Category: Spirituality

For good measure, here is another short essay by Bauckham, on “Heaven.”

In another of these essays I wrote about the decline in belief in life after death in contemporary western society, and suggested some reasons for this. I did not then give much attention to the question: what is it that Christians hope for after death?

To think about heaven we need imaginative pictures. We cannot expect to know in literal terms what heaven will be like. Attempts to describe it literally are usually banal, and easily provoke the response: why should I want that? Who wants to spend eternity sitting on a cloud playing a harp? Heaven must be inconceivably different from our experience here and now. So we need pictures that evoke a sense of something that far transcends this life.

The Bible and the Christian tradition offer us three main pictures of what heaven is all about. If we put these three symbols together, we shall get quite a good idea of what the Christian understanding of human destiny is.

The first is the hope of the vision of God. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” said Jesus, “for they shall see God.” God, whom we now know so imperfectly, we shall then experience directly. We shall enjoy him as the ultimate fulfilment of all human desires. We shall worship him with the kind of rapturous attention that a powerful experience of beauty or love can evoke in us in this life. Because God is infinite and we were made to enjoy him, heaven’s joys will never be exhausted. We shall find eternal fulfilment in God.

But heaven will not be just me and God. God made us to find fulfilment in each other as well as in him. So the second picture of heaven is the city of God, a perfect human society, in which all our dreams of really adequate human relationships will be fulfilled.

The book of Revelation, in its great vision of the New Jerusalem, which is the Bible’s fullest account of heaven, combines these two symbols in a picture of the city in which God himself will dwell with humanity. It will be a perfect human society because it will be centred on God.

But God’s purposes reach beyond even a human society finding its true fulfilment in him. They extend to God’s whole creation. Our third picture of heaven, the kingdom of God, is the broadest. It looks for the time when God’s rule over his whole creation will finally be perfected. All evil, suffering and death will be overcome. God’s world will be as he has always intended it to be. And when all the evils and imperfections hat obscure God in the world as it now is have been transcended, then all creation will perfectly reflect God’s glory. As the apostle Paul put it, “God will be all in all.”

So the Christian hope is that the whole of God’s creation will find its eternal destiny in God. Although, up till now, I’ve used the term “heaven” to refer to the

Christian hope of life after death, because this is usually done, we can now see that this term can be rather misleading. It might suggest that our destiny is to leave the world behind and join God in some otherworldly, purely spiritual heaven. The Christian hope is much better than that. It is for the union of heaven and earth, for God’s transforming presence throughout his creation.

All this should widen our horizons beyond the narrowly individual terms in which we so often think of heaven. Our hope as individuals is to share in God’s great triumph over all evil and death, to have a place in his cosmic purpose for the whole creation, to find our own fulfilment in God in the context of a world centred on God and transfigured by his glory. But, since this is what heaven is all about, of course we cannot hope to share that destiny unless we place ourselves now, as individuals, within God’s purpose for his world. To enjoy the vision of God then we must begin to centre our lives on God now. To enter the city of God then, we must seek his will for human society now. To enter the kingdom of God then, we must place ourselves under God’s rule now and seek his kingdom in all reality.

Richard Bauckham is one of the biblical scholars and theologians for whom I have the foremost respect.  Perusing his nice personal website during lunch today, I found this little essay of his on Hell.  It is excellent and I reproduce it below.

Early in 1996 a report by the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England was published. It was a book (called The Mystery of Salvation) on the Christian understanding of salvation. The coverage in the national press was largely confined to one paragraph within this book of over 200 pages: the paragraph about hell. Typical headlines in the press were: “The Church’s empty hell” – “Church elders pour cold water on hellfire and damnation” – “We believe in Hell, says the Church (but without the flames).”

This was a surprise to the authors of the report, who had thought the paragraph about hell fairly uncontroversial. In any case it was a very small part of their report, which dealt at length with many other more topical issues, such as feminism and the church’s attitude to non-Christian faiths, which they would not have been surprised to find proving controversial.

Much of the report is a sustained attempt to make the Christian understanding of salvation relevant and meaningful in the context of contemporary British life and society. The national media were not interested in this. For them, salvation means escaping hellfire when you die, and so the only point worth noticing in the report was the suggestion that the church was abandoning its traditional picture of fire and brimstone as the fate of the damned.

In fact the report wants hell to be taken seriously. But hell is nothing more than not attaining salvation. It cannot be understood as something positive in itself. It only makes sense as a negative: not being saved. Salvation is not avoiding hell; rather hell is missing out on salvation. So hell cannot be understood without a fully Christian and thoroughly positive understanding of salvation.

There are many Christian ways of describing salvation. One way the Doctrine Commission report adopts is: Salvation is experiencing the One who is the Source and Goal of all things as the Source and Goal of one’s own being and living. Salvation means, in the last resort, finding one’s fulfilment as a human being in God. Human beings are made to find fulfilment ultimately only in God. Salvation, both now and after death, is in knowing God.

If this is the destiny for which God has made us, hell cannot be a kind of parallel, alternative destiny. Hell is the result of refusing the one destiny for which we were made and the only way in which human life can find eternal fulfilment. It is a real and terrible possibility that human beings can refuse the destiny for which they were made. This belongs to the utter seriousness with which God takes the freedom he has given us.

