Popular eschatology is a booming business. In recent decades, a host of television evangelists, including Jerry Falwell, Rex Humbard, Oral Roberts, Kenneth Copeland, and Herbert W. Armstrong, have popularized various theories about the second coming of Christ and the apocalyptic end of the present world.
Prophecy buffs transect the continent with slide shows, films, and wall charts enticing their audiences to join them in the guessing game. Books on end-time speculation are flooding Christian bookstores. And the number-one non-fiction best seller in the 1970s, aside from the Bible itself, was Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, which sold more than 15 million copies.
The prophecy promoters all begin with the same question: "What is the timetable of the last days?" They take highly symbolic material from Daniel to Revelation and give it literal, simplistic, and culturally biased interpretations in order to explain complex events and to predict how the world will end.
Since the church began, some people, out of either their struggle or their theology, have expected the imminent return of Christ. For example, when Napoleon and his army invaded Moscow in 1812, groups of Russian believers were convinced the apocalypse had come and Napoleon was the Antichrist.
However, the widespread evangelical preoccupation with the end times is of fairly recent origin. Evangelicals in the early and middle 1800s, inspired by the awakening that Charles Finney sparked, believed the Bible taught they were to work for the kingdom now. They were in the forefront of every major social reform movement in the United States before the Civil War, from the abolitionist and temperance movements to the struggles for women's rights and peace.
For example, an editorial in the Oberlin Evangelist, a major voice of these reformers, opposed the Mexican War out of strong biblical concern. It declared, "Wars of aggression like this we not only deprecate and deplore, but most unqualifiedly condemn. The conscience of the world and the court of heaven are against us." For these Christians the biblical material on the kingdom of God was principally ethical and not primarily predictive. They believed they were called to make a difference in their world, and they did.
By the end of the Civil War, however, evangelicals had begun to give up the belief that they could or should seek to change their world. Evangelicalism began to turn in on itself and adopted a historical pessimism and a corrosive fatalism that was caused in part by the emergence of the doctrine of pre-millennialism.
Premillennial theology expects Christ to return before the thousand-year millennium to "rapture" the saints out of the world before the apocalypse. This teaching strongly implies that the world is in such bad shape that it can only get continually worse until Christ returns. Even in the early days of this doctrine, some argued that the attempt to ameliorate social conditions would only slow the inevitable process of degeneration and postpone the "blessed hope." The emphasis of this movement has been the abandonment of God's earth in favor of a non-material heaven.
In ensuing years popular expressions of the "prophetic movement" have been rife with fanciful speculation, weak biblical exegesis, and frequent error. Periodically over the years, groups have become convinced that they knew the exact date of Christ's return, sold all their goods, and literally waited on hilltops.
For example, Herbert W. Armstrong's vast empire on the fringe of the church suffered a major setback when the earth failed to terminate as predicted in 1972. Members had given most of their assets to his church in anticipation of the world coming to an end. When it did not end, they had to resume their lives without regaining their assets. During the late 1930s, radio preachers and prophecy hobbyists "knew" Benito Mussolini was the Antichrist. During World War II, Hitler was nominated. A radio pastor later used a complex numerical formula to "prove" that Kissinger was the Antichrist because the number value assigned to the letters of his name totaled 666, the number associated with the Antichrist (Revelation 13:18).
Mary Relfe, in her best-selling book When Your Money Fails, spent a remarkable amount of time tracing the number 666 in all kinds of unlikely places, from product codes in the United States to shirt collars in China. In an earlier edition of the book, she nominated Anwar Sadat as the Antichrist, the "real Mr. 666." After Sadat's tragic assassination, she found it necessary to rewrite her book and alter her prediction.
William Martin, in an article on popular eschatology in the Atlantic Monthly, ironically points out, for those interested in numerological prophecy, that President Ronald Wilson Reagan has six letters in each of his three names. In this type of speculation, the rules are simple and the possibilities endless. The elements of biblical prophecy have been correlated with everything from UFOs to rock music. Hal Lindsey suggests, for example, that the demonic mutant beasts in Revelation are really modern armored tanks.
It would be a dangerous error, however, not to take this movement seriously. We must realize that this increasing fascination with eschatology is more than a cultural curiosity and a leisure-time activity for many conservative Christians. It is a growing threat to the biblical cause of peacemaking and the larger mission of the church.
Built into the very fabric of popular end-time theology is a sense of the inevitable decline and destruction of everything. This viewpoint fosters a rigid, historical determinism. Increasingly, doomsday prophets see nuclear conflagration as the way the world is supposed to end. They typically cite a passage of Scripture and render a prophetic interpretation that leaves the believer locked into a predetermined future of calamity, collapse, and nuclear cataclysm.
For example, in his book 21 Amazing Predictions, David Wilkerson quotes the apostle Peter:
But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up … What manner of persons ought ye to be ... looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? —2 Peter 3:10, 12
Wilkerson concludes without explanation that a cataclysmic nuclear war is certain.
