Dispatches from the Eschatological Battlefield (The Blogosphere, not the Valley of Megido, Silly)
November 10, 2009
How does one engage other Chrisitans about doctrinal disagreements? Why would one want to? How do you speak the truth without losing sight of love? Since the theoretical answers to these questions don’t mean much, I recently embarked on a some experimental dialogues with Christians that believe some very different things than myself, hoping to gain some insight, and to practice my ability to be gracious and loving in the midst of ugly theological conflict. I don’t know how to measure my success. Should I measure by how many peopled I convinced that I was right? If so, I was a dismal failure. Should I measure success by how few times I lost my temper or said something rude? According to this standard, I was fairly successful–not perfect mind you, not an “A+”, but maybe an “I” for Improved. Here is a sampling of my experiments, which mainly centered around getting an into an argument/dialogue concerning eschatology with very conservative, and outspoken bible “prophecy” bloggers. I have not changed a word of the following argument, except that I have erased the name of the person with whom I was arguing. I have put editorial comments in italics and brackets.
The original blog post was about how Bible “prophecy” should be more important to the church today than it is.
ME:
The rapture was a concept made up in the 19th century. Standing up for peace, justice, and unity should be more important for the church today, not an erroneous interpretation of Revelation and Daniel.
http://theophiliacs.com/2009/11/03/eschatology-and-the-american-lawn-a-parallel-history-part-iii/
[Editorial Note: I fully admit that this isn't the most graceful way to begin a conversation, but it did garner some attention. Still working on my entrance.]
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HIM:
Both Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul made statements that clearly establish the rapture doctrine. Jesus said, in Matthew 25:13, “Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.” Paul affirmed in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18: “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive [and] remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.”
jstambaugh, your belief in liberation theology is leading you down the wrong path. Liberation theology replaces the traditional message of salvation based on faith in Jesus’ death with one that is focused on salvation through political and social reform. Salvation is simply reduced to the goal of freedom from oppression in this life. Liberation theology allows the Gospel of Christ to be swallowed up by socialism. God is seen as a “hidden force,” and the New Testament is merely a collection of useful illustrations of Marxist truths.
[Editorial Note: Damn my bio, it is apparently of more interest here than my post concerning the raputre!]
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ME:
B_____,
Please don’t get me wrong here, I believe very much that Christ is returning to judge the living and the dead. I simply do not believe that Christ will return once to take away all true believers, and then they’ll be a tribulation in which an anti-Christ (according to Bob Jones the anti-Christ will be a homosexual robot) will make everyone take the mark of the beast, and then the Tribulation force will come in and kick some anti-Christ butt, etc., etc., etc. until Christ returns again to establish a reign of peace and justice on the earth. Why not cut out all the stuff in the middle?
The return of Christ has always been and will always be a primary doctrine in the Church, the doctrine of the ahead of time rapture of true believers to spare them from the tribuation, etc. etc., has only been around since the 19th century.
I understand where you’re coming from on the whole Liberation Theology thing, but I think you’re oversimplifying things quite a bit. Using your logic and method, I could just as easily say that evangelical/fundamentalist doctrine has been swallowed up by nationalism, that God is seen as the protector and blesser of rich, white America, and that the New Testament is a collection of truths that verify our own predispositions toward capitalism, greed, and oppression. But the above statement, too, while there is a kernel of truth there, is not the whole story, and so is unfair.
I believe that in his life Jesus taught us to have concern for the poor, the oppressed and the outcast. In his teachings he taught us to be peacemakers and to love our enemies. He died in a self-sacrificing act of salvation for all, and he rose again to conquer death and establish a new reign of a different sort of Kingdom on this earth. As those who believe in what he did and said, our job is to live in the Kingdom of God now, and work toward the reconciliation of all Creation to Christ (Rom. 8), not in our own power, or through the use of political ideology (marxist or conservative), nor through the use of violence (like many marxist and fascist groups would use), but through the power of Christ’s self-sacrificing, world-changing, Love, which we have access to through reliance on the Holy Spirit.
In short, I do not take the teachings of Marx (or Glen Beck) seriously, nor do I take the efforts of governments to institute social reform seriously. Rather, I take the Beatitudes seriously; I take the Sermon on the Mount seriously; I take Matthew 25 seriously; I take Romans 12 seriously, etc.
In any event, I hope you take my words with grace, not as attacks but as a sincere desire to talk about serious issues that face us as brothers and sisters in Christ. Thank you for allowing me the voice to do this on your site.
May the peace and blessing of Christ be with you.
James
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HIM:
James,
There is nothing wrong with being an “escapist.” Noah was an escapist and so was Lot. And Jesus said that when the end time signs begin to appear, we are to pray “to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man” (Luke 21:36).
Certainly we are called to suffer for Christ (Romans 8:17). And anyone who truly stands for Jesus in this world will be persecuted (John 15:19). We are assured that as believers we will suffer tribulation in this world (John 16:33), but we are promised that we will be exempted from the great tribulation that will one day come upon the entire world (Revelation 3:10).
