Converting our Imagination 7

How odd to end the year thinking about eschatology! The issue today for many of us is the power and the pervasiveness of the Left Behind approach to reading Revelation.

The method is so pervasive many today just don’t even want to talk about this stuff. Many raise their hands and walk away — choosing to spend their energies on other topics. Well, I wish we could create a logjam and force the entire issue to be reconsidered. What would it take for that to be done?

Michael Gorman, Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation spends some of his energies pointing to the problems with the Left Behind approach to Revelation. (May I confess that Jerry Jenkins’ son and my son played baseball against one another in high school. Jerry’s son hit a home run against our best pitcher. (So, Jerry, if you are reading, much luv but… here we must part.)

So here goes:

This approach is the most influential approach to Revelation in America. He finds three kinds of problems: hermeneutical, theological and political.Hermeneutical problems for Left Behind:

1. Not fiction simply but theology combined with an attempt to be almost like a documentary. Left Behind is like an advance DVD.
2. The Bible is a puzzle to be put into a futurist script. Hopscotch method.
3. It is selectively literal.
4. Misunderstands the nature and function of both prophetic and apocalyptic literature.
5. Finds a two-fold “coming” of Christ in Rapture and then Parousia.
6. Dispensationalism is a 19th Century approach.
7. We are on the brink of the Rapture and Tribulation … that’s what matters.
8. Misses the richest theological content: Alpha and Omega.

Theological and Spiritual Problems

1. End times is about the period between First and Second Coming.
2. To much about Rapture, and unhealthy concern with details that are unknowable.
3. Fear dominates.
4. Discipleship is reduced … in a number of ways.
5. Escapist.
6. It is inherently militaristic.
7. Anti-Catholic.
8. Fails to see the Church as the peaceful alternative.

Political problems.

1. Uncritically pro-American.
2. Privileges the modern State of Israel uncritically.
3. Suspicious of everything connected to United Nations.
4. Wars in the Middle East are justified and justifiable.
5. It is survivalist and crusader in approach.

He sees this as “thoroughly misguided.” It is dangerous theology. Killing for Jesus is justified.