The Little Tin God of Apologetics

Christian Apologetics demands systematic structure.  However, sometimes I just like to wander around in thought.  So for irony's sake, today's critique of Christian Apologetics will abandon structure and flow like a wild stream.

“Ladies and gentlemen: Are you ready to rrraaaaaambllllllllllllllllle?”

***

Here’s a homey Apologetics metaphor I thunk up while watching remodelers in my home last month:

Imagine a contractor comes to redo your kitchen.  You watch him work, and you admire his skill.  The man is a master with the hammer, never a hesitation, never a  bad hit as he drives those nails home into the new window casing.  But then you watch as he sets a pane of window glass into the new frame.  He aligns it carefully, and instead of reaching for the caulk, he again grabs that trusty hammer, drawing his arm back to nail the glass into place.

“Wait!” you dare to yell at this expert.  “Why on Earth are you using a hammer to set the window?”

“I’m a Hammerist,” he explains, sounding quite reasonable.  “Hammering is my gift.  Since it’s what I do well, I use it for everything.”

“Oh,” you say.  “Even for making sandwiches?”

“Now you’re just mocking me,” he says darkly as he raises the hammer toward you.

THE LITTLE TIN GOD

If you’ve ever run into a vehement (“forceful”), virulent (“bitter”), obstinate (“stubborn”) believer in Christ who immediately begins fellowshipping with you by demanding to know your faith credentials, by testing you on a set of key doctrines, by declaring approval or disapproval of your faith almost immediately, and by demanding to know by Scriptural citation whether you can prove you really want him to “have a nice day” as you claim … you have met a follower of the Little Tin God of Apologetics.

The expression “Little Tin God” might come from a Don Henley song or it might be from an Isaac Asimov essay.  Whatever its source, its meaning is intriguing.  As a “little god,” it is clearly an idol, a false focus of worship trying to call attention to itself.  Made of tin, it is not even an impressive idol of precious metals.  It is robotic and cold.  It is hollow inside, lacking the innards and guts and warmth and stuff of humanity.  Like the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz,. it has no heart.

Unlike the Tin Man, it is not on a quest to find one.

THE LIMITATIONS OF APOLOGETICS

I have no hard evidence for it, but my anecdotal experience leads me to feel that a high percentage of Virulent Christian Apologists suffer from Asperger Syndrome, a “developmental disorder related to autism characterized by higher than average intellectual ability coupled with impaired social skills and restrictive, repetitive patterns of interest and activities.”  I’ve only met one Virulent Christian Apologist who shared that he actually had that diagnosis from a physician, but the points of overlap are striking enough to at least justify a comparison by analogy:

Higher than average intellectual ability: Virulent Christian Apologists (let’s just call them VCAs from here on) prove their point by blurting out a Bible verse or the meaning of a Greek or Hebrew word from Scripture, and they demand you do the same on the spot.  If you cannot, they declare themselves a “winner”  of the intellectual argument.

Impaired social skills: VCAs cannot see the difference between fellowship and Apologetic debate.  When a group discussion is about a point of dogma, they become animated and even dominant in the conversation; when the discussion focuses on other aspects of life, they either become oddly silent and withdrawn, or they turn inappropriately silly and verbally clumsy.  For the VCA, times of prayer and worship and praise and elation and celebration in the Lord are awkward experiences.

Repetitive patterns: For the VCA, use of Scripture as a hammer in all situations is not a moral choice; it is a hardwired pattern.  If a truth is needed, there is a Scripture for it.  If there’s a Scripture for it, there is a single truth being conveyed.  I once conducted an informal experiment (unkindly; I should not have done it without consent) to test the repetitive nature of a brother in Christ.  I had noticed a nearly Pavlovian response to certain Scriptures, and I wanted to see if I was imagining the phenomenon.

MY LITTLE EXPERIMENT

With this brother, I noticed that whenever anyone would cite the story where Jesus refuses to condemn the woman caught in adultery, he would quickly remind the person speaking that Jesus then said, “Go and sin no more.”  So I experimented on him over a period of months.  Whenever I would mention the story without that line at the end, he would quickly remind me that was how it ended.  Whenever I mentioned the story and inserted that ending myself, he would thank me for remembering that was how it ended.  It didn’t matter whether or not going forth and sinning no more was part of the point I was making.  The ending had to be there.  My friend had to put it in.  It was in the pattern.

Then I tried it with another of his stimulus-response lines: “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am with them.”  His unvarying response when hearing that was to state a reminder that the verse was written “in the context of church discipline.”  Never mind that the point being made was that God is with His people individually or in a group, small or larger.  The pattern demanded that the point be made that the original context of that particular verse was church discipline.  One line of Scripture, one required response.  I suspect that if he didn’t mention the church discipline context, even when it added nothing to the discussion, he would feel vague unease for the rest of the conversation.

Test number three: Then I tried it with mentions of the human heart.  Say anything about following your heart, and my friend had to remind everyone listening that somewhere in the Bible it declares the human heart to be the most wicked of all things.  Never mind that a mere seven chapters later, the Lord announces he gives His people a heart that will know Him and follow him.  The stimulus-response/one-verse-one-truth mental rule said that if you mention the human heart, my friend had to mention the exact citation of the human heart being most wicked.

WHAT’S YOUR POINT?  WHAT’S YOUR SCRIPTURAL POINT?

Oops.  Sorry.  I just did another mean experiment without consent now.  It was this: Instead of mentioning the exact chapters and verses of the last three Biblical references I made, I stayed vague about their locations in the Bible.  If you didn’t notice I did that until the very last one, you are definitely not a VCA.  If you noticed I did it and filled in for yourself ideas like, “Yes, in John, around chapter 8.  Oh, and in Matthew, I think.  Yes, yes, that’s in Jeremiah somewhere!” you are probably a well read brother or sister in Christ who is not VCA either, simply very familiar with the Word.

BUT … if you immediately filled in with, “John chapter 8.  Ah, Matthew chapter 18.  And Jeremiah 17, that’s obvious, why didn’t she say so, why was she so vague and why did she turn sloppy and say 'somewhere in the Bible'?!?  What the heck!”… then you, my dear brother or sister, you may be in danger of being VCA, and worshipping before the Little Tin God of Apologetics.  If you felt irritated about my nonspecific citations, despite their accuracy, then you are displaying signs of worshipping skilled citation and process of debate above the very essence of truth.  To you, the logic flow may be more important than the Father of All Hearts.

And if you just demanded, “What Scripture does the term ‘the Father of All Hearts’ come from?  Did you make that up?!?” … then you’ve got it really badly.

AT THE ALTAR OF THE LITTLE TIN GOD

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

The gears of the Little Tin God of Apologetics are testing, analysis, dialectic, demand, logic, victory, rightness, and self-congratulation.

***

Once I spoke with a friend who is caught up in polemical Apologetics.  I told him about how I was starting a Bible study with an 8-year-old girl, introducing her to the message of the Gospel.  One of his first questions about this beautiful opportunity and blessing was this: “Have you addressed with her the distinction between the concepts of election by God’s foreknowledge and a believer selecting to accept propitiation voluntarily?”

“She’s eight years old,” I said.  “We talked about lost lambs.”

“Oh, okay,” said my friend, now sounding vaguely confused.  “Maybe not yet, then.”

Yeah.  And maybe not ever.

***

Hey, check this out: At the throne of God or maybe Christ, somewhere in the Bible, that place where Jesus says, “Not all who say Lord, Lord will enter into the Kingdom of God” (or maybe it said Kingdom of Heaven), those who are going to be brought into the Kingdom respond from the heart, astonished that they had actually fed and clothed and comforted the Lord when they fed and clothed and comforted all others.  Meanwhile, the rejected "Lord, Lord" sayers immediately want to enter into debate with the Lord, challenging Him to provide verifiable evidence that they had neglected to feed, clothe, and comfort Him!

How cool is that?  Heart vs. Brain, compassion vs. calculation, Writ of Scripture Searched vs. Him to Whom They Point.

***

Somewhere out there in the world, my Apologetics friend just thought, “You know, that passage refers to doing good to other brothers in Christ, not just to random poor people.  I felt the need to say that.”

***

“Lord, when did I see you hungry and not feed you?  Huh?  When?  Tell me, when, huh?  And don’t give me that ‘Who is my neighbor?’ line and bring up Samaritans, because that is a different passage of Scripture subject to distinct contextual hermeneutics, and you can't logically grab a citation that …”

“Depart from me.”

***

YOYO, THAT'S TOO RANDOM, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!

Yeah.  Sorry.  It’s a little trick I learned from the writer Kurt Vonnegut.  Sometimes you just have to shake up the fleas by going into a tail chase.  Nearly every VCA has already stormed off in disgust at the messy, illogical, and purposely unpatterned flow I’ve built into this post.  Which is good, because now I want to talk to those of us who feel beleaguered by them.