One of the early Church fathers, Clement, wrote quite extensively on the principles of the rapture in an epistle to the Corinthians he drafted in either 68 or 97 AD – less than 70 years after Christ’s death on the cross – a considerable period of time before 1830.
I have also given other historical evidence in prior comments that validate the teachings of the rapture preceding anything related to Darby.
The history of the social gospel (which the Emergent Church teaches) is, in nearly every case, a sincere attempt by Christians to do those things that they believe will honor God and benefit humanity. In every case, however, the practical working out of “benefiting humanity” has compromised biblical faith and dishonored God. Why is that? God’s Word gives no commission to the church to fix the problems of the world. Those who attempt to do so are starting out under a false premise, “…a way which seemeth right unto a man,” not God’s way. So where can it go from there? “The end thereof are the ways of death,” i.e., destruction (Proverbs 14:12). Furthermore, the problems of the world are all symptoms. The root cause is sin.
Consistent with its amillennial/postmillennial beginnings, the efforts of the social gospel are earthbound in their attempted restoration of the kingdom of God. Eugene Peterson has infiltrated that heresy into his Message Bible: “God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again” (a perversion of John 3:17).
Anyone who puts his hope in this social gospel, which employs “people of faith” to make “this world the kind of place God can come to,” needs to heed the words of Jesus in Luke 18:8 “When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” People of all faiths, yes, but certainly not “the faith,” for which Jude exhorts true believers to earnestly contend.
B______
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ME:
B________,
What exactly did Clement say? I will agree with you that he speaks extensively of the Second Coming of Christ and the bodily Resurrection. But these things are not what I am talking about when I talk about the rapture. Give me some chapters from Clement’s epistle to the Corinthians so that can see what you’re saying.
[Editorial Note: Strangely enough, Clement has nothing to say concerning the rapture, or the imminent formation of the Tribulation Force, or about the fact that the leader of the EU is going to put barcodes in everyone's foreheads. There is, in Clements letter, a fascinating discussion of the Resurrection and the immenent return of Christ, in which he invokes the imagery of the Phoenix, however.]
You said:
“God’s Word gives no commission to the church to fix the problems of the world. ”
What do you mean? Are you saying that Scripture has nothing in it about taking care of the poor? Does it not have anything in it about being good stewards of Creation? Does it not have anything in it about standing up against injustice and oppression? About taking in the widow and the orphan, about being kind to the stranger and the immigrant? Nothing about paying workers fair wages?
If you ignore the parts of the Bible which lay out God’s outline for a better world you have to ignore about 3/4 of it…and I thought you reformed folks were Sola Scriptura. :) [Editorial note: I am not particularly proud of this little jab]
I am not purporting the social gospel as taught in the early 20th century, or post-millenialism. I don’t think we’re gonna fix the world’s problems before Jesus comes back, nor do I think we’ll do anything of lasting value without reliance on the Holy Spirit. But I do believe that we are called to be witnesses the Kingdom of God now, here on earth. I do believe that all Creation is groaning for Christ to return and set everything straight, and we need to be witnesses to that redemption in our actions and our words.
And furthermore, I believe that unless we are following God’s earlier commissions, like Micah 6:8 which tells us that all the Lord requires of us is to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly before God, and like the roughly 2,000 verses that deal with the poor and our responsibility to them, that the “Great Commission” of Matthew 26 is meaningless. Our failure to witness to the true Gospel in our actions invalidates the witness of our words.
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HIM:
James,
You have come on the scene disputing the rapture doctrine, but have given no supporting scripture for your point of view. Instead, you throw some un-Biblical website out there. [Editorial Note: that would be THIS website he's talking about 
]
Then you have spouted socialist and marxist views, but you try to use Scripture to disguise the ideology.
You made the comment “I don’t think we’re gonna fix the world’s problems before Jesus comes back”. That’s a glaring humanistic comment in my opinion. [Editorial Note: I think his eye must have skipped the "don't" in my sentence. It happens to the best of us.]
Your comment “Our failure to witness to the true Gospel in our actions invalidates the witness of our words” incorporates salvation through works it seems.
Ephesians 2:8-9 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
Not of works, lest any man should boast.
James 2:18 Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works; shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works.
Works will never produce salvation, nor will faith plus works save, but good works always accompany true saving faith.
This conversation is closed as far as I’m concerned. Points of view here are polar opposites. I stand firm in my faith and beliefs of what the Bible has to say about the Rapture and Prophecy.
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ME:
Thanks for the responses, B_______.
May the peace, love and joy of Christ our Saviour be with you, my brother.