Hal Lindsey in his book The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, sounds the same note in this terrifying speculation regarding the world's end:
The Russians ... now arm some of their intercontinental missiles with 100-megaton nuclear warheads ... It is difficult to imagine the power these missiles possess. So consider this: Just one of these weapons has more destructive power than all the bombs dropped by both sides in World War II.
If one of these warheads exploded over Ohio, every living thing in the state would die. People looking in the direction of the blast from as far away as 300 miles would have their eyes burned out before they had a chance to turn their heads.
Poisonous radiation would continue to kill far beyond the range of the blast itself. And the state would be uninhabitable for centuries.
These 100-megaton warheads are now hidden in Soviet missile silos, aimed at U.S. population centers.
Lindsey concludes, "Jesus warned us in the Bible that in the last days of the world, man would destroy nearly everything that lives."
The sense of impending apocalypse and the possibility that God would use nuclear weapons to end human history seems to be an increasingly popular viewpoint among many conservative Christians. "Developing nuclear weapons was a part of God's plan," said Ed McAteer of the Religious Roundtable in a television broadcast. "Nuclear war may be the fulfillment of prophecy. We need to be prepared. Before we go, they go. I can do that in all good Christian conscience." In all good Christian conscience we are to fulfill prophecy by annihilating our enemies first in the belief that the vaporizing of the planet is inevitable.
Martin Scharlemann, professor of biblical interpretation at Concordia Seminary, writes:
The concept of God's judgment must be factored into the whole question of nuclear warfare. It is proper to ask why the Creator should tolerate for very much longer the current indifference to His call, the defiant blasphemy of His holy name and the massive rebellion against His will? After all, He is the Lord of history and a nuclear conflagration may well be His way of bringing history to an end for a creation which stubbornly refuses to accept His will and His ways.
The Old and New Testaments undeniably contain apocalyptic literature, but the Scripture gives us little help in understanding what it represents. But no biblical basis exists for picturing God as a co-conspirator in the ultimate violence of using nuclear weapons to destroy God's good creation. One thing that the Bible teaches clearly is that God loves the world and intends to recreate it, not destroy it.
Christians cannot possibly work for the cause of peace and nuclear disarmament if they believe not only in the inevitability of an impending apocalypse, but also in the possibility that a nuclear holocaust may be the way God wants the world to end. In fact, an anti-peace sentiment is growing among the proponents of this viewpoint. Hal Lindsey asserted that we could not trust the Russians and that it was impossible to verify compliance if they did agree to negotiate nuclear arms reduction and work for world peace. Instead, since he viewed nuclear confrontation with the Soviets as inevitable, he urged the United States to embark on massive nuclear weapons buildup to ensure that we came out on top.
Jerry Falwell, who fully shares this end-time theology, is openly hostile to those working for peace. In his June 17, 1982 letter to members of the Moral Majority, he writes: "Here in America the 'freeze-niks' are hysterically singing Russia's favorite song: a unilateral U.S. nuclear freeze and the Russians are loving it!" (Apparently no one has told Falwell that the freeze campaign advocates bilateral, not unilateral disarmament.) At the end of his letter, he announces a major national campaign to "blunt the hysteria of the 'freeze-niks.'"
The Middle East has also figured prominently in the predictions of end-time prophets like Lindsey and Falwell, who equate the modern nation of Israel with the biblical children of Israel. Because of their eschatology, they believe the nation of Israel can do no wrong, including the brutal bombings and killing of scores of innocent civilians in the invasion of Lebanon. Instead of working for peace in this troubled region of the world, many of these self-appointed prophets are supporting the most reactionary and militaristic factions in the Israeli government. A church in California has reportedly sent a $250,000 contribution to help Israel buy weapons.
In the Atlantic Monthly, William Martin asks what would happen if the president were to appoint one or more convinced premillennialists to key foreign policy posts. "What incentive would they have to work for lasting peace in the Middle East, since they would regard a Russian-led attack on Israel as a necessary precursor of the Millennium? ... And if nuclear destruction of Russia is foreordained, as in some pre-millennial schemes, might not a fundamentalist politician or general regard his finger on the button as an instrument of God's eternal purpose?"
The millions of Christians who subscribe to this type of end-time theology unwittingly buy into a degenerative view of history and a fatalistic view of the future. Their eschatological determinism makes working for peace at best nonsensical, and at worst a subversion of the destructive designs of God. Some even seem to derive satisfaction from global disasters that seem to confirm their end-time scenarios.
Not surprisingly, this deterministic and despairing view of history and the future not only threatens the cause of peace, but also undermines the larger mission capability of the church. Those who subscribe to this latter-day fatalism conclude that nothing can be done to alter the growing plight of the world's poor, change unjust economic structures, or advance the cause of God's kingdom here on earth. They feel that while such suffering is undeniably tragic, God intends it to be so. The best they can hope to do is to get a few more in the lifeboat before the rapture.
I am persuaded that the powers of darkness have pulled off an amazing coup. While the American church is undoubtedly the wealthiest church ever in education, discretionary time, and money, a major segment of that church has been lured through its own eschatology into believing it cannot make a difference for world peace or social justice. As a consequence many Christians are taking their lives and resources out of the church's social mission instead of fully investing themselves in the work of the kingdom.
