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PART VIII:

THE FUTURE QUESTION

18

Can We Find a Better Way of Viewing the Future?

Some of us are terribly familiar with the theological discipline of eschatology, the study of the eschaton, or the future and end toward which history moves. We grew up in fundamentalist, Pentecostal, or Restorationist churches that loved to hold prophecy conferences, to preach sermons about the coming last days, to publish garish magazines and illustrated tracts about the “LITERAL FULFILLMENT of biblical predictions TODAY,” and to speculate about the impending apocalypse (initiated by godless communism in Russia, China, or Iraq). Our preachers often speculated according to a theory of eschatology called dispensationalism. Although dispensationalism was invented somewhat recently—in the 1830s—among the somewhat eccentric Plymouth Brethren (the fascinating tradition in which I was raised), it has been popularized worldwide through the Scofield Reference Bible since 1909 and is now considered absolute historic orthodoxy by millions of Christians around the world.

Those of us raised in dispensationalist circles can regale one another with stories about scary “left-behind” sermons, sometimes illustrated through huge and serious wall charts and dramatized in B-rated movies. These sermons often climaxed with warnings about the second coming, when Jesus will return like “a thief in the night”—initiating the “Rapture” when “born-again Christians” will (we were told) be miraculously evacuated to heaven and the rest (including the children of “saved” parents) will be left behind for a nightmare apocalypse. As a boy of about eight, having come home from school and found the doors locked and nobody home, I once spent nearly an hour sitting on my back porch, deeply dejected and with rising panic, sure that the Rapture had occurred and I was a child left behind. Who knew a third-grader could feel such terror and despair?

To the uninitiated, this all might sound pitiful or laughable, like wild conspiracy theories shared on strange Web sites or middle-of-the-night AM radio. But surprising numbers of mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics have also been thoroughly catechized in this eschatology through televangelist broadcasts and books (and newer B-grade films) in the Left Behind Series, which have broken sales records around the world.1 If they only focused on speculation about who the antichrist is (I remember hearing it was Khrushchev, then Henry Kissinger, then Saddam Hussein, and now apparently odds are being placed on Barack Obama!), their eschatological hobby might be harmless enough—like a crazy uncle obsessed with UFOs.2 But in recent decades, dispensationalism and its eschatological cousins have become significant factors in the foreign policy of the richest, most consumptive, and most well-armed nation in the history of history, and that’s where things get even scarier than a B-grade movie.3

If the world is about to end, why care for the environment? Why worry about global climate change or peak oil? Who gives a rip for endangered species or sustainable economies or global poverty if God is planning to incinerate the whole planet soon anyway? If the Bible predicts the rebuilding of the Jewish temple (or requires that rebuilding for its prophecies to work in a dispensationalist framework), why care about Muslim claims on the Temple Mount real estate? Why care about justice for non-Jews in Israel at all—after all, isn’t it their own fault for being on land God predicts will be returned in full to the Jews in the last days? If God has predetermined that the world will get worse and worse until it ends in a cosmic megaconflict between the forces of Light (epitomized most often in the United States) and the forces of Darkness (previously centered in communism, but now, that devil having been vanquished, in Islam), why waste energy on peacemaking, diplomacy, or interreligious dialogue? Aren’t those simply endeavors in rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?