James
Eschatology and the American Lawn: A Parallel History, Part III
November 3, 2009
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SEEDLINGS: THE GILDED AGE
For our purposes the Gilded Age ( a phrase which originates from the acerbic pen of Mark Twain) refers to the time period after the Civil War and before World War I, and is geographically confined to the United States. It was a time of huge industrial advances which directly resulted in gross economic and social disparities between the rich and the poor. It was the time of the “robber barons,” men whose vast and unprecedented fortunes (unprecedented for Americans, that is) were built from the sweat and blood of the working class, especially the immigrant working class, and “freed” slaves. Racism, sexism, and classism were arguably at their peak during the Gilded Age.
Emerging from this backdrop of decadence and oppression were two inter-related theological responses. The two arose at roughly the same time, and are so intertwined in their reactions to and rejections of each other and of the social condition of the day that it is hard to say which really came first. The first we will mention, however, is the Social Gospel movement, sparked by theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch with his extremely influential work, Christianity and the Social Crisis. The Social Gospel movement called for a revolutionary shift from, on the one hand the indifference toward and collusion with oppression that was typical of the mainline denominations, and the equally indifferent, escapist, personal salvation theology of the emerging fundamentalist movement.
Fundamentalism, the other movement to emerge from the Gilded age, was an alleged return to the “fundamentals” of Christianity. These fundamentals included a strict belief in biblical inerrancy, the doctrine of personal salvation through a conversion experience, and premillennial dispensationalism. As the Social Gospel movement took off in the beginning of the 20th century, fundamentalism also gained momentum in opposition to it. The struggle between these two movements was a long cold war that is the topic of another post. For now, let us briefly explore the beginnings of the ”fundamental” of dispensationalism and its attending eschatological doctrines.
John "Spooky Eyes" Darby (1800-1882); The Guy who Made Up the Rapture
John Nelson Darby, a man of Anglo-Irish descent, became a priest in the Church of Ireland (Anglican) in 1826.[1] He quickly became disillusioned with the politics and hubris involved the Established religion of the British Isles. The final straw was when the ecclesial authorities made it a requirement for members of the Church of Ireland to recognize King George IV of England as rightful ruler of Ireland. This sort of political interference bothered Darby on a nationalistic and a theological level, leading him to rethink his ecclesiology as well as his eschatology. Darby began to deviate from the common view of his day (and in some form or another every day of the Church’s existence), that the Church constituted the Kingdom of God. He began to believe that the Kingdom of God spoken of by Jesus and Paul, as well as the OT prophets had nothing at all to do with what those who called themselves Christians were doing in the world. This led to his formulation of the doctrine of the rapture, which he was teaching by 1833. His doctrine interpreted Scripture to say that Jesus would someday return to remove the true believers which were not the Church, but an invisible spiritual fellowship (made up of people who believed as Darby did), and with this group the Kingdom of God would be established in heaven, while on earth the Great Tribulation spoken of in Revelation would be unleashed as punishment for evil doing. After this time (the 70 weeks of Daniel), Christ would return again to set up his millennial reign of 1,000 literal years. This was the ground work for the great theological project that occupied much of the rest of his life: the development of dispensationalism. This meant a new interpretation of biblical prophesy and apocolyptic literature. Let’s be clear. Darby didn’t invent the idea that God has worked differently at different times with different people, that idea’s been around since at least the 2nd century. Darby’s unique innovation lies in the fact that in his version of dispensationalism, he divorced the Kingdom of God (and therefore all of eschatology) from the Church, and from the present. He shifted the question from “What should we be doing to work towards the Kingdom of God right now?” to “What prophesies does the Bible hold that will tell us when the Kingdom of God is going to be established in the future?” In effect, this placed primacy on prophetic and apocolyptic literature over and above the Gospels, and produced the evangelical fixation with “prophecy” that lasts to this day. By locating all prophetic literature in the future, Darby conveniently removed from notice the over-arching and pervading theme of justice toward the poor that is present in most if not all of OT prophetic literature.
Here are some other hallmarks of the eschatology that emerged from Darby and his associates; a belief that the Gospel would not save the world, but that the world was on a path of irreversible corruption which would only lead to imminent judgement; that all or most of the OT prophesies told of future events and that with the proper study one could unlock their secrets; and that the Jews would be restored to Palestine before the return of Christ and the commencement of the millennial age (but not necessarily before Darby’s rapture of the true believers). These beliefs became quite popular in Britian during the middle of the 19th century, and were adopted and expounded by many theologians and pastors there. It was only a matter of time before they spread to America.
Darby’s ideas were spread through an influential series of tracts and newsletters across Europe, and through the newsletter of a man named John Inglis, his ideas were accepted by an influential group of American fundamentalists starting with James H. Brookes, and C.I. Scofield, but soon expanded to include D.L. Moody, and R.A. Torrey. These men and many others developed and polished Darby’s dispensationalism. Through the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible, which was to become the most influential Bible on the North American continent for a century, and the establishment of Bible Colleges like Moody Bible Institute, and BIOLA, this eschatology spread like wildfire among the American Church, especially among fundamentalists who used it to combat the Social Gospel movement to great effect.
