I am a Christian Too

No one believes, or at least will admit to believing, that the outbreak of war in Israel, Gaza and Lebanon is a good thing. But some believe that these events are fulfilling God’s Word in our presence.

Neil Little, a Toledoan who has programs on WGGN-FM (97.7) in Sandusky, said he is concerned that the networks reporting on the Middle East fighting are not making any references to Bible prophecy.

“Nobody is bringing up that this is what was prophesied in Jeremiah and Isaiah — that Israel would be bombarded,” Mr. Little said. “I understand what the geopolitical issues are all about, but I believe the coming of Christ is just around the corner. I preach it. I don’t want to scare people, but Christians should know what’s going on.”

The pre-trib pre-millenial dispensationalist worldview holds that many of these events are inevitable because “prophesy demands it”, as Hal Lindsey wrote in The Late Great Planet Earth. This leads to a fatalism: “Gee, it’s terrible that innocent men, women and children are dying, but you know, it’s God’s will, because prophecy demands it.” Hezbollah lobs rockets into Israel? Jeremiah. Christians in Lebanon are dying? Isaiah.

This fatalism results in a curious inaction, in a silence in the face of war, almost as if to work for peace in the middle east would be to thwart God’s will. Condoleeza Rice is delaying a U.S. call for a ceasefire to give Israel some time to root out Hezbollah, a move to which none of Bush’s Christian supporters are objecting. I wouldn’t presume that apocalyptic eschatology is driving Rice’s current policy towards the conflict, but I do think it is driving the approval of those policies by much of the Republicans’ base. After all, if we actually achieved a just peace in the middle east, we would be proving God a liar.

This attitude is behind much of the Christian Zionism in the U.S. Genesis 12:3 describes God’s promise to Abram that God will give him the land of Israel, and that “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you”. This becomes the proof-text for an unqualified support for Israel regardless of the wisdom and morality of its actions. U.S. pressure for Israel to stand down in the current conflict would be seen as abandoning God’s command that Abraham’s descendants will live in Israel. As Richard Mouw, President of Fuller Seminary, writes:

Even if we believe that God wants the contemporary nation of Israel to prosper in the land that was promised to her ancestors, evangelical Christians do Israel no favors by refusing to criticize what the Israelis are presently doing in the Middle East. No one cared more about the well-being of the Hebrew people than the prophets of ancient Israel. Yet those prophets regularly criticized Israel’s leaders for their corrupt practices. They minced no words when they were convinced that the people of Israel were guilty of injustice: “O Israel, return to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity”

So here is yet another downside to the apocalyptic worldview. Conservative Christians are abandoning God’s will for us to speak truth to power and to be peacemakers in favor of a fatalistic acceptance of all manner of tragedy in the middle east and an unquestioning support for any and all of Israel’s actions.

I’ve been reading Barbara Rossing’s The Rapture Exposed, and enjoying it very much. I first learned of her book when looking into various views on the rapture for my earliers posts, and picked up a copy.

Rossing makes a convincing case that Revelation is entirely misunderstood by the dispensationalists, and that

• It’s intended audience is the 1st century Christian community in the middle east, not the 21st century Christian community in the U.S. and Europe.
• Jesus’ victory is by means of his death and resurrection, his gospel of peace and compassion, and Christians’ witness to their faith, not by means of a violent military encounter.
• Revelation is prophetic in the original meaning of the word — it speaks God’s truth — instead of the current meaning — of telling the future. The dispensationalist notion that “prophecy demands it” misses the point of prophecy, which is as a warning of what may happen if we don’t repent, not as a prediction of what will happen regardless of what we do.
• The pre-trib pre-millenialist interpretation is anything but literal — it requires, for example, assuming that the events described in the first half of a bible verse and the second half of the same verse are separated by 2,000 years.

Rossing certainly is clearing up for me the true meaning of Revelation. But, my objective in this series of posts is not to argue the hermeneutics of apocalyptic biblical interpretation. For that, I will defer to Rossing and others. My point here is only that we mainline Protestants have our authorities explaining our view of the meaning of Revelation, and the dispensationalists have another set of authorities (I will be gracious here) explaining their view. All are Christian, and all are sincere believers in their point of view. Most importantly, our choice between these eschatologies, I maintain, is an adiophoron, something that is not essential to our faith nor our salvation.

So the mainline versus the dispensationalist interpretations are choices we are free to make. Given that it’s a choice, what is the worldview of those choosing the mainline interpretation versus the worldview of those choosing the dispensationalist interpretation? And how does this worldview affect more broadly the theology and the politics of those who hold it?

In an interview by Salon, Sam Harris, the author of The End of Faith and a very vocal anti-monotheist, responds to a question thusly:

Salon: If you’re a Christian and you look at the figure of Jesus, you can easily read his core message as being about love and compassion and caring, particularly for the outcasts of society.

Harris: That is Jesus in half his moods speaking that way. But there’s another Jesus in there. There’s a Jesus who’s just paradoxical and difficult to interpret, a Jesus who tells people to hate their parents. And then there is the Jesus — while he may not be as plausible given how we want to think about Jesus — but he’s there in scripture, coming back amid a host of angels, destined to deal out justice to the sinners of the world. That is the Jesus that fully half of the American electorate is most enamored of at this moment.

Harris has been listening to the pre-trib pre-millenialists and their interpretation of Jesus’ return. And it is a Jesus I don’t recognize.

