I mentioned something in my sermon this morning for Advent 1, in relation to the strong sense in the gospel reading, Luke 21:25-26, that before Christ's Return, there will be significant convulsions in the world, including in the sea (climate change?). The last aspect being a feature unique to Luke's account of Jesus' end-time predictions.
That something is the curious feature of today's world that despite its many convulsions - wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, threat of war in the Asia-Pacific region - there seems to be very little interest in the Christian world about interpreting these signs as signs of the time of the End.
This is a marked contrast to my youth - well a period roughly the 1970s and 80s - when the Bible was scoured for texts relating to then contemporary events, especially in relation to Israel (the re-establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, wars in 1967 and 1973), formation of the EEC with ten nations (predicted, it was argued in the Book of Revelation), expansion of the role of the UN as a prelude to a to-be-feared "one world government," and so forth. The interest of Russia in the Middle East was - naturally! - Gog and Magog of ancient scriptures forecasting invasion from the north. In 1980 I heard a Kiwi, Barry Smith, speak at Canterbury University, billed as "the world's leading prognosticator". I don't recall anything about what he said, save one focus was on the coming (or even, already present in hidden form) one world government which would require us all to have a personalised identity number - the mark of the beast!
Today's gospel text includes reference to these kinds of things taking place before "this generation" passed away - always a difficult text - but back in those days I recall a linkage to the re-formation of Israel in 1948: was one further generation 25 years on (note the Israel-Egypt war in 1973 = 1948 + 25) or 40 years on (note that the end of the world in the 1970s and early 1980s would be therefore before 1988 = 1948 +40).
In 1983 I had the opportunity to visit Israel and recall meeting an American Christian man in Jerusalem. On asking him what he was doing there, he replied that he was waiting for the Messiah to come. On some of the interpretations alluded to above, a perfectly reasonable idea. But some 40 years on from that visit, I occasionally wonder if he is still there ... waiting!
Anyway, with those days in my memory, it is remarkable that today, despite the huge focus on Israel at war through this past year and a bit, with new technology connecting us all into "one world", a once again expansionist Russia and the threat of rising seas and destructive high tides, I am unaware of any end-time anxiety like once featured in Christian discourse.
Or, have I missed something?
PS On just about any way of reading the writings of the 1970s and 80s on end time speculations, if a Trump figure had been foreseen, I reckon he would have fitted in well, in the thinking of that day, as the dragon/beast/antiChrist, especially with his tendency to deceive "even the elect." But that is not how Trump figures in the Christian mythology of today for many Christians!
20 comments:
I have friends who talk about End Times though not with quite the 1980’s fervour that I remember. There has been comment about a personal identification chip as the ‘mark of the beast’, which is quite possible. But I have mentioned that we have been in End Times since Jesus’ resurrection!
It does occur to me that, if 1000 years is as a day to the Lord, it has only been two days since End Times began. And three days is a common motif in Scripture so maybe the ‘soon’ is sooner now? Though, of course, it could be another 1000 years yet…
From a liberal perspective, we scoffed at all the end times carry on (while secretly feeling rather anxious). I remember all the hype with the year 2000 - "Y2K" - that was meant to create vast global computer errors, crumbling civilization. I remember feeling anxious but also angry - I'd finally got a girlfriend and now the world was going to end?!
I enjoyed Peter's sermon (had the pleasure of the receiving it first hand) drawing attention to the roaring of the waves imagery. I really like Moya's wise reflections here too.
The advent candle we lit on Sunday was for hope. I felt quite raw thinking of how important it is to hold both a sense of hope *and* non-avoidance of suffering and ordeal - the roaring of the waves - especially in our personal lives (when the "heavens" of our soul are "shaken), let alone in contemplating current world events and patterns.
The old ways die hard: As a world we yearn for a more caring and just life together (this spirit is still sonvery new), and this is so threatening to the part of us that still seeks to dominate and exploit.
An evolutionary faith - hope in an unfolding cosmos:
"From the beginning of time until now, the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth. (Romans 8:22.