SEEDLINGS: THE RISE OF SUBURBIA
Another social movement had its beginning in the Gilded Age: de-urbanization, and the rise of the American suburb. It was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the rich vacated the cities and began building exclusive communities on the outskirts, getting special zoning laws passed, and creating covenants which prevented the poor or people of color from living nearby. Frederick Law Olmstead, an American landscape architect, was responsible for landscaping one these pioneering suburb housing developments, Riverside, near Chicago. His revolutionary idea was to connect the front of each of the homes in the development with huge swaths of grass. The scale of his grass planting was only made possible by the recent invention of the lawn mower. This allowed the relatively new rich elite of America to enjoy a perceived luxury which had hitherto been reserved for the Dukes and Barons of England and France, bolstering, in their own minds at least, their new position of prominence.
CONCLUSION SO FAR: WHERE I GOING WITH ALL THIS
In my previous posts I wanted to show that theology and in this case eschatology cannot be understood outside the historical circumstances that have given rise to it. It is clear that Darby’s eschatology was a direct result of his personal experience within the established church of the British Isles. The established church’s eschatology was correct to a degree: the Kingdom of God is in the here and the now, and we as Christians must work (with the power of the Holy Spirit) toward building it. Unfortunately, the established church was very, very wrong in assuming that the British Empire was the way of bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth, just like the 4th century Church was very wrong in assuming that the Roman Empire under Constantine would bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. In both cases Empire co-opted the eschatology of the Church. Darby’s eschatology was a reaction against that co-optation. But, in throwing out the idea of a now and present Kingdom of God, he threw out the most important eschatological concept of all. Ironically, (as we will hopefully see in my next post) it was this rejection of the now and present Kingdom of God, coupled with a removal of the theme of justice for the poor from prophecy, that allowed fundamentalist and evangelical eschatology to be co-opted by Empire in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, completing the cycle of the imperial re-appropriation of Christianity once again.
The Social Gospel movement and the Fundamentalist movement were both results of their age. All eschatology, I believe, must function at some level as answer to the problem of evil. That is exactly what these two movements attempted to do in the face of gross human indignity and suffering. The Social Gospel movement as it went along, developed serious and fatal eschatological and Christological flaws, but its answer to the problem of evil was still closer to the original vision of Christ than fundamentalism’s. Fundamentalism’s answer–enabled by the flawed eschatology of dispensationalism–was and is mere escapism, a cop-out. “Sure there’s evil in the world, and its gonna get worse, and we can’t do anything about it, so let’s just “save souls” and think about heaven.” Admittedly, there is comfort in the idea. It’s easy. It means no real engagement with social problems. It is also the furthest thing from Christ’s intention for the Church and for the world.
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1. My main source for the life of Darby, and the development of dispensationalism is The Roots of Fundamentalism by Ernest R. Sandeen (Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago). A lot of this stuff can be found on the internet as well.
Eschatology and the American Lawn: A Parallel History, Part II
September 11, 2009
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SEEDS
You can own, love, and take care of a lawn without knowing all the historical and cultural circumstances which contributed to your desire to own, love and take care of a lawn. Many of the under-pinning desires of our consumer choices are left unexamined. Similarly, you can believe in something without knowing all its historical and cultural circumstances, precedents, antecedents, dependencies, and implications. Many times its easier that way. As Ecclesiastes tells us, with great knowledge comes great sorrow. As another author puts it, “Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most must morn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, the tree of knowledge is not that of Life.” Many times we avoid knowledge that we intuitively know will cause us pain. On the other hand, being the conflicted and paradoxical beings that we are, all of us humans to some degree have a drive to get to the bottom of things, to look for the truth, to expose the lies that we are fed, and (less often to be sure) to expose the lies we feed ourselves.
Growing up I never questioned the legitimacy of grass as a landscaping feature. I never wondered why everyone either had grass or wanted to have grass in their yard. I would have been an unusual child indeed if I had gone around questioning the reasons behind cultural norms, but I think that as a young adult questioning cultural norms I am engaging in an activity very common among people of my age group. 20-somethings always question things, it’s what we do, especially since the fall of modernism as a way of seeing the world.
The flaw of conservative evangelicalism is that it denies the cultural and historical foundations for its theology and claims Scripture as its only basis. This is a comforting idea, one that causes very little internal pain, but it also an idea that possibly more than any other has driven more young people away. I’m sorry but peer pressure and pot are not the reasons why 50% of those who grow up in conservative evangelical churches lose their faith in college; it is (at least in part) their awakening to the cultural and historical currents which have shaped conservative evangelical theology. This necessarily undermines the authority of a hermeneutic which makes the foundational claim of independence from the shifting sands of culture and history.