Are there really two Jesuses? A loving and compassionate Jesus and a vengeful smiting Jesus?

Lets compare two images of Jesus. First, a bit of stream of consciousness from the gospels:

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy…If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also…Love your neighbor as yourself…Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you…For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son…Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.

Now here’s another image of Jesus:

Rayford watched through the binocs as men and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin. . . . Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.

This is from Glorious Appearing, the twelfth book of the Left Behind series, as quoted by Harpers.

No wonder Sam Harris speaks of “another Jesus in there”. Here is the evil inherent in the fundamentalist eschatology, the conservative apocalypse. Jesus becomes transformed from loving savior to savage killer.

This hope for a warrior Jesus isn’t new — after all, the disciples were expecting the messiah to overthrow the Romans and institute a new kingdom in the Temple. There’s a scene in the wonderful Christian movie The Last Temptation of Christ when, as they are walking to Jerusalem, Peter asks Jesus “is an army of angels going to meet us at Jerusalem?” While not biblical, it certainly captures the disciples’ expectation. In the Bible, Peter, the wonderfully dense Rock, is ready to fight when Jesus is arrested:

Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear.

But Jesus chastises Peter, and goes peacefully with the soldiers. In the gospels, Jesus’ kingdom is not one enforced by military power.

So why would anyone want to believe that when Jesus returns there will be “blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ”?

Vengeance.

Going back to my first post in this series, the apocalypse in general gives hope to the oppressed. In America, it gives hope to the culturally estranged, conservatives who see the culture changing around them, outside of their control. The government, liberals, Hollywood, globalization and pluralism are all blamed for rising crime, a coarsening culture and changing cultural norms. I’m sure it’s hard for many rural, conservative Christians to adjust. It’s not just that the world is changing, but that the conservative Christian culture has gone from the dominant societal norm to being marginalized. It would be easy to slip into resentment, anger and hatred of the prevailing culture, along with a growing conviction that the old ways were godly and the new ways are not.

It’s a small step from there to hoping, even confidently anticipating, God’s violent vengeance being wreaked upon the sinners. It would be a vindication, justice, revenge and restitution all in one, accomplished by a stroke of the sword coming from the Lord’s mouth. This desire for revenge isn’t seen as self-serving, but as God fulfilling his promise to institute his reign on earth. The victims of Jesus’ wrath are goats, not sheep, and it is divine justice he is meting out, not insanely bloody and horrific warfare. We Christians are not allowed to commit murder, but we can take joy in the anticipation of God’s perfect judgment upon those He condemns to hell. God (and we) have been patient, long-suffering, and merciful. In Armageddon, God, in His own time, has unfolded his plan to cleanse the earth of those unworthy of the new millenium by spilling their “innards and entrails” on the desert floor. Praise God!

At the heart of pre-trib pre-millenialism is a desire to see the “other” punished by God, and violently so. What’s worse is the belief that the Christians who have been raptured will have a ring-side seat in heaven to watch it all unfold. Not only does God smite our enemies, but we get to watch!

This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ turned upside down.

More next time…

So if the apocalyptic parts of the Bible are difficult to understand for those of us that haven’t spent years studying them, what do the professional theologians and pastors make of them? Let’s take a survey.

First, the Lutherans. A few years ago, Dr. Barbara Rossing, a professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, wrote The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation. Apparently, the first sentence in her book is “The rapture is a racket.” Instead, she believes Revelation tells us that:

God hears our cries; Jesus, the Lamb, is a new Moses, and He leads God’s people out of oppression into freedom—which is the new Jerusalem vision of chapters 21 and 22 of Revelation.

Next, the Roman Catholics. Dr. Paul Thigpen, author of The Rapture Trap: A Catholic Response to ‘End Times’ Fever, writes:

So what does the Catholic Church officially teach about the true meaning of all these puzzling symbols, figures, and events [in the book of Revelation]?

The short answer: Not much.

What about the evangelicals? Aren’t they all believers that we are in the end-times? Tony Campolo, author of Speaking My Mind, has said:

I have some problems with the whole Rapture theory, as [my] book suggests.

Two very important points I’d like to make here. First, all of these Christian thinkers believe in the second coming of Christ, and to some extent the prophecies of a tribulation. It’s the belief in the rapture, and that biblical prophecies are coming true in today’s newspapers, with which they disagree.

Secondly, unlike the authors I’ve quoted, my intent here is not to “debunk” the pre-trib pre-millenial interpretation. I’m only trying to demonstrate that it is not the only sincerely Christian interpretation. It isn’t even the majority view of Christians across the world. The world’s Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestants, and even many evangelicals, faithful Christians all, understand the apocalyptic tradition in the Bible differently than the “Left Behind” believers.

Belief in the rapture is a choice. It is one alternative understanding among several, all equally Christian, that one decides to embrace.

I would never dream of criticizing Christians who, understanding the differing apocalyptic theologies and in the good faith of their God-centered religious journey, come to believe in the rapture. (Angel, this means you!) God bless those Christians whose minds are open, but come down on the side of pre-trib pre-millenialism.

But here’s what I’m interested in: the worldview of Christians who have come to view the rapture as a shibboleth: a belief that separates the true believers from the apostates, the pretenders, the social Christians.

In my next post, I’ll start discussing some of the elements of the worldview that is inextricably linked with a belief in the rapture and a rapidly approaching apocalypse.