"In this passage, St. Paul seems to fully acknowledge evolution. It’s always seemed completely strange to me that there should be any resistance whatsoever to evolution or evolutionary thinking in Christian theology or practice. Christians should have been the first in line to recognize and cooperate with such a dynamic notion of God....
If our God is both incarnate and implanted, both Christ and Holy Spirit, then an unfolding inner dynamism in all creation is not only certain, but also moving in a positive direction. If not, we would have to question the very efficacy, salvation, hope, and victory that the Christian gospel so generously promises. Foundational hope demands a foundational belief in a world that is still and always unfolding.
I believe that as “children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:36), we are both burdened and brightened by a cosmic and irrepressible hope—and we can never fully live up to it. We are both burdened and brightened with the gift of an optimism whose headwaters are neither rational, scientific, nor even provable to those who do not have it. Yet it ticks away from a deep place within us."
- Richard Rohr
Yes, everything you've said +Peter. Everything. Dad often spoke about these things at Sunday night "gospel" meetings. Hal Lindsey's book "The Late Great Planet Earth" was in our home library and I read it multiple times as a teenager. He also had Clarence Larkin's "Dispensational Truth" and I loved to pore over the incredibly detailed diagrams. I loved that book so much that I asked for it after his death and have it here at home. Dad particularly talked a lot about the parable of the fig tree, referencing it to the 1948 Israel event. He often did sermons which included passages from Revelation and it remains one of my favourite books of the Bible. I've wondered if church people still talk about these things so it's fascinating you've written this post!
Naturally I had to do a search and see what might be revealed in my search results - and yes - I found someone else interested in such things and a lovely read it is...
Jesus will most definitely return in 2024. Maybe
by Robin Schumacher. 25 Dec 2023
"the Bible isn’t shy about trumpeting the return of Christ"
https://www.christianpost.com/voices/jesus-will-most-definitely-return-in-2024-maybe.html
I also searched for the "Dispensational Truth" book and ADU Readers may enjoy having a look because it's available online via the Internet Archive. I'll give you a link that goes straight to one of the charts - it opens up in a special viewer and you can flip through the pages, zoom in, etc. You need to zoom in a lot actually, because the chart is so detailed! Serious but also fun (I find the pop-eyed smiley Sun both adorable and hilarious). First link goes to the chart...
https://archive.org/details/dispensationaltr0000clar_o0h0/page/n19/mode/2up?view=theater
I'll give you the 'landing page' for the book too:
https://archive.org/details/dispensationaltr0000clar_o0h0/page/n19/mode/2up
~ Liz
Almost all who take the view that the end is near - wittingly or unwittingly - ignore verse 32 (and it's parallels in the other gospels)
Yes Jesus' "apocalypticism" is no easy to interpret. Most biblical scholars see this as a core, historically reliable teaching of his ministry, though John Dominic Crossan, controversially, disagrees. Some, like Bart Ehrman, claims Jesus believed the world literally was about to end - and it didn't. I'm open to that being the simple case. Jesus himself did not claim knowledge of all things - he might have got that literally wrong. Does Jesus have to be "right" on everything? I don't believe being fully human (as per Chalcedony) and being perfect (*completely* sinless) are compatible. If we affirm a fully human Jesus, then he gets hungry, doesn't know everything, can't work miracles in his own town, fears death, gets angry and attacks people (in the temple) etc. A spotless, perfect Jesus is more angelic than truly human.
On the other hand, perhaps the world ending shouldn't be interpreted literally at all - and Jesus didn't mean that as such. Perhaps all eschatology and prophecy is deeply symbolic language that needs careful handling.
Jim Friedrich, Advent Homily:
"Who has not experienced apocalypse on a personal level—the exit from childhood, the loss of a job or a loved one, a scary diagnosis? And throughout history, apocalyptic episodes have periodically disrupted the stability of humanity’s collective life: the fall of empires, economic crashes, military invasions, revolutions, authoritarian nightmares, environmental crises, and the like.
