What happened? What does it take?

When I was in seminary nearly all of my friends were post-tribbers. When I was teaching in a seminary, nearly all of the Faculty were post-tribbers, or at least they weren’t pre-tribbers. Those aren’t scientific polls obviously, but I was not alone in thinking that the dispensational pre-trib days were behind us and that we were poised to study and teach the Book of Revelation and eschatology from new angles.

But something happened. Pre-tribbing is as much “in” today as it was in the 60s and 70s when it seemed to hit an all-time high.

A common admission I heard from pastors who graduated post-trib only to find themselves alone — and stared at as if to say “Young man, that’s not what we believe!” — was that they didn’t want to lose their job or it wasn’t worth the fight or everyone in the pew has been captured by the pre-trib vision.

And, yet, there are very few scholarly studies today on Revelation or on eschatology that comprehensively argue for that pre-trib view. In fact, the most important scholarly studies, including stuff by Bauckham and others, are advocating more historicist if not preterist-feeding perspectives.

So, two questions: What happened or what does it take for pastors to undo the view that few of them hold?

And, Are we poised for a new shift in how we read eschatology and teach eschatology?