Beatus Commentary on Revelation from the Morgan Library, NYC
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
A theology of End Things, or more accurately a theology of Christian Hope for the Future has always been with the Church. Since an examination of early church eschatology is not the main focus of these posts, but rather background, I will briefly outline three hallmarks of Early Church Eschatology, understanding that despite a hegemony of belief even within “orthodox” teaching on the End Times, there were several points of remarkable agreement. In what follows I am, of course (it almost goes without saying), seriously indebted to NT Wright’s sizable corpus of work on this subject. [1]
First, the focus of early church eschatology was on the Resurrection. In a sense it was a very simple Eschatology: Christ is resurrected, therefore we too with be resurrected. Christ’s body is absent from the tomb, therefore, so will our bodies one day rise from the grave.
Second, heaven was not thought of as the final destination, but an intermediary step. Jesus told the thief on the cross that they would see each other in Paradise, but this is certainly not where Christ stayed, and neither is it where early Christians believed they would stay after their Resurrection. They thought of it rather as a place of rest (whether literally or metaphorically), a holding area where one’s spirit awaits the Resurrection, and the eternal life to come.
Third, they believed that the hope of the Resurrection was not passive but active. In the words of Wright: “Because the early Christians believed that resurrection had begun with Jesus and would be completed in the great final resurrection on the last day, they believed that God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness. It was not merely that God had inaugurated the ‘end’; if Jesus, the Messiah, was the End in person, God’s-future-arrived-in-the-present, then those who belonged to Jesus and followed him and were empowered by his Spirit were charged with transforming the present, as far as they were able, in the light of that future.”
And then Constantine happened. Starting in the mid-4th century, the Church found itself with considerable political and cultural power. This changed its eschatology. No longer was the Church looking for the final judgment where Christ would return to set everything straight, but rather the Imperial Church saw itself as presiding over the Millennial Reign; the Kingdom of God was the Roman Empire. After the slow decline of that empire, the kingdom of God became, in the eyes of the theologians, the “Christendom” of western Europe. There was no need for Future Hope, because the between the Church and the emperors, and later between the popes and the kings, everything was under control. So it was that in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, the Eschatology of the church was impacted by the cultural and political events of its day. And it was this Imperial Eschatology that made possible on the intellectual level the first Church sanctioned murder, and subsequently the travesties that were the Crusades, the inquisitions, et al.
Beatus Commentary on Revelation from the Morgan Library, NYC
It should be noted that there were other strains of eschatological belief at work during the Medieval period. Many popular eschatologies (then as it is now) devolved into nothing but base superstition. Y1K, for instance, was every bit as dramatic and trauma-filled as Y2k. extant commentaries on Revelation were filled with Jack VanImpe style doom-and-gloom-messages concerning plagues and wars and predictions about which angels were blowing what trumpets when.[2] There was also a lot of sane eschatology that more or less continued the emphases of the early church (the Resurrection, etc), which were strong especially in the monastic reforms in places like England and Ireland. The point I am making, however, is that the official eschatology was an Imperial one; the Church saw itself as the eschatologically proper political ruler of the world; the pope was Christ’s stand-in for the millennial reign (seen,even then, not as a literal 1000 year period, but a more or less eternal period of time); the emperor was Christ’s vicegerent; the hand of God whose job it was to subjugate the heathens and bring about God’s Kingdom with whatever force and violence necessary. The church’s mission of working toward the Kingdom of God with love, compassion and justice was twisted into a mission of bringing about the kingdom of God through war, extortion, and torture. Political power and material greed warped the eschatology of the Church.
In was also during this time (the early Medieval period) that the lawn was born. The first lawns were created by noblemen and kings as places to hold tournaments and fairs. The lawn became a symbol of nobility and of the monumentally asinine pissing contests that made up much of western European sport during the middle ages. When one thinks about, then, it is really not surprising that the common ancestor of both lawns and football fields is the mock battlefield of the tournament.
Go to Part III
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1.For a more cogent and detailed explanation of all of this and more besides, see Wright’s Surprised by Hope pp. 31-51; in the endnotes he gives references to even more detailed and academic discussions of these points in his tome, The Resurrection of the Son of God.
2. This is not to say that all the crazy stuff Jack VanImpe believes was invented in the Middle Ages, only that there were people running around commenting on the events of the day and trying to predict when Christ would return, etc. Rather than go into details now, I intend to devote a post to the book of Revelation and the history of its interpretation. But if the gentle reader is curious, she or he should look into the Beatus Commentary on the Apocalypse illustrations of which I have included in this post; fascinating stuff.
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INTRODUCTORY MATERIAL/SOIL PREPARATION
Everything is connected. This is not something I “know” in any verifiable sense, but something I feel.
I’ve been meaning to write about Eschatology for some time now, and I’ve also received the subtle and well-placed prods from my fellow theophiliacs to hurry up, since I’ve been saying (threatening?) I would do so for a long time. My problem is that to write about Eschatology in any “systematic” way would: a) bore everyone to death, and b) take a long damn time to do thoroughly, and c) there are plenty of people who already claim to have done so. Besides all that, systematic theology just doesn’t do it for me. I’ve tried your Millard Ericksons, your Wayne Grudens, and your Louis Berkhofs. I even sat down one semester with Volume I of Barth’s Church Dogmatics intending to ”read” them (all 4,521 volumes as if they were a series dime novels or something that you sit down and read, HA!). I’m done with that. Sure, from time to time, I’ll consult what systematic theologies I didn’t sell off (I sold Millard Erikson to buy a Christmas present for my wife one time), but I have lost faith in the modernist proposition that theology can or should be systematic.
