might have inspired messianic expectation.

Fig. 1.1. The days of creation and the lifespan of the earth

These isolated and sporadic insurrections culminated in the failed first revolt against Rome and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70. Far from eliminating messianic expectation, however, this catastrophic loss was entirely consistent with what was to be expected. As one of the “birth pangs” of the Messiah,...