Dear ones, those with faith of children … I ask that you not fret in the presence of the VCAs.  Don’t cast aspersions upon yourself for not being able to battle them in their You-Sank-My-DogmaShip! Scripture wars.  Neither should you cast aspersions upon them, not right away.  They, too, have hearts that seek God.  And they are not the little tin gods who demand worship.  Rather, it is the field of Christian Apologetics itself that is the Little Tin God.  That pursuit focuses on cold content, and cares little for the styles and context and sensitivities and humility required for interacting with the world or with brothers and sisters in Christ.  In the field of Apologetics, content is king, context is annoyance, and people are just things you're meant to pour your facts into.  And by “context,” I don’t mean the context of a Scripture verse.  I mean the timing, the placement, the awareness, and the discernment required to truly interact in love and with a heart of fellowship.

Yes.  I’m talking about window pane caulking jobs that replace the Hammerist instinct.

***

Some random considerations:

1. Apologetics study can leave the impression that there is an answer for everything.  There isn’t.  Our beloved VCA brothers and sisters cannot see that, either due to neurological limitations, learned experience, or immaturity in their growth in Christ.
2. Apologists leave the impression they think they’re never wrong.  But we must understand that isn’t what they feel.  Behind their abrasive arguments, many VCAs are frightened that they may get something wrong, that something will be out of place in their Kingdoms of Tidiness.  We must be sensitive to that, and we must model the Love so they can see it, if not feel it at first.
3. Apologists do not yet know how to fellowship.  Remember, they, for many years, have mistaken debate and argument for acts of fellowship.  They don’t understand that faith has a component of simple, kind, human interaction – times of reaching out and embracing.  The emotions of faith have more to do with Christian fellowship than any concordance could ever capture.  This is why Paul’s letters end with such long passages of greeting people by name and verbally interacting with them on mundane matters.  It is also why those sections of the New Testament are of so little interest to VCAs.
4. Apologists don’t understand that your perspective is different.  They honestly, with all their mind, feel you’re simply missing the Logic.  When you say that you feel in your heart something doesn’t mean what they claim, they really do think you are not using your mind, or that you’re stubbornly playing by pretending not to see what is so amazingly clear to them.  Mention your heart, and they can simply spout Jeremiah 17:9.  They will not spout Matthew 22:37.
5. Apologists sometimes can’t even hear your alternate perspective.  Polemics and Logic Craft have driven them to build walls around their conclusions.  If you say to them, “Couldn’t that also mean …?” you are wasting breath.  “Also mean” is not a word pairing they can hear.  They have long ago lost the opportunity to derive wisdom from many counselors.  Unless those counselors are already speaking within Apologist Logic Craft, they cannot be comprehended.
6. Pray for them.  We are in danger of losing our Apologists from the Body of Christ.  As we refuse to let them dominate us with their cold strictures of thought, they find us less appealing to be around, and actually enjoy the company of unbelievers more.  At least among unbelievers, they can feel right about fighting all the time.  Fellow believers who reject that style make them feel oddly uneasy.  Far better to dwell among the unbelieving (they reason) and to take fellowship there.  Then VCAs can stop calling their hostility “teaching” and call it “outreach”  instead.

***

VCAs have elevated “being right” above “being righteous.”

VCAs have replaced submission to the Law of Moses with submission to the Laws of Logic.

VCAs only see the faith of little ones as something embarrassing, something to be matured out of, and not as the very basis of entering the Kingdom.

VCAs still sticking around to read this have already mentally mustered a list of bullet-point Scriptures to contradict the spirit of this blog.

VCAs can justify their rude, tactless, strife-laden social interactions by citing Scripture that presents seemingly approved rude, tactless, and strife-laden speech by their Biblical betters.

VCAs believe defending the faith, fighting the good fight, striving for the Gospel, and many other quippy sayings they have ossified right out of context serve as justification for their antisocial rudeness and unprovoked attacks.

Most VCAs are not even mildly swayed by anything I’ve written here today.

***

Flashback: Jesus is twelve years old.  He’s at the temple.  He’s questioning the temple teachers, astounding them with his insights and depth of understanding.  His questions are powerful ones.  His insights are logically sublime.  His progression of thought is polemically dazzling.

And which of those brilliant argument techniques does the Holy Spirit inspire Luke the Evangelist to record in the Bible for our later use?

Not a one.  Not a single one.

The Little Tin God of Apologetics demands rational, systematic, polemical purity.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love.

Maran atha,

Cosmic Parx

The Revelation: Boys vs. Girls

On Thursday, August 1 of 2013, I presented my final lecture in a four-week series at God’s House of Prayer, a sim in the virtual world called Second Life where I do most of my social media interaction.  This is the text of that last lecture..

Hi.  I’m Yolanda Ramírez, “YoYo Rez,” and I’d like to welcome you to House of Prayer for the final week of my lecture series.  I’d like to thank Reverend Brett for giving me this opportunity to share some of my thoughts.  It’s not something I do often.  In fact, this is my first time in 5 years of being on Second Life that I’ve done anything like this.  As soon as I finish tonight, I’ll get right to work on my next lecture series, which will probably be in 2018.

Like all other weeks, this lecture is in text.

You can get an abbreviated outline of the talk by clicking the box to my right, your left.

Series: SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL END IN FIRE

Lecture IV: INTERPRETING REVELATION, THE BOYS vs. THE GIRLS

Let’s jump right in:

Part A: THE FAITH OF MY MOTHERS

Tonight, as promised, I’ll take a look at two final ways the church has approached the interpretation of the Revelation: “Historicism,” the belief that the events described in Revelation map out the entire past 2000 years of Christian history, from the ascension of Christ, through the rise of Europe, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and up to modern times; and “Idealism,” an approach that says Revelation events are symbols of the seemingly endless struggle between good and evil, with no single symbol in the book tied directly to any single historical moment, and the eternal promise of Christ’s ultimate victory over evil.

I also mentioned I’d be casting this talk in terms of creation’s greatest divide: the Boys vs. the Girls.  That’s mostly just for fun – I could have done it along any number of other divides, like Prose vs. Poetry, or Priests vs. Prophets, or Coke vs. Pepsi.  But making it Boys vs. Girls had a special appeal to me, because it spotlights different ways of thinking about Scripture – the staunch, literal, structured, dogmatic and organized way I tend to associate with stereotypes of Male thinking; and the softer, more social, compromising, gentle, and imaginative demeanor I associate with Female thinking.   Neither of those is better than the other, in general – you can’t build safe bridges without staunch, structured thinking, but you also can’t have brilliant product & marketing breakthroughs without social imagination that envisions new paths.

More on that stuff later.  But for now, I’ll confess the real reason I break the discussion down into Boys vs. Girls: because it gives me a chance to talk about my grandmother.

My father’s mother – my grandmother on the Irish side of my family – was a pious woman, filled with faith.  For all the years I knew her, she had the same Bible, leather-bound but worn and beaten from daily use.  She read her Bible with a hunger in her heart and a highlighter in her hand, marking and underlining verses that spoke to her, and then underlining them again when they kept speaking to her the next time through.  I was a little girl, and that Bible of hers was the biggest book I’d ever seen.  I was in awe of it.  You see, I wasn’t allowed to write in MY books, so I knew it must be a Special book, worth reading over and over, and worth breaking the Don’t Write In It rule.

Grandma knew that book well.  She’s passed on now, and she lives with the Author.  The Bible she cherished was given to me when she died, and it’s beside me on my bookshelf right now.  Her highlights and multiple underlines are still there, and her notes in the huge margins still speak to me from across the decades. 

In Grandma’s thoroughly marked-up Bible, the book of Revelation is the part with the least-worn pages.  Galatians is an underline festival.  Ephesians actually has passages with big circles around them.  And the Gospel of John?  I think Grandma wrote more words in the margins than the Apostle John wrote in the text.

But the Revelation is oddly empty.  Not entirely, because there are notations here and there.  But only one verse, for her, merited her most impressive markup, the yellow-highlight-triple-underline-stars-in-both-margins treatment.  That verse was Revelation 21:4.

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more, for the former things have passed away.”

Forget questions like “Who is the Beast?”  and “What does 666 mean?”  Grandma didn’t fret about such questions, and went right to the answer, right there in that verse.  “God shall wipe away all tears” – that is Grandma’s Revelation.

Forget debates about mid-trib vs. pre-trib vs. post-trib raptures.  Let the scholars fight that out.  “No more death.  No more mourning.”  That’s her Apocalypse, the real unveiling.

And those debates about whether the seals and trumpets and bowls are separate plagues, or the same set of plagues restated and re-emphasized?  Secondary details, like the men of the family sitting in the living room arguing about baseball stats and the rule changes in football.  “Crying shall be no more.  Sorrow shall be no more.”  For my Grammy, that was the real promise of the End Times, no matter what those End Times looked like.

She wrote her scholarly commentary on Revelation 21:4 – Yellow highlighter.  Then an underline.  Then a second underline.  Maybe years later, a third underline.   And in her waning days, stars in the margin, so that those of us left behind, including her nerdy, bookworm granddaughter, would always remember what the Revelation was really about.

Do you feel the emotion of that verse?  Do you feel how it outweighs every other line and fulfills what the Slain Lamb had been up to all along?  Grammy’s commentary gets to the very heart, the purest emotion, of our love affair with the Almighty.  I could stop right now and say, “That, my friends, is the Revelation, and no more needs to be said.”

Of course, I won’t.  After all, Grammy’s granddaughter really IS a nerdy little bookworm,  so I can't bypass the opportunity to share how other scholars who aren't my grandmother view that very same verse from Revelation.