In the Humphrey Bogart movie, Beat the Devil, a ship is floundering on a stormy sea. In his typical wise-cracking manner, Bogie says to a panicky passenger, “What have you got to worry about? We’re only adrift on an open sea with a drunken captain and an engine that’s liable to explode at any moment!”
...Apocalypse can be an unwelcome judgment on the way things are. It weighs the world in the scales of justice and finds it wanting. The judgment is not punitive, simply accurate. As a 14th-century English poem on the end of the world put it, the apocalypse judges “without revenge or pity.” It just tells it like it is."
The last paragraph of Peter's post:
"Trump ... especially with his tendency to deceive "even the elect.""
Earlier, quite by coincidence, I came across an old Twitter thread in which +Peter had re-tweeted a cartoon and then a conversation followed - the other participant (more conservative) put it online as a blog-post. So interesting! If +Peter allows, I thought I'd share the link.
https://www.anglicansamizdat.net/wordpress/a-bishop-a-professor-and-a-layman-walk-into-a-chatroom/
The cartoon is at the top of the blog-post, followed by a thread of comments.
Two tweets from the thread particularly stood out (I'll call it More or Less?):
+Peter
The simple point of the kingdom of God, which Jesus taught and enacted, was that God was and is setting up an alternative kingdom to the kingdoms of this world. There is nothing more political than that.
@anglicansam
Agree on the 1st sentence, not on the 2nd. There is nothing less political that that. "My kingdom is not of this world". Politics is very much of this world.
*
Those tweets stood out because prior to finding the cartoon thread, I'd been thinking about Mark's interesting comments and somehow ended up in Daniel 2. This is the story where a stone is "cut out of the mountain without hands" and then breaks in pieces and consumes all the kingdoms.
"and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth."
*
All this thinking about earthly power, religion and politics, and the kingdom of God left my mind in a whirl, but perhaps others will add comment? ~Liz
"... especially with his tendency to deceive "even the elect.""
Deception, you say? And have you a comment on that good, abortion-loving, trans-promoting cafeteria Catholic President pardoning all his son's crimes since 2014, those known and those yet to be revealed? This is the meaning of grace, is it?
The meaning of grace is that I have published your comment when you didn’t give your name. Please use your name next time.
Biden was never the perfect candidate for President. He has become measurably less good as President.
Liz, your interesting comments above put my mind in a whir too! I don't know what to make of the words from Daniel, though I find them quite compelling....
"and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth."
Oh yes.. I was really intrigued by that, Mark! Thanks.
Reminds me of:
So when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle, so that she could fly from the serpent into the wilderness ... Then from his mouth the serpent poured water like a river after the woman, to sweep her away with the flood. But the earth came to the help of the woman; it opened its mouth and swallowed the river that the dragon had poured from his mouth (Rev. 12:13-16).
I remember Barry Smith, (mentioned by +Peter), in the 1980’s, teaching that the then EU (EEC?) was the feet of clay and iron because it had ten members!
The interpretation talks of God’s kingdom which was also a constant theme in Jesus’ teaching. Because he focussed more on an inward kingdom of love, the image of a stone becoming a great mountain doesn’t seem quite to fit our current understanding of what he is about.
But the One is God of the mountains as well as the wind. Maybe our image of Christ Jesus has to stretch?
The imagery of that passage from Revelation is magnificent, Mark. I love it.
Thanks Moya, yes. After posting my short 11:34pm comment I later recalled the parable of the mustard seed that grows (and grows) and eventually "shooteth out great branches; so that the fowls of the air may lodge under the shadow of it." Mark 4:30-32. And I wonder if that's a similar theme to Daniel's stone/mountain - a very humble and seemingly ordinary beginning that eventually transpires into something FAR greater - something that would NEVER be anticipated from the apparently insignificant beginning! (Christmas story?). And as you observe Moya, "Maybe our image of Christ Jesus has to stretch?". Thinking of +Peter's re-tweeted cartoon, the "how it's going" scene is such a tragic, deceptive, pathetic distortion of the gospel!!!