So, back to eschatology and lawns, two seemingly disparate subjects, why should I write about them together? Mainly, because I feel like it. Because I think everything is connected; because I’ve come to think that everyday things, even mundane things can illuminate the study of God in ways that endless pages of scholasticism* cannot. Theologians (along with everyone else in the Humanities) have allowed themselves to be pigeon holed by the science-pimping academic community. Specialization is the death-knell of creative, and beneficial academic work. Therefore, I want to cross-pollinate my theological reflection with other fields, one of which is landscaping. For centuries Buddhists have seen the benefit of combining religious (or maybe religio-philosophical) meditation with gardening, maybe it is time Christianity does the same. Is it even possible to combine the study of landscaping with the study of dogma? Can a parallel history be useful? Can connections, however tenuous they seem to some, be found and profitably meditated on? Is this whole thing just going to amount to a pile of crap? I’ve yet to answer these questions myself (so I don’t need any of you jokers answering them for me!), but as the fly said when he fell into the strawberry preserves, “I’ve put myself in much worse jams than this!”
Christian eschatology is a series of interrelated beliefs concerning what is happening/what will happen in the “End Times.” It’s the study of the theology of end things in the sense that it’s about the Christian God’s End Game. Eschatology endeavours (with varying success) to answer the question: “How is God finally going to get us out of this mess we’ve made?” So, these posts are going to deal with that and related questions, not the question of IF God is going to get us out of this mess. I am going to take that proposition on faith.* There are a lot of different aspects of eschatology: Christ’s Return to Earth, the Millennial Reign of Christ, the alleged Tribulation, the Anti-Christ(s), Seals, Horsemen, Judgment seats, eternal rewards, eternal punishments. It is a difficult task to sort all of this out. One of the really confusing tendencies of the systematic and especially the denominational literature on the subject is that it sometimes seems to take all the authors opinions and interpretations concerning these various subjects and lumps them together in one bulk package that the reader is invited to take or leave (at the reader’s own risk). So that if you want to believe that Jesus is going to come back to judge the quick and the dead, all the sudden you must also believe that the UN is going to set up a New World Order and then all the Christians will be raptured and then Communist Russia is going to attack Israel while President Obama (anti-Christ) and the Pope (the beast) join in holy homosexual matrimony, adopt a Chinese boy (who is the false prophet) and together go around branding people’s foreheads with the dreaded 666, decapitating anyone who refuses. Anyone who’s been around evangelicalism their whole lives (and that’s most of us around here) knows that I am not exaggerating much in my description of that movements dominant eschatology. So where did this all come from? Why does the evangelical movement, the A/G, and until a few years myself believe the way they do about End Things. I am going to advance the claim that eschatology (especially the eschatology described above) finds its origin and foundation in a strange, fluid and convoluted mixture of hermeneutics and history. So that if you want to understand the eschatology of a particular person, or denomination, or broad theological movement you need to look not only at interpretations of some obscure passage in Daniel, but also and possibly more importantly at the culture, the historical circumstances, and the personal circumstances of the person/denomination/movement in question. In the words of Titus Decker,
“Theology and history form one giant gelatinous blob slowly making its way across the landscape evolving, changing, oozing out and sucking in as it goes.”
Which brings us finally to lawns. There are an estimated 32 million acres of grass lawns in America. Professional lawn care is $28.9 billion industry. 50%-70% of all residential water usage is spent on landscaping the vast majority of which consists of grass. Have you ever wondered how that happened? Now, probably the reason this interests me (and possibly why it doesn’t interest you [yet!]) is that I am in the landscaping business; my brother and I just started a little garden design company. I receive a small percentage of that 29 billion dollars American spend on their lawns. Later today, I will drive to subdivision hell and finish installing a sprinkler system so that a paying customer (to whom I am grateful) can add his little 1/32nd of an acre to the 32 million.
Why do we keep grass? There are environmental benefits of course, but grass took root in American consciousness and culture far before any concern for global warming, urban hotspots, or even environmental conservation of any sort was ever a concern. In future posts, I will attempt to answer these and more fascinating conondrums, but just as clue as to where I’m going with both my discombobluated meditations on Eschatology and my grass fixation (heehee) I leave you with a quote from Virginia Scott Jenkins, The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession:
“American front lawns are a symbol of man’s control of, or superiourity over, his environment.”
Go to Part II
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*scholasticism: I use this word in a very specific sense to refer A) to the tradition of the medieval theologians who styled themselves after Thomas Aquinas, or B) pejoratively to describe theology or theologians which nit-pick in a ridicously obtuse fashion over the most asinine things (i.e. the famous theological debate about how many angels can dance on the tip of a needle at once) in the farcically serious fashion of the medieval Scholastics.