Part B: THE FAITH OF OUR FATHERS.

Let’s look at the Revelation 21:4 insights of the Boys, the Scholars of our faith.

JOHN WESLEY.  Awesome man, a driving force behind the Methodist movement and multi-continent revivalism.  His written commentary on this verse shows that he found it to be important because it provided proof that the scene being described was extra-temporal, not locked into time, and instead situated within the eternal.  He mentions the tears, but makes clear that his interest in the verse is in its usefulness as a way to support an interpretative framework he fancied.

MATTHEW HENRY:  Brilliant mind, powerful thinker, Henry was a Welsh Presbyterian writer and theologian.  His view on Grandma’s verse: It was meant to remind us we cause our own tears through our own sins, so we’d better shape up and let God be God, and abandon sensual and worldly pleasures that muddy and poison the waters of our lives.

And then JAMIESON, FAUSSET & BROWN:  Founders of what would become the National Bible Society of Scotland.  Their commentaries are a staple, critically important, scholarly, lauded by Charles Spurgeon and admired to this day.  Their take on Grandma’s verse?  They found it “useful”  in its proof that the events described take place outside of the millennium.

Yeah.  That’s it.

JOHN DARBY:  I love this guy.  He’s most noted for inventing the Rapture.  Okay, okay, sorry, he is most noted for promoting the pre-tribulation Rapture that he discerned from the pages of Scripture in the 1820s, (and which no one had noticed before then, to any great extent).  What was his take on Revelation 21:4, about how God will wipe away all tears, ending death, and mourning, and crying, and sorrow?  Darby is pleased that the verse “reflects the elimination of a mediatorial kingdom,” praises “its application of the two-fold portion of the Final Blessedness,” and admires that it shows a new world “recast as a great ‘Rephidim.’ ”

I had no idea what most of that meant when I read the commentary.  And I didn’t expend a lot of effort to find out.

One last example of Boy Scholars, somebody still living:

JOHN MacARTHUR, noted American Evangelical Christian pastor.  MacArthur has an exhaustive audio commentary on the Revelation of John.  MacArthur is detail-oriented.  In his commentary, he dedicates two full hours to the first three verses of Revelation chapter 21.

That isn’t a typo – two hours of commentary on verses Rev. 21:1 and Rev. 21:2 and Rev. 21:3.  That's what detail-oriented means.

Verse 21:4 is Grandma’s verse.  To that, MacArthur dedicates 8 minutes.

I’m not kidding.  After two hours of insights, MacArthur gives 8 minutes of reflection on the verse my grandmother saw as the most worthy one in the Revelation.  They aren’t a very satisfying eight minutes either – I’ll recap it here for you in under 30 seconds:

• MacArthur thinks out loud about the negative grammatical structure of the verse.
• He rebukes anyone who thinks the verse might mean there will be tears in heaven.
• He opines about how resurrected bodies might not have tear ducts.
• He states that eternity is not a water-based experience.
• He complains lightly that John is needlessly repetitive about “no tears” and “no crying” and says, “I guess he wanted to cover all his bases.”
• Then, he’s out of there, away from that uncomfortable verse, and back to the good stuff about how much suffering will be endured by the enemies of John MacArthur and of Jesus Christ.

It’s almost as if Wesley, Henry, Darby, MacArthur, and the others have no idea what to do with the raw, powerful emotion of Grandma’s verse.  Each of them dissects it, looking for hints of doctrine and dogma to round out his eschatological weapons rack. 

Please don’t misunderstand me.  I really AM a nerdy bookworm, and after this chat, I’m going to go research what “Rephidim” means so I can understand Darby better.  But I wanted to emphasize how stark a difference there sometimes can be between how scholarly men and pious, believing women can approach the Word of God.

The Masculine side of our faith, I believe, is on the whole more inclined and better suited to embrace the doctrine, the dogma, the legalities, and the historical data of Scripture.  Those are NOT dirty words – we need doctrine, dogma, and details, so that we can focus our faith.  The Feminine side of our faith, I believe, is more inclined and better suited to use Scripture to explore the Lord’s heart for his people, to envision his imagery and poetry, and to empathize.  And boys, those are not dirty words, either.

I say Boy vs. Girl to highlight tendencies, not to imply firm divisions of the sexes and their styles of interpretation.  Of course there are overlaps and exceptions.  I’m emotional and empathetic, but according to my boyfriend, when I debate Scripture I sometimes “fight like a boy.”  For his part, I see him as a tough, manly, analytical thinker -- but I’ve also seen tears in his eyes during our morning devotionals in the Psalms.  There is overlap, and I think each of the sexes is strong where the other is wanting and in need of support.  Peter instructs us: “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; but do it with gentleness and respect.”  I think men, overall, are better equipped for the first part of that verse: Ready with reasons, prepared for defense.  I think women, overall, are better equipped for the latter half: ready with gentleness, prepared for respect.

And it’s in that spirit that I contrast the last two approaches to Revelation: Historicism and Idealism.

Part C: HISTORICISM

“Historicism” launched into prominence during the Protestant Reformation, six centuries ago.  It existed before that, of course, but it really came of age in the 1500s.

The Reformation was a boy’s movement, really.  If I said, “Name some prominent men of the Reformation!”  many in this room could call out, “Wycliffe!  Luther!  Calvin!”  If I said, “Name some prominent women of the Reformation!”, the Google searches would begin.  Many initial hits would mention the wives of Wycliffe, Luther, and Calvin, who were wonderful supporters to their men while the boys held their Reformation.

The Reformation was a conflict of politics, doctrines, authority, and accusations of heresy.  As a result, the Historicist approach to Revelation was a natural fit for the thinking of the age.  It focuses on politics, doctrines, authority, and accusations of heresy throughout the stretch of Christian history.  You may remember that in an early lecture, I mentioned Martin Luther’s rejection of the Revelation as a legitimate book of the New Testament.  I also mentioned he had a complete turnaround after eight years – and from that point on, he began to use the Revelation of John as a strategic weapon to battle the iron grip the Roman Church had over Western Christianity.  The Jesuits fought back against that on two fronts: half of them became Futurists (“You’re wrong, none of the stuff in Revelation will happen until the very end of time!”), while the other half became Preterists (“You’re wrong, because everything in Revelation has already happened!”)  The Jesuits saw no problem with these contradictory stances.  Nothing smoothes over contradictions better than a common enemy, after all.

A Historicist maps all of Christian history to identify events and spiritual beings in the text with actual human events and human beings.  Almost without fail, Historicists put themselves in the last chapters and events of Revelation, and work backward through history from there.  Nobody, as far as I can tell, creates a Historicist interpretation of Revelation that ends in the year 4500 A.D., two and a half millennia from now.  What fun is that?  How could Revelation be interesting if our own historical age is only found up through chapter 6, with 16 more chapters that won’t even take place until I’m long dead and buried?

Therefore, Historicist Martin Luther saw the End of Time as coming in the 1600s.

Historicist Charles Wesley, brother of John, saw it coming in his own 1790s.

Historicist William Miller knew it would be in the 1840s.

Historicist Uriah Smith saw it scheduled for the early 1900s.

Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth, fancied 1989.

Each and every one of these men wrote convincing, detailed expositions on why they were right about their interpretations.  They prayerfully and, I believe, piously and honestly searched the Scriptures, and in them, they found the point-by-point layout of history that led to their own doorsteps.  They were all wrong.  It’s safe to say that now.

Want to have fun at a gathering of believers who are talking about the Signs of the Times?  If you’re in a bratty mood, wait for everyone to share his or her own insights on how modern events and wars and politics and natural disasters point to the End of Time being near, in our own lifetimes.  When everyone is in agreement, satisfied that they’ve all shared an unshakable truth, speak up and announce: “I think Christ will come after the year 2900 A.D.  That’s just the sense I get from the Bible, especially those spaceships in Ezekiel.  Definitely no sooner than that.”

Then sit back and watch the temperatures rise. 

Part D: IDEALISM

When little boys play games, the games develop rules, hierarchies, conflicts, battle simulations, and complex strategies.  When little girls play games, the games are social explorations of tea parties and food sharing and ever-shifting rules of how the imagination is allowed to express itself.  Think of the brief history of video gaming – boys were the predominant audience in the brutal years of constant-action Shoot-‘ Em-Ups.  But when Sims entered the scene introducing a social, rule-flexible opportunity, sales soared in the female market.  Plots and story lines became more complex, until now, girls account for 44% or more of gamers.

Idealism wasn’t invented by girls, but it certainly has the light rules and flexible understandings that tend to appeal to the Feminine side of our race.  The most famous spokesman for Idealism is the mind-bogglingly famous theologian, St. Augustine of Hippo.  Everyone in today’s Western church – Romans Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Calvinists, Protestants of all flavors – like to trace their own ideas back to Augustine.  He’s been called the most important Christian thinker of the thousand-plus years between St. Paul and Martin Luther. BUT … when Augustine writes about the Revelation, modern Historicists, Preterists, and Futurists start getting a little embarrassed by him.  He becomes that distant uncle with the past you don’t really talk about.  (We all have that guy in our family, right?)

