It was late July in New Jersey. By early evening, the day’s stifling heat and humidity had given way to a soft breeze. For many twelve year old boys, this was the golden hour, a time to play barefoot wiffle ball or hide-and-seek. For me, it was time for our family’s bi-weekly pilgrimage to the Summer Bible Conference at the Gospel Church.
Inside the church building, the crisp air conditioning, mauve carpets and polished pews bespoke comfortable suburban affluence. This week’s preacher was a Conference regular, Dr. David Breese, an imposing, beefy man with a shock of dark Grecian-formula hair, a booming bosso voice, and a vocabulary stocked with ten-dollar words. Anticipation and delight of a sort that must once have been reserved for Gnostic initiates crackled through the room.
During the ensuing hour, Dr. Breese unraveled the twin mysteries of the Bible and geopolitics. Daniel’s sixty weeks, the Beast of John’s Apocalypse, the State of Israel, Godless Soviet Communism, the United Nations’ designs on world government, the idolatry of Roman Catholicism and the apostasy of the World Council of Churches, the European Community’s secret reconstitution of the Roman Empire, nuclear conflagration, hippies and rock and roll and drugs and sex, the Four Horseman and Armageddon – all of it made sense in a grand narrative of consummation and judgment. We were the terrifyingly privileged generation chosen to observe so many of scripture’s prophesied signs line up before the Rapture of those who had entrusted themselves to Christ. It was spectacular religious theater, a Key to Understanding Everything, a palpable sense of heightened reality unavailable to the lost mass of ordinary humanity.
Dr. Breese’s presence, vocabulary, and knowledge of world affairs appealed to my sheltered, understimulated pre-teen lawyer’s mind in the making. I drank it up. I was certain about how the world would end, that it would be soon, and that the great mass of human endeavor was a blind, distracting charade.
But my gut, even then, told me something was wrong. First there were discrepancies and mistakes – and even what seemed to be misrepesentations – in the various “end times” presentations I heard through my teen years. Things like the “ten nations of the European Union, which clearly correspond to the ‘ten horns’ of Daniel” – when there were already twelve EU nations and more poised to join. Or the ways in which Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Iran seemed to play interchangeable roles as the “Gog” and “Magog” of Ezekiel, depending on what was in the news at the moment. Or the venom towards Roman Catholics, who seemed to say many of the same things about Jesus we were saying. Or, perhaps most vexing of all, the way in which our “Christian Nation,” the United States, the most powerful nation in the world, seemed to play no part at all in consummation of history.
On the heels of these technical difficulties followed deeper existential concerns. If we really believed the Rapture and Tribulation were immanent as the preachers claimed, why did most of our congregation wake up and head to ordinary, comfortable, middle-class jobs in the morning? Why did we continue “marrying and giving in marriage” if the end was near? Why did we attend school, watch TV, play baseball, vote for Nixon and Ford, fight communists, or build new church buildings in New Jersey? If the pretribulation-Dispensational chiliastic view of history were correct, then life was meaningless except as an effort to save others from the swiftly coming horrors of judgment, Tribulation, and Hell. And worst of all — what if I wasn’t really among the saved few after all? What if my conversion wasn’t really good enough? What if my doubts about this picture of the “end times” signalled a basic failure of faith?