*on faith: I know not all of our commentors and readers will, and that’s fine. I just thought I would be upfront about where I’m coming from.
What The Hell Is A Post Evangelical Tea Party?
July 31, 2009
A simple google search for “post evangelical” will return a plethora of commentary on the term (some of my favorites: the very straight forward wikipedia entry, the standby internetmonk, an open source theology thread from 2003, and our fellow ccblogger notes from off center).
It would be very silly of me to launch into a comprehensive series of posts on the idea when so much has already been explained by those more capable (and internet savvy). However, the term displays prominently at the top of our blog right next to ‘tea party’ as if we all sit around counting doilies and discussing Mr. Darcy all day long and as far as I can tell, we’ve never actually sussed out just what that means.
I am especially guilty since it would seem I consistently use this slippery word as an adjective for my position on various issues right now and just smile coyly to myself as people sitting across from me as they scramble to figure out if that’s a postmodern, emergent, postdenomentational missional thing or whether I just made it up on the spot. (In truth, it gives me an inherent sense of superiority to be “post” whatever the person is whom I’m discussing things with. Post-girlfriend anyone?)
For some odd reason probably having something to do with either Shawn Wamsley or my slick redo of our sidebar, our traffic has increased in recent weeks and I’m delighted that many of our new readers and commenters come from worldviews outside the Christian sphere. If you’re new and reading this, I hope this post is useful for you.
Everyone who contributes to this blog came to Christianity in an Evangelical movement in the United States. None of us have remained.
This is the simplest use of the term on this blog and if nothing I say after makes any sense, I suggest we just stick to it. Some of us have found new movements to join, some have left conventional Christianity altogether and others are lost somewhere in the clouds.
Our reasons for leaving are as variable as our tastes in beer, which is to say, surprisingly not quite so varied—however, full of tiny quirks unique to our own persons. Shamelessly borrowing formatting from the wikipedia article because I’m on vacation and too tired to be creative on my own, I’d like to list some of these frustrations to which many of us can attest (I’ve also decided to add Exclamation points because most of us live in Minnesota where people really don’t show enough emotion):
1. Politicization of Faith!
The G Dub years were hard for me. I was a loyal supporter before I could even vote but by the end of his eight year reign, I couldn’t figure out why people kept telling me he was Christian, and why that necessarily meant I had to vote for him. An astute reader of the blog might observe that we still discuss our political convictions using Christian rationale, just often from the other pole. I would counter that such explanations are often more complicated than simple blind “good vs. evil” comparisons and that likely a particular politician we might support involves our reasoning of “shared goals” rather than “shared convictions.”
2. Unreasonable view of Scripture!
One of the two issues on this blog that will never quite go away. I don’t have much to add here. Look around, you’ll find it.
3. Inadequate Response to Homosexual Christians!
The other of the two issues that is never far from our recent comments list. There are a variety of stances on this issue on our blog—which is something, I’m proud of.
4. Militant Exclusivism and Preoccupation with Eschatology!
For those of us who grew up in a church or movement with a vibrant missions or Evangelistic focus, this issue remains difficult. Just what does it mean to share the good news? Am I accountable if I don’t “witness” to every single person I meet? Does hell exist? Are Christians the only people who go to “heaven.” And just what is heaven? And hey, what about my Muslim friends, I like them and I think that their faith is pretty cool and I’d rather they don’t change to be completely honest. Can God make a rock so big he can’t lift it?
5. Emphasis on Personal Piety over Social Responsibility!
Disgusted by mega church opulence and prosperity nonsense, post evangelicals are afflicted by the tension between holiness and justice. Maybe those hippies who joined the Peace Corps instead of the missions trip were on to something. And seriously, just how does my memorizing another scripture verse help people dying from Malaria in Africa?
6. Disconnect From Church History!
I’ve discussed this elsewhere. Old stuff matters and Evangelicals seemed determined to separate themselves from it.
7. Separatism and Alternative Culture!
More a personal pet peeve of mine. I can’t stand alternative Christian culture, music, movies, books etc… I find it to be a cheesy and crude attempt at unnecessary and harmful separation from “the world.” Seriously, why are Christians so weird?
8. Other Stuff!
Which I’m sure you guys will add in the comments.
Finally adding “tea party” to our blog tag line was really a throwaway thing I did when first designing the site. I suppose you could say its lighthearted or a reference to our mutual friendships and enjoyment of imbibing things but really, I just threw it in there on a whim.