Idealism looks at the book of Revelation as a poetic expression of symbols and principles, an ever-shifting kaleidoscope view of the heart of God.  We are a people, says this view, who live as representatives of glory and righteousness, but who are trapped in a mortal tent that sees evil everywhere and suffers persecution.  The forces of the Enemy seem tireless, but we have a hope, the One Blessed Hope: in the End, evil is conquered, and Christ will come in glory to end all death and suffering and pain, and to break once and for all the grasp of the enemy on the human realm.  Then we shall see as God sees, and end our spiritual thirst by drinking from Living Waters.

Every age is an expression of the Revelation.  Are you trying to identify the seven-headed dragon?  He manifests in every decade, in every human institution and government.  Do you wish to pinpoint the Antichrist?  There are many antichrists, and the spirit of antichrist does battle on the Church in every age.  Do you wish to find the exact date when the Millennium starts and Christ reigns from Jerusalem with His rod of iron?  The Kingdom of God is within you, and Christ rules there, even with that iron rod, for those whom He loves, He will both chastise and comfort from within.

Do you hear that?  That sound?  It’s the grinding of Historicist teeth, the frustration they feel when they hear such light, flimsy, wishy-washy interpretation.  “There’s a meaning for every point, and a point for every meaning!” they might say.  “You’re over-spiritualizing the Lord’s final battle plan!”

But the Idealist would disagree.  You don’t approach poetry for its data points; you approach it for its overall sense and feel and guiding ideas & principles.  You don’t approach parables by demanding to know the actual names, ages, and addresses of the people in the story so that you can verify all specific claims.  Poetry and parables are experienced and absorbed and applied to one’s life.  To subject a poem or a parable to point-by-point analysis for the extraction of doctrines, dogmas, and timelines would be like trying to dissect a baby bunny while it’s still alive.  It’s just wrong.  You’ll destroy everything valuable and worthwhile about the bunny with every slice of your Historicist knife.  So, you don’t analyze Revelation – you appreciate its spirit and its principles.  You recoil from its horrors.  You melt and take refuge in its promises.  You feel what it’s like to truly believe that one day, every tear, every sorrow, every moment of mourning will be taken away.

Back to the Historicist: “But that’s a horrible way to interpret the Scriptures!  Don’t you realize there is a Golden Rule of Interpretation?  The Rule is – You must take every word of Scripture at its plain face value, every word at its primary, usual, literal meaning unless otherwise indicated by the text!”

And the Idealist: “Do you feel there is a primary, usual, literal meaning to Revelation’s swarm of breastplated locust with horse bodies, lion teeth, men’s faces, and women’s hair?”

THE HISTORICIST: “Yes.  Those are helicopters.  Hal Lindsey said so.”

THE IDEALIST: “I see.  But Uriah Smith said the locust were the sweeping armies of Islam.  Matthew Henry said they were the first great corruptors of the Christian Church, false teachers. Wesley said they were Persians. Jamieson-Fausset-Brown suspect the Turks.”

THE HISTORICIST: “So you deny they’re helicopters?” 

THE IDEALIST: “Not at all.  I affirm that they’re helicopters, and Islam, and false teachers, and Turks, and Persians, and so much more in the future.”

THE HISTORICIST: “How can one symbol be ALL those things?  That’s crazy talk!”

THE IDEALIST: “No.  That’s Girl Talk.”

THE HISTORICIST: “There’s no definitive divide between female and male interpretation styles!”

THE IDEALIST: “Relax.  That was a metaphor.”

THE HISTORICIST: “God would never end His canon of sacred Scripture with a book that couldn’t be understood precisely, crisply, and clearly, once we have the key!”

THE IDEALIST: “You feel it’s not in God’s nature to have us see Him in a mirror, dimly?  Through a glass, darkly?”

THE HISTORICIST: “Ah, you are alluding to 1 Corinthians 13:12.  You know, there are fascinating analyses of that verse from various hermeneutical schools—“

THE IDEALIST:  “I’ll bet.  Say, I’m going to head off for some tea …”

And so – Idealism.  It’s an approach that’s not satisfying to my inner Scholar.  It’s without firm conclusions, and it’s as maddening as the sentiment in the old joke: “I shot an arrow in the sky.  It missed.”

But it has this in its favor: It can look at Historicism and say, “That’s a good insight, those historical events were part of the essence of Revelation.”  It can envelop Preterism and say, “You’re right, those things happened in the past, the first manifestation of the Revelation’s timeless principles.” And it can break bread with Futurism, agreeing, “These things must all come to pass, until heaven and earth pass away.”

Idealism can look peacefully upon all other approaches to Revelation.  The other schools, on the other hand, can be united on their common loathing of any interpretation system that doesn’t come with a Secret Decoder Ring.

Should Revelation be decoded?  Or should it be experienced and felt?  After four weeks of lectures, I can’t answer that for you.  Like the Revelation itself, this series has been filled with details, but presents no firm, fixed picture of what is true or false.

But I do leave you this: I leave you my Grandmother.  Throughout your life, you’ll hear other believers decoding the book of Revelation for you.  Some of their insights will be brilliant.  Some of them will be utterly loopy.  But as you are bombarded by spins and twists and data and timelines from every school imaginable, I pray there always be a part of you that steps back from the deciding, and simply experiences the book.  I pray that in some of your moments, it will be enough to highlight a verse, to underline it, to underline it again, to put some stars in the margin, and finally accept that one day, you’ll get to hug the Author and say, “Now I see clearly.  Now I understand.”

I’ll end tonight with the same words I use to end all of my blog posts:

“Marana Tha,” …  “Maran Atha”

 – “Come, O Lord”; “Our Lord Has Come.”

*** HERE ENDS THE LECTURE SERIES ***

No Rapture, and Fear of 666?

Series: SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL END IN FIRE

Hi.  I’m Yolanda Ramírez, “YoYo Rez,” and I’d like to welcome you to week 3 of my four-week lecture series on approaching the Book of Revelation.

These lectures don’t actually study the book of Revelation in a formal manner.  Instead, I’ve been discussing various approaches the Body of Christ has taken to help them embrace the message of the book.

This week is Lecture III: NO RAPTURE, AND FEAR OF 666

During this talk, you’ll hear about a number of things you disagree with.  Some of them, I disagree with.  That’s part of what happens when we weigh all sides of a complex issue – we consider many things, we develop our wisdom from a variety of viewpoints and counselors, and then, when we’ve weighed them all, we embrace what seems right to us, those things that we feel are of God.  It’s fun to think about different theories and perspectives and hypotheses and ideas, but in the end there is one goal – to set our minds on the things of Christ and His things above.  Philippians 4:8 instructs us with these words from Paul: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things.”

To discern those things, we have to separate a lot of wheat from a lot of chaff.  That’s what maturing in Christ is all about.  So guide us, Holy Spirit, as we do that.

And away we go ...

PART A: SEARCHING FOR DUCKIES

Some of you know that I work as a governess, a live-in teacher and companion to a young girl, the daughter of an East Coast U.S. family.  The little girl I have charge over ... the most wonderful child I’ve ever met ... plays a game with me outside on cloudy days.  The game is “Find the Ducky.”  We each take turns spotting duck-shaped collections of clouds.  Whoever finds the most ducky-shaped clouds, wins … and trust me, as the game goes on, we can find the shapes of duckies anywhere and everywhere.  There we are, the innocent little schoolgirl and her older postgraduate companion, each of us able to look at random sky patterns and spot the ducks of our dreams.

And that, my friends, is a parable of how we as a modern church sometimes read the Revelation of John.

The Revelation is a book written in mysterious symbols and breathtaking visions of both glory and horror.  Almost nothing in it is literally what it says it is – the heads of dragons are hills of a city, the horns on a beast’s head are sometimes kings, sometimes symbols of power; a woman riding a beast is Rome, but then the beast she’s riding is suddenly Rome, too.  Without a clear sense of how to approach the text, the Revelation is pretty much Symbol Soup.

That’s both a good thing and a bad thing.  It’s good because we know that if we find the right keys to interpret it, the visions will make perfect sense.  After all, the book is called “Revelation” – things revealed, unveiled, made clearer.  It isn’t called “The Utterly Incomprehensible Symbol Soup of John.”

But yes, the thick symbolism of Revelation is also a negative.  That’s because we humans are pattern-seeking creatures.  When we see a row of dots, our brain wants to connect them with a line.  When we see interesting burn patterns on a piece of toast, we can sometimes make out the face of Our Lady of Guadalupe.  When we go to the store and ring up a bill of $47.65, and then on the way home see a license plate that ends with the numbers *4765* … the marvelous, wondrous brains the Lord designed for us make us WANT there to be a connection.

When I say to you, “Look, there’s a cloud that looks like a ducky,” you will look up and see the ducky.

And when I point to a passage of Scripture and say, “Look, here you will see a reference to the New World Order and the secret Illuminati behind it”  -- by golly, when you look at that Scripture, you’ll see it, plain as day.

Let me show you a non-Revelation example of that principle at work.  I’m going to post a passage for you, a pretty well known passage about the Rapture.  When I post it below, I want you to pinpoint the parts of the passage that indicate the Rapture is taking place.  It’s not a hard test, you’ll see the verses easily.  From Matthew chapter 24 –

“For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.  Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.  Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.  Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.”

