It was one of those rare, perfect moments in preaching.
While living in Florida some years back, due to limited choices I was attending a church of a different denomination than my own. It was a large, growing, dynamic congregation. The pastor announced a series of sermons on Revelation. But when he started preaching, it quickly became clear he was not teaching the Dispensational Premillenial (i.e., Left Behind) interpretation that’s so popular in our day. He was an amillennialist.
Many congregation members were not happy about this, and made their opinion known.
After a few weeks of controversy, the pastor got into the pulpit one Sunday morning and announced that, for the sake of peace, he was discontinuing the sermon series on the End Times. Instead, he would take up a topic that would trouble people less.
“I’m going to preach on Hell,” he said.
Growing up in a Lutheran pietist church (yes, there are such creatures; I had no idea how rare we were at the time), I was introduced early to Dispensational Premillennialism, and had no idea there was any other way to approach eschatology.
In the years since, I’ve been sufficiently exposed to other systems (Joe Carter served up an excellent overview over at First Things yesterday) to leave me largely agnostic on the subject. When I hear speakers on the radio suggesting that anyone who holds a different view from theirs probably has a low view of scripture, I can only marvel at their assurance. As a Lutheran, I lean toward amillennialism, but my strongest conviction in this realm is that God probably didn’t intend to give us a detailed timetable, so that we could pay off our mortgages ahead of time (or pile up a lot of debt, depending on our attitudes toward commerce and banking).
But I do find one item in prophecy that suggests to me (I certainly don’t insist on it) that these may well be the last days of the last times.
The apostle Paul writes in 2 Timothy 4:3-4, “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” I don’t think it’s a big jump to connect this passage to the description of the great harlot of Revelation 17, frequently interpreted as a symbol for an apostate church.
We’ve seen great corruption in the church at many times in history. We’ve seen laxity, and hypocrisy, and pride, and bigotry, bloodthirstiness, and simony.
But (as far as I’m aware) there has never been a time in history when we’ve seen great segments of the institutional church openly turning their backs on the Scripture, the creeds, the teachings of the Fathers—the faith once delivered to the saints.
This is a new thing.
Is it a sign of the approaching apocalypse?
I would never insist on it.
But I (personally) suspect it.
There were the Manicheans in Augustine’s day, and the Albigensians in Dominic’s; and then, there was that whole flap (he said in the nicest possible way) back in Martin Luther’s day…. But the Arians were the worst of the lot.
But that’s my point. The heretics were rejected in the past. They didn’t take over the church. Whatever you think of Protestants, they never turned their backs on the contents of the creeds. Until now.
The Arians came awfully close. IIRC they were a majority in the Eastern church for awhile.
The passage you quote is certainly descriptive of parts of my old outfit, the Episcopal Church, and also descriptive of much of mainstream American Protestantism. It may also be descriptive of the mainstream Protestants in Europe, which I gather is almost entirely post-Christian. But I don’t think it’s true in the main of the Catholic Church, even in the United States (though there are some who lean that way), and I don’t think it is true worldwide.
Re: Martin Luther, I’m sorry if I caused any offense with my teasing. But there’s a kernel of meat there. On the one hand, apostasy among mainstream Protestants is at an all time high, a terrible and tragic thing; but I also see it as the ultimate and inevitable consequence of leaving the Barque of Peter.
I’m obviously not qualified to evaluate Christian eschatology, but this isn’t the first time that a large Christian population turned away from Christianity. Remember, North Africa and the western Middle East (Jordan and Syria, but probably not Iraq) used to be Christian. They converted for the most part to avoid paying the jizya, the dhimmi tax – most of them could have remained Christians, and some did.
Is there a significant difference between Christians that openly renounce their faith, and those that redefine it in a way that constitutes renunciation?
Ori, I don’t think there’s a real difference, since it’s a matter of the heart in both cases. The one who renounces the faith and the one who redefines it are the same in having left it many days prior to their visible actions.
And the ones who have not rejected their Lord but do renounce him publicly out of fear have not lost their faith, despite their sin. Their public confession is actually false.
Lars, I like your point, but I don’t think I could vote for it. I hear the same point made in different ways, but I just don’t know. The church has been through pretty bad times in the past, and yet the Lord has not returned.