But here's a thing... the "stone" breaks in pieces and consumes all the kingdoms.
The tree provides a place of rest and shelter.
So what's going on there, how do they relate?
Some personal thoughts.. only Christ's kingdom is an everlasting kingdom therefore all competing power structures *must* fail (or eventually be overcome) until, "Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God" Rev 12:10. God's kingdom (or kin-dom?) prevails, a kingdom of "righteousness, and peace, and joy" Romans 14:17.
Thoughts?
One thing we are perhaps talking about, or around about, in this thread is rich symbolic language and imagery, and responsible hermeneutics around that in the context of a collective religious community in which people are likely to be vulnerable, embedded, and deeply emotionally invested.
Jung and others after him argued that a poverty of access to our own symbolic and spiritual life - such as is symptomatic of the modern psyche - makes us more vulnerable to religious literalism (and fundamentalism), and more addicted to finding religious meaning in lop-sidedly external events and ways, and vulnerable to charismatic public figures who use and manipulate images in a potent manner.
It's more than interesting that Jesus never explains the kingdom, his central teaching, in purely conceptual, didactic, theological ways. He gives us a wealth of images and symbols instead, from which we might take....
the kingdom starts off very small in our lives, in almost imperceptible and seemingly insignificant ways; it is characterized by *growth*; it has a process quality, it grows over time; stones or pearls or waves or mustard seeds, none of these symbols should be taken literally ("If you say it is in the sky, the birds will get there first", Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas)- it is a fundamentally spiritual reality, deeply anchored in our inner worlds.
Maybe the stone and the tree images are unable to be reconciled in our thinking, Liz?
Jesus seems to prefer growth images but the Scriptures do tend to present polar opposites about God without any attempt to bring them together. Even heaven and hell are categories like that, as well as justice and mercy and I am sure there are others. We wonder how both can be true!
It takes a degree of humility to say of God, ‘I don’t understand but I believe…’ The human quest for knowledge is endless but so is the One we call God and more so. That’s why the desire to be certain about him is dangerous.
I'm grateful for these helpful responses, Mark and Moya. Thanks heaps, I've much to ponder. The "poverty of access" concept is new to me Mark and it was like a light bulb moment, an interesting idea.. and it makes sense to me too, as a motivating factor for that particular type of behaviour (which I find hard to fathom). True Moya, yes.. great reminder!
Talking about this across the table with Ms Liz initially re Mark’s mention of the symbolic break forced on us by modern society (theological, … and political) in a drive for simple binaries, and how that lack opens us to charismatic individuals, extreme simplistic belief, and the dangerous certainties Moya mentions.
Then returning to +Peters’s observation of the stark non-focus on end-times thinking among most modern evangelicals.
I think this change is due to a seismic shift in eschatological thinking since the 1980’s* from a pre-millennialist/rapture to a post-millennialist stance - at least for evangelicals who hew to ‘prosperity gospel’, Dominionist and related apostasies.
Due to the long-term work of the Council for National Policy there are now many political leaders who ‘appear’ to hold this ‘belief’. ‘Appear’ as this looks like a religious Libertarianism for the wealthy: you get your thousand year rein and then go to heaven – no wonder the far-right are drawn to it. And ‘belief’ as this movement is either a political-religion, or a petro-religion as its adherents appear to be pro-oil, pro-wealth and climate change deniers. Christianity is schisming into those who believe in Jesus .. and those who believe in no-future except wealth.
* I do not know the origins of this shift as I ceased involvement (apart from Jesus own words) shortly after hearing Barry Smith speak in 1990 about how nuclear war could never happen as nuclear bombs can only explode when all the planets are in some sacred alignment! I awoke as if from a dream.
That is a very interesting perspective, Nigel - an eschatological shift from leaders who saw the world as stuffed, to put it crudely, and looked to the imminent return to Christ, to the "petro-religionists" whose prosperity is centrally involved in stuffing up the world.
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