See?  It told you it was easy.  The Rapture is there in the discussion of people being left behind, others being taken.  We spotted that ducky, no problem.  It was obvious.

Here’s what would have made it a lot less obvious: If we hadn’t been taught that that verse is about the Rapture.

Suppose, for example, a favorite pastor or preacher had taught us that the passage refers to the Romans sweeping through Judea, finally putting down the Jewish rebellions – grabbing people from the fields and enslaving them, leaving others dead in the field.  What if that pastor had taught us that the warning was about the fall of Jerusalem, and advice from Jesus to the Jews of his day that if they are on their roof when the invasion came, not to go back inside to get their stuff – flee to the hills, all of them!  If they stayed in the fields or slept away the time in bed, they’d become one of the enslaved or one of the dead, whose bodies were left in the fields where the eagles would gather to scavenge their flesh.

You see how it works?  The word for that is “priming.”  If I “prime” you to see that Scripture one way, as a vague reference to the Rapture, you will easily see how it fits what I claimed.  If I prime you to see it another way, as a description of the effects of a Roman invasion, then that second way is what you’ll see.

Those of us who are mature in Christ aren't easily fooled by fancy footwork around the Scriptures.  But even if we are mature, we still have an issue to face: What if, when we were still babes in Christ, we were primed to read things in only one way?  What if that first impression wasn't the whole story?  Our first impressions are seriously stubborn … once we see a thing a certain way, our wonderful, pattern-building brains will cling to that way of seeing it.

So what are we supposed to do?  How are we to know which way to approach the slippery ideas of Scripture when it comes to the end times and the symbolism it’s always draped in?

Part B: KNOWING THE ROAD WE WALK

This is a good time for me to emphasize a point I’ve tried to make every week: None of the passages of Scripture we’re discussing have to do with salvation.  Some parts of Scripture can be tricky, requiring more study and deeper investigation.  However, the portions that deal with the most important fact of the universe – our salvation through faith in the saving power of the blood of Christ – are crystal clear, and the stuff of childlike faith.  Above all else, and despite anything I spout tonight, that Truth of Salvation is the overriding fact of our faith.

That said – getting saved is not the end of the line for a believer.  Growing in discipleship means making manifest the fruit of the Spirit and the love that is our God … love from our hearts, from our souls, from our strength ... and (out of order here to make my point) from our minds.  We are called to manifest God through our thinking, and studying, and learning.  In fact, whole sections of our sacred Scriptures are called the “Wisdom Books” – manifestations of the principle that intelligence and learning start with fear of the Lord, and grow on from there.  We are to use our brains.

Last week I outlined 4 possible approaches to understanding the Revelation.   All of them come from the beliefs of orthodox, born-again believers.  They could be classified as:

• FUTURISM: The belief that everything in Revelation has yet to happen, and will take place in a single era in the church’s future.
• HISTORICISM: The belief that the events symbolized in Revelation cover the entire span of history from after Jesus’ ascension until the last days.
• PRETERISM: The belief that nearly all of Revelation was fulfilled at the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the end of the Old Covenant.
• IDEALISM: The belief that Revelation is symbolic for every age and era in the church, continuously fulfilled until the final generation and coming.

 If you were discipled in your walk to think like a Preterist, you will have a hard time seeing the sense of the Futurist approach.  If you were schooled as a Historicist, the Idealism approach will strike you as wishy-washy and too “fluffy” to satisfy you.  Remember how I opened – if you expect to see ducky clouds, you won’t easily see horsey clouds; it will be ducks, all the way down.  But let’s take a few moments to open our minds and consider our favorite clouds from a different perspective – because each of these approaches has specific strengths, as well as weaknesses.

Part C: FUTURISM

Good news out of the United Kingdom – a new baby has been born, the first Prince of Cambridge in hundreds of years!  You might have seen it mentioned on television.

But even better – within 24 hours of his birth, I had already found the first YouTube video discussing that this new bundle of British joy is a serious candidate for being the Antichrist.  I also found another site that played with the mathematics of the day and hour of his birth to tie him to the number 666.  In other words -- before this child even had a name or a Wikipedia page, he’d been assigned a title and a number to make him a part of End Time prophecy.

Welcome … to the wonderful world of radical Futurism. J

I said last week that “Futurism” is currently the most popular way to approach the Revelation of John.  Its appeal began to rise in the U.S. in the 1820s, overcoming several hundred years during which “Historicism” was the preferred way to understand the End Times.

The appeal of approaching Revelation from a Futurist mindset is so obvious that it almost doesn’t need stating: Obviously, Christ has not come back yet, so the fulfillment of End Times prophecies MUST be in the future.  We’re not living in a Millennial Kingdom seated in Jerusalem.  The moon has not darkened and the sun has not gone out, stars have not fallen from the sky.  We Christians do not yet rule the planet, and our warrior Christ has not revealed Himself to take control of the nations.  Since this troubled world can’t be fixed by human power, we require the apocalyptic destruction of all nations and civilizations … although we ourselves will be spared that tribulation, caught up in clouds with Christ to avoid the worst Tribulation ever and the utter punishment of all bad people, in those ways graphically detailed in our book of Revelation.

So, the strengths of the approach are obvious, but the weaknesses should be kept in mind.

For one thing, modern Futurist thinking all focuses on the concept of a Rapture … a grabbing away of the people of God so that they will not experience tribulation over a seven-year period.   While such a “catching away” is mentioned in other passages of Scripture, it isn’t found in the Revelation.  Even if you’re hunting for it in the text, it’s rather hard to see, and it depends on some fancy footwork by the person who insists there’s a Rapture there.  When various commentators try to show the Rapture in the text of the Revelation, you can really get the feeling you’re being shown cloud duckies.

Meanwhile, most of the other Scriptures referencing a Rapture talk about it as the moment all death ends, the twinkling-of-an-eye change of the living and dead into spiritual bodies in Christ.  It’s difficult, in these other Scriptures, to see any distinction between what we call the Rapture and what Christ calls his final coming and the defeat of death.  When Paul talks about it, the moment of translation seems to be the last moment of human time, not the first day in a Tribulation that kills a whole lot more people even after death has been defeated.

Another major hurdle to the Futurist approach is the very first line of the Revelation – the verse that insists that the things described in the book must soon [quickly, immediately, shortly] come to pass.

Soon.  Quickly.  Immediately.  Shortly.

Of our four approaches to Revelation, Futurism is the only one that struggles with the meaning of that verse.  Enemies of our faith latch on to that word, "soon," and mock our hopes, reminding us that almost two thousand years of waiting can hardly be considered “soon.”

WARNING: Remember that I am presenting both sides, strengths and weaknesses.  If you just felt the urge to begin assembling counter-arguments, I applaud you, because you are loving the Lord with your whole mind.  But I also urge you to continue focusing, even if this is new territory for you.  Truth will remain true, and it will wait for us to get there. Continue with me as we weigh the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.  END OF WARNING.

I’ll give one final consideration about Futurism.  I’ll ask, “What fruit does this mindset bear?”  In other words, how does this way of interpretation manifest itself in the church of Christ?  Is the fruit good, or bad?

Clearly, there is very good fruit to come from a Futurist mindset.  This approach keeps us focused on Christ, and maintains our hope in His final victory, yet to come.  It keeps us ready and keeps us ever mindful that we should live as if the end will come unexpectedly, a thief in the night.  We are urged to share the Gospel, never knowing how much time we have left to reveal the Lord to others.

But Futurism also has its down side, which I've already hinted at.  If misapplied, Futurism can foster a paranoid, suspicious mentality, the exact opposite of Christ’s admonition that when we see signs of the end, not to worry.  Within Christianity, "Apocalypse Obsession" is simply a reflection of the secular, worldly "Paranoid Conspiracy Theory" obsession – the worries of the world dressed up in Bible verses, and unable to distinguish a Mayan Calendar and a quatrain of Nostradamus from the Holy Spirit-inspired words of the Gospels and of John.  I myself have heard preachers in the virtual world community of Second Life speaking of how a Planet X, called Nibiru, is going to slam into us on December 21, 2012 (oops)  and start the Tribulation under the New World Order.  That’s Babylonian mythology, mixed with Mayan mythology, mixed with Biblical prophecy, mixed with contemporary American mythology.  I’m a girl who loves her Symbol Soup, but that’s too many calories even for me.

In some cases, the paranoia can grow one level more, into what I call Pop Paranoia.  Here’s my “Bigwordism” of the week:

"Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia."

It’s the technical term for “fear of the number 666.”  When I was very little, Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to a post-presidential residence in Bel Air, California at 666 St. Cloud Road.  Before moving in, they had the town change the house number to 668, precisely because they knew what kind of grief they'd be in for if they didn't.  No, not grief from living under a cursed number; grief from the evangelical community, and derision from the culture at large.  It was already bad enough that the president had 666 tied to his name from birth (Ronald, 6 letters, Wilson, 6 letters, Reagan, 6 letters).  They didn’t want to compound the issue by actually living in the Home of the Beast right there in California, the State of Sin.