But all of the sorry scholars who disagree with us don’t really take the Bible seriously, you know. What a bunch of losers.
I’m not talking about individuals, even in large numbers, abandoning the faith. I’m talking about church bodies officially rejecting the content of the ecumenical creeds. When populations apostasized, they didn’t redefine Christianity to conform to Islam (or whatever contrary doctrine subsumed them). They were honest enough to say “We’re not Christians anymore.”
Ori, it seems to me that one who loses or changes faith and says so publicly is a vast improvement over one who does the same thing but refuses to acknowledge the change, if only in terms of his own integrity. It’s dishonest, just as it’s dishonest to change the terms of an argument in medias res.
Also, as someone who has been left by a church because it was co-opted by those who don’t believe in its tenets (yep, another former Episcopalian here), I can tell you that it is far more painful and destructive for those who identify themselves with a particular church to find themselves in such a situation. If you take your faith seriously, it is heartbreaking, even shattering to find out that the supposed leaders of what purports to be your faith don’t believe a word of what they’ve sworn before God to defend.
Everything I worked for and paid for and spent time accomplishing got walked off with and credited to a group I not only don’t support but whose beliefs I find deeply offensive, I lost friends and community, and I lost a tradition I loved and in which I felt deeply at home. I have stayed with my core beliefs (I converted as an adult, so I’m very aware of what my beliefs are) and after almost ten years of wandering about trying to find a church in which I could worship in peace I have found another spiritual home, but I am nowhere near as happy here as I was in the Episcopal church. I have lost the ability to trust that *any* church will maintain the faith, so a good chunk of time that should go towards contemplation of the relevance of any sermon to my own shortcomings is spent checking the background and orthodoxy of the sermonizer and wondering if this guy has some agenda I’m not aware of and wouldn’t approve of if I were aware of it. I tend to suspect the orthodoxy of my fellow congregants, the spiritual leaders, the teachers and on and on.
A very good, earlier example of ‘turning aside from truth… and to myth’ would be the period from the rise of Wagner to the end of the Second World War. Not to tie Wagner to the Nazis, as is so often done; but merely to point out that the rise of mythic thinking was in high tide at that period.
That said, the period following the war saw another movement along that same line: the rise of J. R. R. Tolkien as a towering figure of literature. This time, the myth was one of health, and allied to truth.
I did not know there were still Pietists. Kant was raised as one, you know. But I had thought it was a movement of his era.
Grim, modern evangelicalism is a direct (though somewhat debased) descendant of classic pietism. That’s how I see it, anyway.
Take a look at John Stephenson’s Eschatology, in the Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics series. (Sounds like it would be heavy going; actually it’s very readable.)
He’s about where you are, Lars, just was there a little before you.
I wonder if part of the problem is that much of Christendom has become unwilling to hold “prophets” to account? I know a Pentecostal guy who at least used to refer to aberrant big names in his circles as “goofy.” That seems rather mild considering that in the Old Testament, if a man claimed to prophesy in the Lord’s Name and the matter did not happen, he was to be put to death. But I can think of at least one big-name individual who, according to what I have seen, “prophesied” the return of the Lord in specified time frames. It didn’t happen. Of course I don’t mean he should have been stoned to death. But it seems a lot of loose talk gets, as it were, written off as overhead, in some circles: the idea being that if you are going to have the freedom of the Spirit, well, then you have to allow a lot of loose talk. But to let the loose speakers get away with it??
Yes, I’ve been amazed at this phenomenon too. Fool me twice! Please!
I think reading the scriptures gives people the wrong impression. Scriptures contain the words of true prophets, which lead people to believe that prophets were always men of God, carrying His Words.
That’s nonsense, as a careful reading of scripture shows. When we had true prophets, we also had false ones (1 Kings 22:19–23, for example). But I suspect some people would rather have the good and pretend the bad does not exist in equal measure.
I think such loose speakers are followed by intellectual feather-weights. They want to believe, so they will regardless. I don’t know what good Bible teachers can do beyond sound preaching and warning. Perhaps there are some whose congregational circle touch those of these loose speakers, and they should rebuke them openly.
My own pastor has said several times that if someone tells you they know when the Lord is returning, run from him.