Originally published March 2023
When I was in college I had to take a few Religion courses to meet the requirements of my university. In one course I wrote a paper about the teachings in the New Testament related to the rapture, which is the idea that Christ-followers (believers) are going to suddenly be transferred from earth to heaven at the Second Coming of Jesus. As a young Christian, the rapture was presented to me as a fact. My assignment was not to judge its validity as a doctrine but more so to argue for or against the biblical claims related to it. I don’t remember many of the details, but I do recall the difficulty in reaching a conclusion. Decades later I don’t feel any more confident in understanding what the Bible teaches about this topic.
I have, though, learned two important points since my “baby Christian” days. One, ideas around rapture theology, dispensationalism, and end-time prophecies are fairly new in terms of church history. Many of the popular claims about how Jesus will return or how the world will end have surfaced within the past 200 years! Two, certain end-time (aka. eschatological) doctrines have been significantly instrumental in national policy and world affairs to a degree I never realized.
There are two outstanding podcast episodes (Part 1) (Part 2) from The Holy Post that cover this topic well through interviews with Daniel Hummel.
Coincidentally, I recently finished reading The Delusion of Crowds by William J. Bernstein. Bernstein writes (p. 238):
“To get a ground-level sense of America’s current cultural polarization, watch Left Behind, a B-movie starring Nicolas Cage as airline pilot Rayford Steele. On a flight from New York to London, Steele’s plane suffers the inexplicable disappearance of dozens of passengers and a collision with an apparently pilotless airliner and is then improbably guided by Steele’s daughter to a fiery emergency landing on a stretch of abandoned highway.
The film, which chaotically shifts between scenes of mayhem in Steele’s aircraft and on the ground, neatly separates its viewers into two groups: those who find the plot line bizarre and kick themselves for watching it, and those who consider it an entertaining version of a story as familiar as Ocean’s Eleven or Casablanca.
Nowhere is the nation’s cultural divide more noticeable than that cleaved by dispensationalism: To one side lie those to whom it supplies the very real prospect of salvation from a fearsome Tribulation and eternal damnation; and to the other side it seems a belief system that, to the extent they’re aware of it at all, echoes the incoherent jumble of Left Behind.
As you can infer, Bernstein is critical of dispensationalism and the Left Behind series, and for good reason. Coincidentally, although this perspective had become, and continues to be, wildly popular among many mainstream evangelicals in the latter half of the 20th century, it is almost universally dismissed by scholars and seminaries. The negative effect of this end-times obsession has raised confusion, fear, and deception to fever pitches, which fits the theme of Bernstein’s book of mass hysteria resulting from crazy teachings.
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Bernstein briefly chronicles the contribution of Robert Anderson in the late 19th century because of its foundational influence on 20th-century prophecies among dispensationalists. Anderson’s work, Bernstein contends, can be seen as the basis for many predictions from people like Jerry Falwell, Hal Lindsey, and Tim LaHaye. As many others have done, Anderson drew from his interpretations of the Old Testament book of Daniel (chapters 8-9) to create a timeline with quite fanciful calculations for events in the late 1800s. (p. 205-207)
Hal Lindsey perpetuated the idea of the world ending by 1988 because of his interpretation of Matthew 24:34, thinking that “these things” will happen within a generation of the 1948 establishment of Israel. (p. 248) Lindsey took the end-time prophecy of dispensationalism to the masses with his book, The Late Great Planet Earth. It was the best-selling non-fiction book of the entire decade of the 1970s, so much so that the Mutual Insurance Company of New York began to offer policies that would pay off left-behind beneficiaries of raptured policy owners. (p. 250)
The Moral Majority, founded by Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich, “burst onto the national scene with their opposition to abortion and gay rights, determination to ‘clean up’ television and the movies, and fervent support for the state of Israel.” (p. 253) At the same time, other influential factors included the late Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, Christian Zionism, and the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ).
Christian Zionism supports a return of Jews to the Holy Land, and the rights of the nation-state of Israel as formed in 1948, and sees these things as necessary fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. So, for many Christian Zionists, what happens with Israel is inextricably linked to end-time predictions. More specifically, as Bernstein points out, “A small piece of land, the site of the Temple Mount, takes center stage in many eschatological theories among Jews, Christians, and Muslims” (p. 218-219).
**Note for full disclosure: Currently, I fall into the camp that sees the rebuilding of the Temple as unnecessary since Jesus Christ came and finished the work of the sacrificial system once and for all. His followers became the living temple since His Spirit is in, and among, us wherever we are. God is not bound to a location or structure.
I am a novice when it comes to these theories of end-times prophecy and apocalyptic literature so I won’t try to explain them any further here. I leave that to the experts like Hummel. What I do want to reiterate is just how much Bernstein and Hummel and others have reinforced my concern with the way Christian doctrines are presented to children and youth. Because of our misguided attempts to be faithful to the gospel, we make up stuff about heaven, hell, the rapture, and how the world will end. We scare a lot of people at a young age or turn a lot of people off to God altogether. We major in what we don’t know (how things will end) and dismiss what we do know (Jesus says His followers will be known by their love.) to get people “saved.”
The focus on what if over what is presents enough of a problem, but we have made things worse by hitching all of this bad theology to politics. Some people are deceived into thinking only one political party has this all figured out. They think it is worth fighting for and anyone who believes differently or even doubts it, is an infidel.
This post is largely for my own brain to process this information. It is complex and I am not the best at making perfect sense of it all. But I will end by contending that we are better off teaching our children to see the needs and people around them here and now and focus their energy on these things. I may not know how the world will end or what exactly happens to a person after they die, but I do know that Jesus clearly taught and commanded us to love.
What does all of this have to do with how we teach and raise the next generation? Quite a bit, actually. See, modern evangelicalism has run with this theme of getting people to heaven after they die as the prime objective of the Christian faith. More than anything else, they present this as the top reason for knowing and following Jesus.
As I write in my book, “I submit we would be better off, as would our children, if we spent more time on what is right before our eyes in this life than on the unknowns of the afterlife.” It is with humility that I acknowledge I, and really we, know almost nothing about what happens to us after this life. The late Dallas Willard wrote, “The damage done to our practical faith in Christ…by our confusing heaven with a place in a distance space…is incalculable.”
Knowing that our concept of heaven is a source of great hope for many people, professing Christians or not, I don’t enjoy giving this caution. But to be honest, we need to resist obsession with the afterlife as an escape from this life. Not everything about believing in God comes down to getting our ticket punched to go to heaven when we die. There is real work God is doing in and through His creation here and now in this life.
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