That might be a cute example of Pop Paranoia, but what the Reagans were up against was anything but cute.  Too many evangelicals of a Futurist ideology respond to triple sixes with a level of paranoia that brings derision on the believing community.  Maybe I’m guilty of it, too.  I always notice when my grocery bill comes to $66.66 … or $166.62 … or $60.66.  I always wonder if I should drive a little bit farther when I’ve parked with the odometer ending with sixty-six point six miles.  Never mind that none of those really equals 666, literally.  And never mind that the number 666 in the Revelation is not itself literal but a code for the name of a man.  I invite you to laugh at me, because I am a creature of my culture, whose head says seeing a grouping of sixes means nothing, but whose heart always wonders.

I’m glad I’ve never been issued a credit card that ends with the digits 0666 – because the rational part of me only goes so far.

Part D: PRETERISM

A believer who approaches the Revelation with a Preterist interpretation doesn’t worry about the number 666.  He looks at it and says, “Ah, look at that, the code for Nero Caesar when you transliterate his name to Hebrew and apply the ancient counting system to it.”

The Preterist doesn’t wonder when the events of Revelation are going to happen.  He believes that Revelation already told him the time table – right there in Revelation 17, where John writes that the 7-headed beast is 7 hills (the seven hills east of the River Tiber, upon which Rome was built), and which John says are also seven kings – five already fallen (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero), one who now is (Vespasian, after a bunch of chaos following Nero’s death), and one that has not yet come (Domitian, who outdid even Nero in his persecution of the followers of Christ).

That’s what the word “preterist” means – past.  If you studied Spanish or French in school, you might remember the preterit verb conjugation, the form used for an event that began and ended completely in the past.

For the Preterist, John is obviously saying that all of this was going on right in his own time, while he was writing – the seven-headed beast was political Rome, not some future Roman Catholic Papacy, and the Whore of Babylon riding upon that very beast also had to be existing at that time, since she was on that very beast.  To the mind of the Preterist, it's a little arrogant of modern Christians to presume that the Revelation was written for modern times, ripped from our own headlines.  Every symbol can be traced to an event in John’s own time, and the Day of the Lord came when Jerusalem fell to the forces of Rome in 70 A.D., ending Israel's exclusive claim to the eternal covenant with the Lord.  The Day of the Lord, says the Preterist, was the "End of the Age" from the viewpoint of the nation of Israel – a hugely significant act in the history of the faith, which will only be surpassed by the "End of the World," of the cosmos, when Christ finally comes to end death.

First let me deal with the strengths of this approach.

It clearly handles the “things that must happen soon” issue.  For the Preterist, the bulk of Revelation deals with the world at the time John was writing, and predicts exactly what happened with the fall of Jerusalem and the end of Israel as a nation.  The Preterist approach also helps us make sense of some of Jesus’ assurances that “this generation” he was addressing would not pass away until everything He said about the end of the age (not the end of the world) came to pass.  In Futurism, that statement by Jesus has to be played with to make it work, reinterpreting what the word “this” means – a trick that is way too painful a reminder of President Clinton changing the meaning of what “is”  is, and not helpful once you realize that in other places Jesus says that there were those listening to him who would “not taste death” until the end of the age came.

Still, Preterism has some obvious problems.  It’s most glaring issue is that it suggests multiple stages to the coming of Christ – one at the end of the age (of Israel), and another at the end of the world, when death is defeated.  If you press a Preterist on this point, he’ll likely say it’s obvious that there were two different events being considered by those writing down prophecy … but, frankly, I suspect it’s only obvious to them because they’ve decided what ducks they were looking for in that particular bank of clouds.

More important, at least in my opinion, is that a Preterist has to spiritualize some parts of “end of the age” prophecy to make it all work for him.  For example, consider Matthew 24 when it speaks of the Son of Man coming in clouds of glory in judgment over his enemies, being seen by all the tribes of the Earth.  (I continue to refer to Matthew 24 because it’s a favorite of both Futurists and Preterists in their explanations of why their side of the discussion is better).   Here, a Preterist will use Scripture to interpret Scripture, pointing out that “God coming on the clouds” is not a literal phrase in the Old Testament, and should not be considered so here – in the Hebrew scriptures, it always referred to God passing judgment on an enemy of Israel.  Likewise, the idea that he is seen by “all the tribes of the Earth” is no more literal than when Augustus Caesar, according to Luke, decreed that “all the world” should be taxed.  "The Son of Man coming in the clouds and seen by all the tribes of the Earth" is, for the Preterist, a way of saying “many shall see this horrible event happen to Jerusalem,” if read properly.

You can probably already see the problem with that.  A clever talker can dance around nearly any line in Scripture, turning it into a figurative saying when the literal meaning is too inconvenient.  I’m not saying the Preterist is absolutely wrong to interpret some texts in a spiritual or metaphorical way … but I am saying that it’s a tricky affair, and that there need to be much more reliable rules of interpretation if we’re going to take that approach to the Scriptures.  Simply pointing to another Scripture ... in another context, written hundreds of years and hundreds of miles away ... smacks of rationalizing more than it does of sound, reliable interpretation of the Word.

What is the fruit of Preterism?  Since it isn’t as popular as Futurism these days, it’s tougher to point at any widespread outcome to using it as an approach.  Still, we’re bright people, so we can consider where it might lead, should it become the favored approach some time in the future.

First the good fruit.  By its very nature, evangelical Preterism is optimistic.  The world doesn’t need to become utterly horrible and fall into abject evil before the coming of Christ, and the church can work to fulfill, literally, the prophecy of both Isaiah and Habakkuk, which see a future where “of the increase of His government and of peace, there shall be no end.”  As a Preterist spreads the gospel, the peace that it brings will actually overcome the world.  Sharing the Gospel isn’t a matter of rushing in to snatch people from the hell fires of impending catastrophe; it is, instead, the act of filling all of creation with the Gospel of peace, offering stewardship to the souls of men and bringing responsible stewardship to the creation itself.

This approach is a pleasant contrast to a recurring radical Futurist attitude that protecting the environment is wasted effort … "cut it down, burn it up, use it while you’ve got it, because it will all be destroyed soon at Christ’s return."  Some evangelical Futurists even use apocalyptic imagery to demonize environmental efforts, calling them “The Green Dragon.”  If you think I’m exaggerating, do a Google search after the lecture on “Why Pastor Mark Driscoll says he drives an SUV.”  Pay special attention to comments by his fans.

But like all the approaches we'll consider, Preterism has potential negative fruit, too.  With no sense of urgency and no press of time, a Preterist’s approach to sharing the gospel might be a lot more laid back than the Kingdom requires.  After all, if there’s no expectation of a sudden, secret Rapture of the church, then why would there be a rush to get out there and win the lost?  A Preterist risks an attitude of laziness, a way-too-mellow approach to preaching the Good News … and, because of that lack of urgency, a Preterist may fail to carry the message to all who need it, due to a false sense of security.

(Similar dangers have been mentioned in connection to extreme Calvinists – if everyone to be saved is elected from before the foundation of the world, then what urgency is there to preach the Gospel?  Those who will be saved … will be saved, without human effort.  Preaching is just us, going through the motions.)

So, FUTURISM – a daily, expectant focus on Christ as the center of each moment, carrying the risk of falling into paranoia about every world event.

And PRETERISM – an optimistic view of the ever-increasing peace and authority of the Lord on the Earth, carrying the risk of lazy surrender and a loss of urgency.

I’ve tried to present both the “up” sides and the “down” sides of each mindset.  Still, I didn’t even scratch the surface of the very loud, very not-friendly debates the two sides can have with each other over the jots, tittles, dust, and details of their arguments.  If you’ve researched the viewpoints for yourself, you already know how vehement each camp can get – extreme futurists view Preterists as forces of Satan, deluding believers into false security in the face of immediate supernatural danger, while extremist Preterists view Futurists as shallow, uneducated, readers of the Word who do no study and who arrogantly see themselves written into every End Time prophecy.

Mind you, most us in the Body of Christ are thoughtful non-extremists when it comes to matters not tied directly to salvation by faith in the sacrifice of Christ.  But just a heads up if you investigate this study further: the Internet is a scary medium of very loud extremists on either side.

Test your sources, and test the spirit of their testimonies.

CONCLUSION

“Hey, YoYo!” I hear someone thinking, “you skipped two of the approaches, Historicism and Idealism!”  Indeed I did, because I like to contrast those two on their own. They get their own, final week next Thursday.  Historicism is the meat and potatoes of Reformation theologians; Idealism is the stuff of mystics and their allegories.  For that reason, I like to square them off against each other as if they were as different as day and night, as different as up and down, as different as men and women.  The final lecture of this series, therefore, is: “The Revelation: Hard-headed Boys vs. Fuzzy-minded Girls.”  I hope you can make it for the finale!

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx

Almost Banned from the Bible

This is the second in a series of lectures I presented in the virtual world called Second Life, at the sim called House of Prayer.  This lecture was delivered on July 18, 2013.

I’m Yolanda Ramírez, “YoYo Rez,” and I’d like to welcome you to God’s House of Prayer.  This is the second of four 45-minute lectures I’ll be delivering on how to begin reading the book of Revelation.  If this is your first time at this lecture series on Revelation, great to see you!  Those of you who were here last week … I’m pleased to be present for your personal Second Coming.    As I mentioned last week, this isn’t a study of the Revelation.  We won’t be doing a systematic investigation of each chapter, verse by verse.  Instead, this short lecture series is about the Revelation … tonight, specifically, about how it had such a hard time getting into the Bible, and how the Body of Christ has developed 4 distinct approaches to help us understand what its wild visions and crazy symbols are all about.

