The Future of Christian Eschatology 1

Scot:

I'll be following this one with great interest. Thanks for posting on this topic. Last things are terribly important. Redemption and consummation outweigh all the topics people love to talk about (sports, politics, economy, etc.) by light years. Everything is headed toward consummation but teachers of the Bible think it is irrelevant. It's why I wrote The World to Come in 2008 and why I think N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope has made such a stir.

Derek Leman

So I grew up attending a fundamentalist church. As a teen in the 80's, I heard of an evangelical pastor in my town who came out as holding to (what I now understand to be) a partial preterist position. All of the fundy churches in town assumed that they guy was totally insane and had lost any sense of the Bible and gospel. It caused quite a stir. From what I understand, he lost a lot of congregants.

Anyway, I look forward to the discussion.

Looking forward to your unfolding partial preterist perspective.

AMR

I do look forward to this! I hope you will talk about the implications of eschatology on our ethics. I recently heard someone quote Brian McClaren saying something to this extent: "The future of the church in America will rise or fall with our view of eschatology."

Does anyone know what book/lecture this is from?

Great! Ladd changed my thinking drastically while I was in seminary as well.

Scot,

I converted to post-trib at DTS and preach it in my church. I just thought you should know that there are some of us with backbone! (Although I have been accused by the congregation of being post-mil and even of preaching the "social gospel.")

Scot, Your introduction is already a breath of fresh air on this subject! Thank you!

As our recently departed friend Paul Harvey used to say, I'm looking forward to "the rest of the story!"

hey everyone,
I don`t know how is is in your country but in my country (israel) usually fundamentalist eschatology goes hand in hand with a prohibition on studying theology in a christian college . So most of the time people don`t have the chance to learn that there are a lot of chalenges to this kind of eschatology. the most annoying thing is that this kind of eschatology , usually produces a lack of care for air pollution and for the generations to come.
besides of being (in the view of many respected scholars) untrue to the biblical evidence this kind of eschatology made people (like me) run away from some books of the bible (like Revelation). G.B Caird wrote a commentary on Revelation , on the back cover F.F.Bruce wrote something that goes like this: the end is not an event it is a Person. In my opinion this kind of eschatology (Rapture , visble and unvisible coming of christ etc. ) had caused us to think of the end as an event and not a person (God the father , Lord Jesus and the holy sprirt) . moreover , in my opinion, it encourages eschatocentric eschatology (focusing on end time events ) instead of Christocentric eschatology (focusing on being compassionate and loving in the face of the end wich is Christ reign with the father and the Holy spirit).

Nice to see you're re-publishing this great article of many years ago.

Hardly any have had the courage to admit that Jesus' message was entirely for the early 1st century church. That the whole of Matthew 24 and even 25 have in that sense come to pass.

That's why I applaud NT Wright for saying so, I like his "achievement and implementation" message. Jesus has achieved it, the church's job is to implement his message.

The american Left Behind circus has moved out of town. I hope there's no return.

I like our Israeli friend, ET's comment (#18), the dominant American eschatology ends up being "eschatocentric eschatology."

Scot, my background is very similar to yours, too. Saved as a Junior Higher and going to a dyed in the wool dispensational "Bible Church" and then off to MBI and DTS (this is middle 60's and early 70's). With Hal Lindsey becoming the end times guru.

What I find interesting is the passionate certainty with which secret rapture insiders told me who the anti-christ was--U Thant, JFK, the Pope (I forget which one), Saddam Hussein, and lately Obama. And the books! Eighty-eight reasons Jesus would come back in 1988 (40 years after the establishment of Israel as a nation...blah, blah, blah).

I think many brainwashed pre-tribbers like me see the whole system as a big comic book joke. This stuff is tabloid material, not serious exegetical study. As was mentioned by someone earlier on Jesus Creed, this whole system takes the Book of Revelation away from the Church as any form as pastoral counsel and turns it into a mystery that only the gnostic insiders know how to unravel. I'm so tired of it.

Wow Scot, this was interesting. I think part of what plays into this is that how lay people in the US think is influenced SO much by the media and entertainment around us, which is why the Left Behind series is so powerful. It simplified a theology and made it entertaining, and therefore spread to people who could ingest it without ever studying it.

I suppose that leads me to ask another question - do we respond by trying to spread our theology in similar ways? Is the damage done by theological beliefs that are wrong, or is the damage done by the cultural ignorance and vulnerability to persuasion? Or both? If the appropriate response is the education of pastors and teachers, then you (and my husband) are going down the right track. Do we also need to educate the filmakers and book writers, or are they to be educated by the pastors?

I've always known that what was and is still being taught in our churches today regarding Eschatology was false. Just a simple reading of the text tells you that. Jesus and the Apostles make it very clear that they were all living out the last days and they weren't mistaken about that. It still amazes me today that most people (including those in our churches who are supposed to be the great theological minds because they went to seminary) read the Bible as if it was written expressly to them and not as it was written, to people of the first century. Perhaps if people would pick up the book and not take it out of the context and time that it was written, things would actually start to make perfect sense to them and then they would "KNOW" the truth. Once you know the truth, you will realize, the Bible from beginning to end it one totally cohesive history of God's grand plan for humanity and it has been fully fulfilled, we just haven't accepted it yet. But, I am confident that one day it will happen just as God promises.