Ironically, in this deterministic view of the future, not only can't the church make a difference, neither can God. This eschatology of despair unwittingly seems to lock God outside of history, characterizing God as an impotent absentee landlord who is unable to effect any real change in the present world. All God gets to do is bring down the final curtain at the end of history.
God's Timetable
The most fundamental problem with popular eschatology is that it begins with the wrong question. It approaches the Bible with the question: "What is the timetable of the last days, when Christ will return and set up his kingdom?"
After Jesus Christ was resurrected, the last question the disciples confronted him with was the timetable question: "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom of Israel?" Jesus essentially told them that the timetable of the last days was none of their business. He said to them, "It is not for you to know the time or the dates the Father has set by his own authority" (Acts 1:6-7).
What is our business then? Our business is the world God loves and longs to change by the power of the gospel. Jesus told them, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will bear witness to me in Jerusalem, and over all Judea and Samaria and away to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8).
We are given a glimpse of the future in the Old and New Testaments so that we will be ready, advancing the cause of God's kingdom. It is essential that we understand that biblical eschatology is principally ethical and only secondarily predictive. Therefore, we need to use biblical eschatology to help guide our ethical behavior as a people and as a nation instead of adopting an end-time fatalism that tragically twists our sense of Christian ethics.
We need to ask a different question than the timetable question. The question we need to ask of the Bible is: "What does God desire for the human future?"
The timetable question leads to fatalism, this question to hope. The first is predictive, focuses on all that is going wrong in the world, and undermines the active mission of the church. The second is ethical, focuses on all that God is doing to change the world, and enlists disciples to fully invest their lives in that adventure.
"The darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining" (1 John 2:8). We are called to focus not on the darkness that is passing away but on the "true light that is already shining." As we search the Old and New Testaments with this focus we will discover a compelling tapestry of images of hope and a clear mandate for Christian action.
What does God desire for the human future? From the beginning, God clearly intended good for creation. Even after the Fall, God promised that through Abraham and Sarah all nations would be blessed. The history of God's relationship to Israel is a history of the redemption of a people as a prologue to the redemption of the world. Unquestionably, one of God's primary intentions for the human future was to create a godly people a new community, a holy nation (Exodus 19:3-6).
God intends to create a new community of righteousness in which personal sin and structural evil no longer exist (Isaiah 1:16-18). In the biblical motif, righteousness is inextricably bound to justice. God intends to bring into being a new age of justice in which the poor are no longer oppressed. "He will make justice shine on every race, never faltering, never breaking down; He will plant justice on earth, while coasts and islands wait for His teaching" (Isaiah 42:4).
God intends to bring into existence a new age of peace in which the weapons of warfare and violence are transformed into instruments of peace. "He ... will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore" (Micah 4:1-3).
The agenda of a kingdom people is set out in the Sermon on the Mount, writes Chris Sugden in his book Social Gospel or No Gospel. "They are those who 'make peace'; they are those who love their enemies because God loves their enemies. God loved his enemies by taking the initiative in making peace with them at His own cost. Makers of peace take the initiative in bringing peace because that is God's will for the human future."
God ultimately intends to bring into being a new age of righteousness, justice, and peace. God does not have a different agenda for the interim. We, the people of God, can derive our agenda for biblical ethics and Christian mission in the church today from God's intentions for tomorrow. The kingdom of God is both present and coming. The Bible teaches that we are to both pray and work that God's "kingdom come," and God's "will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
We are called to seek first God's righteousness, justice, and peace in a world of sin, oppression, and violence. We cannot build the kingdom through our own power. But God's Spirit could blow through our lives to change this world in ways we can scarcely imagine.
Instead of allowing a limited interpretation of the future to box believers into a rigid determinism, we need to help people go back to the Bible with the right questions and not only discover what God's intentions are for the future, but also affirm that God as the Lord of history can bring the future into being in any way he chooses. Certainly, a "birth trauma" and a judgment will occur sometime in the future. But this in no way forecloses the possibility that God can in these so-called "last days" renew the church, bring justice for the poor, or even bring peace in the Middle East.
We need to strongly reaffirm that the God of ancient Israel is alive and well. God is not an absentee landlord stuck in the backwash of history waiting to bring down the final curtain. God is the Lord of history, and God's present and coming kingdom is breaking into the world with power.
We have absolutely no idea of the extent to which God's Spirit can bring righteousness, justice, and peace in God's world today, in anticipation of the day when Jesus Christ returns and the celebrative kingdom of God comes in its fullness. We have no idea of the extent to which God could manifest the kingdom in this world if we would repent, turn away from our self-absorbed lives and our eschatologies of despair, and obediently work for the agenda of God's kingdom now.
Tom Sine, author of The Mustard Seed Conspiracy, was a professor at Seattle Pacific University and a consultant to World Concern, a Christian relief and development organization, when this article appeared.
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