This week is Lecture II: ALMOST BANNED FROM THE BIBLE!

And away we go …

Part A: YOLANDA TRANSLATES SOME GREEK

The Revelation is a challenge for us from first word to last.  Most of us can’t even get the title right … for years I threw an –S at the end of the title, until I discovered that absolutely no version of the Bible shows it as anything other than singular, “Revelation.”  So at first, I couldn’t even get the title of the book right.

Then came the problem of the author.  And for that little hurdle, I’d like to tell you a short story from my own life.

Once upon a time, I discovered that the Bible has grammar errors in it.

I was sitting in the back of a dim, dusty University office, working to translate the ancient Greek manuscript provided to me by my equally dusty professor.  Greek is the original language of the New Testament.  The manuscript I worked on was the APOKALUPSIS IOANNOU, the “Revelation of John.”  That manmade title always bothered me, because the first three words of the book are APOKALUPSIS IESOU XRISTOU, the “Revelation of Jesus Christ.”  The book isn’t a revelation from John; it’s a revelation to John, from (of) Jesus.

More accurately, it was, as the first verse says, a revelation from God, about Jesus Christ, sent through an angel to the servant John for the rest of us servants.  No other book in the Bible opens with such a detailed chain of custody of its message.

But, no matter.  I wasn’t worried about that on this day, ten years ago.  I was worried about my translation.  It was not going well.  I had only been studying Greek for a year and a half.  I was not good at it.

The professor saw my frustration.  He waddled over to see why I looked so upset with the translation.

On my tablet, I wrote to him, “I keep messing up my verb conjugations!  It’s like I can’t remember them!”

 “Conjugations” – my SL friend Ghostwitness would call that one of the “BigWordisms” I like to use all the time.  “Conjugation” is just a fancy word for how you make a verb work right.  For example, in English, we don’t say “He are” or “He am” – the correct conjugation is “He is.”  We learn that as children, and we don’t think much about it until someone starts using it incorrectly.

So, “conjugation.” Y’all done gots that?

My professor was a brilliant man, but no one would call him charming.  He looked at my work and crisply announced: “Your Greek’s right.  The author’s wrong.”

That confused me.  The line I was working on used a singular subject with a plural verb – “He are” would be an English example of that kind of mistake.  The Revelation had a number of other grammar issues just like it, and I wasn’t willing to assume it was the Sacred writer and not the noobie Greek student, me.

 “He didn’t know Greek well,” my professor announced.  “It was his second language.  He messes it up sometimes.  Just like you.”

I felt more confused now.  A few weeks back, the professor and I had translated the first few chapters of the Gospel of John, from the same author, and there were no such grammar errors in that piece of writing.  In fact, it was beautiful, elegant, accurate Greek, following all the rules.  Had the Apostle John forgotten how to write Greek?  Had he unlearned a language he knew perfectly well earlier in life?  Had he grown feeble minded?

Then my professor said, “Don’t be a dimwit.  Who told you it was the same John?”

And that was the day I realized that the world has a lot of people named John in it … and that the author of the Revelation never once refers to himself as an Apostle who knew the Lord Jesus Christ personally, in the flesh.  From the viewpoint of the original language, the John who wrote the Revelation used a quality of and style of Greek completely different from the John who wrote the Gospel.

The idea that the John who wrote the Gospel is the same one who wrote the Revelation is a tradition of men.

I’ll say that again, because it’s an important part of the story tonight: the idea that John of Patmos is the same person as John the Evangelist, the Gospel writer, is a non-biblical tradition.

Scripture nowhere says they are the same individual.  And while we modern Christians have a lot of “lives of the Apostles”  stories, most of those stories come from people who lived hundreds of years after the apostles had all died.

Now, wait a second.  Language difference?  Is that really enough evidence to say that the same John didn’t write both books?

Consider: You don’t have to be a language professional to draw similar conclusions from more modern examples.

EXAMPLE 1:  Imagine you are an immigration officer who pulls over one of my 80,000 Ramírez relatives – we Ramírezes are all cousins, you see.  When you check for his Arizona ID, he might say something in his rich, Mexican accent like: “Hallo!  I am call myself John, and I am swear I be born of United States, Mr. Officer!”  Let’s face it: From the style and quality of his language, you know something is up.

EXAMPLE 2: Or let’s imagine you get a text message from your significant other on a Tuesday that reads, “My dearest one: How I have missed you so, and how I long to take you once again in my embrace and share in silence the solitude of two souls joined as one.”  On Wednesday, you get a second text that says, “Yo, waddup shawty?  U still be my HOTNESS, smexy one!  So when we is to get the grope on?  U tell, scrap!”  You know immediately that something is up.  You know that John of the Embrace might not be the same as John of the Hood, and neither of them is Juan of the Barrio.

There are people, Bible scholars, who know the Greek of the New Testament far better than you and I ever will.  Those people see the same kinds of differences, and more, in the style and quality of the languages used in the Gospel of John versus the Revelation of John.  Simply put: The Gospel writer knew Greek well, as a first language.  The Revelation writer did not.

We either have to conclude that John the Evangelist forgot how to write Greek in the years between the Gospel and the Revelation, or that we’ve found ourselves a different John.

Here’s the lesson I took from that new information I got about the Revelation: Always question what I think I know.  Always pay polite attention to what people tell me about the last book of the Bible, and prayerfully consider what they have to say … but verify, verify, verify.  I will never forget that I couldn’t even get past the title and author of Revelation without learning I had major assumptions that were completely wrong.  I continue to tell myself what my professor told me that day: “Yolanda, don’t be a dimwit.”

Part B: WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHO WROTE IT?

Maybe you’re thinking, “So what?  It doesn’t matter if John the apostle wrote the Revelation, just as it doesn’t matter whether Paul the apostle wrote Hebrews.  The Holy Spirit inspired both.  They’re both in the Bible, so they’re part of my faith.”  And I’m with you on that – I believe as you do, that it is part of the canon of Scripture.

“Canon,”  another BigWordism, despite only having five letters in it.  It’s a regulation or law declared by a church council – and the “canon of Scripture” is the list of books declared legitimately part of the Bible we use today. 

To explain what that has to do with the Revelation, I’ll tell you another story.

Once upon another time … much, much longer ago than my University days … there were a bunch of Christians scattered throughout the Roman Empire who did not have a Bible.  All they had were letters and scrolls and writings that were of special importance to them.  Some were writings from Apostles like Paul and Matthew and Peter.  Some were from non-apostles like Clement and Ignatius and Polycarp.  A small church congregation was lucky to have even a single copy of one of these letters, and there was no such thing as a “whole Bible.”  No one had officially picked which ones should be in, and which ones should be out.

How do you assemble a Bible?  How do you know which books to put in?  I won’t get overly detailed on the process, because frankly, most Christians approach this topic the way they approach their favorite sausages.  Yes, I said their favorite sausages … we’re happy with the end product, but we really don’t want to see how it was made.  It’s messy.  We don’t want to know what almost got in there.  Leave that little secret to the sausage makers.

Rather than toss around names like “Eusebius” and “Athanasius,” allow me to give you the Reader’s Digest version:

·         Some dudes wrote up lists of what they wanted in a final, official book.

·         Some other dudes wrote up other lists.

·         These “dudes” were called church fathers.

·         Their lists didn’t always agree.

·         They argued.  They argued a lot.  It got ugly, uglier than modern debates over who will bring what to next Sunday’s pot luck church dinner.

·         And in the middle of the 300s C.E., a Catholic council finalized the list.  We had a New Testament.  The end.

Just so you get a perspective on how long that took: Imagine, those of you in America, that our founding fathers had sat down to create the U.S. Constitution, and that it had taken as long as it took the church fathers to agree on the contents of the New Testament.  Finishing and approving our Constitution would have taken from the late 1700s until the end of the 21st century.  Our grandchildren would be the first to have a finished version.  The discussions and debates over what belonged in the New Testament took that long.

One of the books most under debate – on many of the early lists, kicked off of others – was the Revelation.  Half of the church fathers saw it as a glorious tale of Christ’s ultimate victory over sin and evil.  The other half considered it a lunatic hallucination filled with ranting and delusion.

Obviously, the Revelation got into the Bible at the end.  But … one of the strongest arguments in the book’s favor turns out to be wrong.  Many of the list makers argued that the Revelation was written by the Apostle John.  For that reason, they said, the book deserved to be in the Bible.

Others argued that the book was too insane, and that the Greek was too poor to be the same writing as the Apostle John’s.  They feared the crazy symbolism of the book would be misused by readers and preachers, randomly applied to anything and everything they had a political opposition to.  In time, though, even those who didn’t believe that the Apostle John had written the Revelation began to soften on accepting it.  You didn’t HAVE to be an apostle to be inspired by the Holy Spirit to write for the Bible.  In fact, the man who wrote more words than anyone else for the accepted New Testament wasn’t an apostle at all, and probably not even Jewish –Luke, sidekick to an apostle, author of a gospel and The Acts of the Apostles.