A (brief) Vision of Religious Pluralism
March 20, 2009
Jeremy recently began a thread on Religious Pluralism, and his three posts are, as usual, well thought out and reasonably argued. In my own typical fashion (ie-loud), I responded to a strain – if not the strain – of Pluralism which takes as a foundation the “unbiased” research of the Social Sciences. I pointed to what I thought were inherent weaknesses in such an approach to constructing a Pluralism which seeks to actually mold a person spiritually or attempt to critique a religious tradition. Namely the problem of the
- “Meta-narrative in a history of religions position,”
- “The Secular in the Social Sciences (with the built in irony of a “secular” take on religions which purports to form a transcendent universal religion based on its own religious agnosticism),” and the
- “The irrelency of the Social Sciences broadly concieved” as critiqued by a truly post-modern epistomology
That is to say it was mostly a polemical piece which aimed at the center of the majority of Pluralistic discourse that I am accustomed to hearing.
But I did not put anything positive in it’s place, and this abscence might seem to imply that I think all other religous people are in complete error and/or going-to-burn in the fires of hell.
I do not believe that. And so I offer here what seems to me to be a few simple consequences which flow out of an creedaly orthodox and patristically influenced meditation on “other religions.” I pre-suppose a crucial theological position.
“Knowledge” of God can never be accomplished by human effort. Even “knowledge” which comes from nature or “natural law” is only possible by the self-revelation of a God who is by nature Love. This is the orthodox position on Revelation and there is something that flows out of this.
It will not do to simply say that we agree with other religions on some “moral” issues. This seems to me to be a weak and even prideful way of looking at common ground between faiths. No. If a Buddhist believes it is wrong to kill, then this is shared Revelation and not something which we just sort of simultaneously came to by looking at the world around us. If a Muslim says that “Allah is merciful,” whatever the influence of the Judeo-Christian religion on Islam, this is something which is deep and can be called nothing other than a revelation of the Character of God. We cannot portion anything specifically “Christian” off to one side and say that the things we have in common are but “moral” issues on some other side.
There are reasons that several of the Church fathers explicitly espoused a Universalist soteriology, and many others came real close. That is, to take the Atonement and Resurrection seriously demand that we think about the effects of the Incarnation on the whole Human race. Consider the reading today in the lectionary in Romans where Paul says that “since ALL died through the sin of the one man, so ALL are made alive because of the one Messiah“ I’m not saying that this “proves” my point, but that even as early as Paul, there was needed a reflection which showed the universal and ontological change which happened in humanity on account of the Gospel. One which is not merely acquired by choice but by the very nature of what has just happened.
And so, if as Paul said, the Gospel “has been preached to the whole world” (a strange thing to say since he obviously knew that that was not the actual case, unless he thought this meant something other than the easy reading) then it should not be a surprise that we should find the real Spirit of God at work in people other than those baptized. Early thought maintains that Christ is renewing the whole of Creation, not just the few elect.
So it seems to me that a religious pluralism, one that posits that yes some from different faiths may indeed find renewal by Christ at the end of the Age on account of their “faith” is an honest position to hold.
Christians do not “own” God, but we are stewards of the Mystery of Faith:
“Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again” Amen!
p.s. – Two great takes on this by C.S. Lewis can be found in his books “The Great Divorce” and the scene towards the end of “The Last Battle” in the Narnia series where “Aslan” and a “Colourman” have a conversation.
More Proof That Fundamentalists Do Not Read Their Bibles II
November 21, 2008
I have been reading through much of the Prophetic books lately. I recently finished Isaiah (I know, I know…I’m pretty holy) and I was struck time and again as I read over certain passages that I had heard interpreted in various ways over the years. Now, I make no claim to be an Hebrew Bible Scholar, in fact the OT scares me half to death (you never know if it really happened, or when it happened), but I am pretty sure that 99% of the “end-times” doctrines taken from the OT fail on a basic, even “literal,” level to take the books seriously as what they are…Timely words for the community of Israel. Now perhaps we can get into a discussion on the sensus plenior of Scripture sometime (oohh, Latin. Jeremy, whatcha gonna do about it?), but at the very least one needs to let exegesis have it’s day.
That being said, I do not know how Isaiah 14.1-14 ever got used to talk about Satan falling from heaven. This is obviously talking about the real, on earth, human, King of Babylon. It is not at all talking about an “angel” or whatever. So yeah…let’s read the Bible literally and stop talking about “The Devil falling from heaven” as described in Isaiah.
Which brings us to the other passage, Ezekiel 28.1-19 Here again, the writer is focused on the King of Tyre. That is, the real, on earth, human, King of Tyre. On can easily get this by looking at the first few verses, where there is the purposeful title “Son of Man,” that is “man.” An intentional title as in the next verse you see that the king said “I am a god” The lament which is sung over the King of Tyre draws from extra-biblical Eden stories and likely other Near-eastern mythologys. Notice that there is extra material here that is not in Genesis. Though it uses mythological language, the theme is the very physical and present King. Otherwise the judgements on him for his arrogance lose any meaning and frame of reference.
So there you go, taking the Bible seriously, even “literally,” reveals that “satan” did not “fall from heaven;” at least not in the OT, perhaps at some other point we can look at Luke 10.18
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