So, these Catholic councils gave a final thumbs-up to 27 books, and the “canon,” the official list, was closed.  The Revelation squeaked by, mostly because a majority of council members mistakenly believed it was written by the Apostle John the Evangelist.  And luckily, since most of the world stayed illiterate for the next millennium, nobody had to worry about too many crazy interpretations from unschooled believers.

But then along came the Reformation and Martin Luther, who started kicking books out of the Bible.  Once more, the Revelation was in danger, and came close to being banned.  Martin Luther looked at it and declared, “ You know what?  I doubt the Apostle John wrote this thing.” 

But for Luther, the issue wasn’t language.  Luther had no love at all for the message of the Revelation.  He felt it was too confusing to be the Word of God, and declared, “I miss more than one thing in this book, and it makes me consider it neither apostolic nor prophetic.”  He doubted that it was inspired by God, declaring, “I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it.”  And in his most powerful dismissal of all, he claimed that the Jesus it portrays was not a Jesus found in the rest of the Bible: “Christ is neither taught nor known in it,” he wrote.

We nearly lost the book of the Revelation at that point.  That’s no exaggeration.  Many books DID depart from the Protestant canon in those days, the early 1500s, including many Old Testament books now found only in the Catholic Bible.  But oddly, eight years after his dismissal of Revelation, Luther did a complete turnabout.  His attitude toward the Revelation changed, because he began to see a very powerful use for the book – it made a great weapon against his Number One Enemy, the Roman Catholic Church.  The Warrior Christ he’d been uncomfortable with earlier in life suddenly made sense to Luther – and the Beast from the Sea was all too obviously, to him, the Roman Church itself.  The Church, for its part, quickly responded by interpreting the rise of a False Prophet to be Luther, raging against the real Kingdom of God.  Lines were drawn, symbols were adopted, and the Revelation of John rested easily, again having a fixed place in the canon, and remaining there to our day.

Printing presses churned out copies of the Bible.  The Word of God became available throughout the world … and, I’m required to point out, the Revelation became widely available to the crazy commentators and interpreters that the ancient church fathers had feared.  The scholar G.K. Chesterton made a wonderful statement about that, saying that although the author John “saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.”

Part C: THE FOUR APPROACHES TO REVELATION

Once upon a time … long before I sat there translating in that University office, and long before Martin Luther changed his mind about the Revelation, and even before the church fathers finalized their list of the books that belonged in the New Testament, a man named John on an island named Patmos sat down to record a vision that would far outlive him, and far outlive even the memories of who he was.  As he wrote his first line about his vision, those “things which must shortly come to pass,” he could not imagine that two thousand years later, people would still be debating about those things he saw.

When I say that the Body of Christ has developed “approaches to interpreting Revelation,” some people might think that I am talking about ideas like, “Will the Rapture occur before or after the tribulation, or will it come right in the middle of it?”  But those matters are mere details that relate only to a single one of the four approaches I want to introduce.  They are details Martin Luther wouldn’t have recognized, since they come from a Futurist approach completely different from his own.

The four approaches I’m introducing are called:

·         Futurism

·         Historicism

·         Preterism

·         Idealism

Before I mention their differences, I would like to point out their similarities: All four of these approaches believe in the literal, physical second coming of Christ in our future, when the world ends and the temporal is replaced by the eternal.  All of them share the belief that fullness of the Kingdom is yet to come.  And most important, all four declare that salvation is through faith in Christ’s redeeming sacrifice alone, the one defining element uniting us, so that one day, a trillion years from now, we can all sit around laughing about how little we knew back in those Old Earth Days.

Here are the approaches.  I’ll hint at strengths and weaknesses in each, but the full examination will come next Thursday.

Approach 1: Futurism

I start with Futurism not because it is the oldest approach to interpreting Revelation… in fact, it might be the newest … but because it is the most popular today.  Futurism holds that Revelation is about activities at the End of Time.  All of its symbols … its two beasts, its Whore of Babylon drunk upon the wine of the blood of the saints, its mark of the beast that will allow buying and selling and damn one to hell … every seal, trumpet, and bowl of plagues is yet to happen, and the signs of the times are hints that it will happen soon.  Futurists tend to see Revelation as a secret code for the headlines of their own times.  If a major earthquake occurs, it is because the End is Near.  If a near-miss asteroid comes by our planet, it’s a reminder that another massive asteroid, Wormwood, is on the verge of slamming into us.  If a Social Security card is issued with three 6’s buried in it, in order, it becomes a reminder of the horrors that are just about to come, and evidence of dark conspiracies lurking just behind the scene.

Futurism is the backbone of the fictional Left Behind series, which has introduced a number of elements into modern Christianity’s expectations of the end times – including the mistaken assumption that the book of Revelation mentions a one-world religion, an Antichrist, and a Rapture.  None of those terms is actually found in the Revelation.

Approach 2: Historicism

Martin Luther was a Historicist, once he finally accepted the Revelation.  So were famed preachers Charles Spurgeon and John Wesley.  To a historicist, the symbols, creatures, and events of Revelation aren’t a collection of things happening in a single era.  Instead, they are a map of all history itself.  The letters to the churches at the beginning are a preview of the ages the Church will go through, and then the main bulk of the vision is all of history after Christ ascended.  The Historicist sees encoded in the Revelation the rise and the fall of the Roman Empire, the sweeping of barbarian hordes through Europe and out of Asia to pave the way for the Middle Ages, the schism of the Roman and Eastern church, followed by the rise of Protestantism and the discovery of the Americas, and perhaps even including Russia, China, and America becoming the dominant powers on the planet.

How these symbols are arranged and counted through history depends on who the historicist is and when he lived.  For Martin Luther, everything culminated in his own age, with the Pope as the Beast of the Sea and the end at hand for everyone being saved from the clutches of Babylon.  For Uriah Smith, author of the 1897 book Daniel and Revelation, it all culminates in his own time, once you count Daniel’s “weeks” as “years” and realize that the invention of the telegraph and dirigibles is most certainly a sign of the end within a generation.

Approach 3: Preterism

A number of the early church fathers, and a number of modern preachers, fall into the category of “preterist,” Eusibius being one of the earliest (he was one of those “dudes” I mentioned who created lists of what books should be in the Bible).  Calvinist theologian R.C. Sproul is a more recent prominent example.  Preterists hold to the idea that most of the book of Revelation … in fact, everything up through chapter 19 … was fulfilled in the generation following the resurrection of Christ, culminating in the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.  The generation did not pass away until the fulfillment of the Day of the Lord, which is not the same as the Final Coming of Jesus.

Preterists distinguish between the End of the Age (when Israel came to final judgment) and the End of the World (when Christ will physically return to earth).  The Son of Man coming in clouds, seen by those who pierced him, becomes, in Preterist ideas, a different event from the Final coming of Christ.  The Old Testament spoke various times of God “coming in the clouds” as a way of indicating God was leveling Israel’s enemies.  This final “coming in the clouds” was the judgment of Christ himself, executed through the Romans, marking the end of the age of Israel and the beginning of the New Israel, the church.  Horrible tribulation befell Israel, worse than any judgment ever on any nation.  We now live in the Kingdom Age, awaiting the final establishment of Christ’s throne as we unceasingly work to increase His Kingdom upon the earth.

Approach 4: Idealism

The three previous approaches suffer from one common shortcoming that’s resolved by the final approach.  The Futurist, Historicist, and Preterist approaches all require that the majority of the book of Revelation have nothing to do with the vast majority of Christians throughout the church’s history.  The Futurist says, Sorry, 2,000 years of believers, this is our secret book for our age, and you only get to wonder why it was in your Bible.  The Historicist says, Hey, there we are on page 23; the rest has nothing to do with us directly.  The Preterist says, It’s all fulfilled except the last part, so Revelation is pretty much a history book.

Idealism makes Revelation relevant, regardless of era or geography.  Idealism says that the book of Revelation is not a code about any single age – it is, instead, a collection of symbols that can and do relate to any era or crisis the church passes through.  There is always a “Beast” who rises to oppose us, be he Hitler, or Caesar, or Tariq ibn-Ziyad of the Moorish hordes conquering Christian Hispania.  Every age has oppression, and every age shows the evidence of God’s people enduring, and God acting to help us overcome trials and ultimately to punish those who defy the will of the Lord.  To the Idealist, “ Who is the Antichrist?”  is a meaningless question, better asked as “ What is the spirit of Antichrist?”   The Revelation is not one Christian Age – it is all Christian Ages, with the Two Witnesses of the Old and New Testaments standing as proof against evil until that final age when Christ’s Kingdom comes, unexpected as a thief, in its fulfillment.

This was the approach embraced by the renown St. Augustine … and it might surprise you to learn that it was the normal, majority approach to Revelation for over a thousand years.

CONCLUSION

Obviously, there’s a lot to say about each of those possible approaches.  That was a lot to take in, especially if you belong to a faith tradition that only discusses one of the four approaches.  Next week, I’ll take an in-depth look at the strengths and weaknesses of each one – without taking sides, since I am here to lecture on the teaching of others, not to directly teach by myself.

And so … I yield the alphabet.  Any comments and insights you have are now welcome.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx (YoYo Rez)