We cannot say dogmatically whether in the end anyone will choose hell. But hell is an absolutely serious possibility of which people must be warned. No one should suppose that while refusing to know God now, they can always change their mind later. As in all areas of life, our choices now may limit the choices we can make in the future.

The New Testament uses a variety of different pictures to describe hell: fire is one of them, destruction another, exclusion from the presence of God another. Burning in fire for eternity is the picture which got fixed in much traditional teaching about hell as though it were a literal description. The New Testament does not require us to think of hell in this way. Hell is not an eternal chamber of horrors across the way from heaven. Hell is the fate of those who reject God’s love. God’s love cannot compel them to find their fulfilment in God, but there is no other way they can find fulfilment. They exclude themselves from the Source of all being and life.

The Rob Bell dust up has caused me to think quite a bit about theological method.  There was a comment I notice on one blog that suggested Bell should be “excommunicated.”  In stark contrast, another blogger wondered why anyone but the elders in Bell’s own church should have anything to say about the matter.  Much of the commentary has focused on whether Bell’s book is “orthodox.”  Who’s to say?  I suspect that this question, more than anything else, is what is causing such hand-wringing in evangelical circles.

I have many books on my shelves specifically about the sources of doctrine, none of which completely agree with each other.  Every systematic theology begins with a prolegomena on method and sources.  I have many of these on my shelves as well — some of which are heavy enough to kill a horse — and none of these fully agree with each other either.

For example, I have been reading Cardinal Newman’s Essay on the Development of Doctrine, which is a splendid argument for the historic consistency of Catholic doctrine rooted in scripture and the Western Christian tradition.  But then I have an alternate version of the nature and scope of the early tradition in some Eastern Orthodox texts.  On the side of the Reformation, I have Barth’s Church Dogmatics, which roots authority in contemporaneously received revelation; Bloesch’s Essentials of Evangelical Theology, which takes a more stable view of scripture than Barth while retaining Barth’s (and the Reformers’) emphasis on subjective certainty; Trevor Hart’s Faith Thinking, which includes the Christian tradition, broadly construed, as a touchstone, but not an irreformable source; Braaten and Jenson’s Christian Dogmatics, which views both scripture and tradition through the eyes of Luther and Barth; Stanley Grenz’s Theology for the Community of God, which pushes scripture and tradition a little further than Bloesch or Hart but places lots of weight on community; sources touting “paleo-orthodoxy” and the “Vincentian Canon” from the likes of Thomes Oden and Gerald Bray; and Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology, which locates final authority solely in a totally inerrant Biblical text (without really explaining, incidentally, the tradition that bequeathed to us the scriptural canon).  And these are just a sample.  I have many more, and there are yet many others I don’t own or haven’t read.

If you were to ask the authors of these volumes whether Bell’s book is “orthodox,” they would not agree with each other.  Some of them (Bloesch and Hart) have written things about eschatology that sound very much like what Bell has written.  Some (Catholic and Orthodox) represent traditions in which there are a variety of contemporary opinions on eschatology, often with equally vituperative accusations flying back and forth.  Some would cite “church tradition” to condemn Bell’s views while at the same time rejecting things that others think are equally “traditional” and equally represented in early Church teaching (such as the primacy of the Roman Bishop, for example, or Mary’s perpetual virginity, or the real presence in the Eucharist).  Some would condemn Bell supposedly solely based on what the Bible teaches, while others might uphold his orthodoxy on exactly the same grounds.

All of this is existentially unsettling for those of us in the evangelical tradition because the truth is that we do not have a tradition capable of sustained reflection on the sorts of questions Bell raises.  We might argue solely from scripture, but scripture can be read in various ways — all of which reflect some tradition of reading.  We might appeal to a presumed consensus tradition, but we can’t explain why we choose some portions of tradition as authoritative and consensual and reject others.  We can appeal to a broad sense of “orthodoxy” rooted in scripture, the early Church, the Reformation, and pietism — this is Richard Mouw’s approach — but that tends to make the term a wax nose.

I’m not sure where this leaves me personally.  I’m realizing that theological method really is one of the main things I’ve been interested in all along.  As far as I can tell, at some point you resonate with and stake a claim to a certain sort of method and go with it as best you can.  It seems to me that this is a place at which each person must rely on the Holy Spirit, trust in God’s mercy, and remain generous with others.  But it seeming that way to me, of course, already presupposes a certain sort of method!  And that, I think, is our real dilemma.

As [Jesus] approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes.  The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”  (Luke 19: 41-44)

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.  (Matt. 23:37)

Much of the conversation about judgment and justice in recent weeks has focused on the question whether God “gets what He wants.”  We know that God “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”  (1 Tim. 2:4).  God’s desire for us, His pursuit of us despite our rebellion, is a pervasive theme in scripture.  It’s something we need to recall again and again and again.  It is why, I think, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem in the story of the Triumphal Entry.

A pastor at my former Church would preach on this passage on Palm Sunday, but he referred to it as the Tragic Entry.  I think he was right.  Jesus foresees destruction for God’s beloved city — a destruction accomplished by the Roman Emperor Titus not too long after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  And Jesus weeps because the “abode of peace” (Jeru-Salem) failed to recognize the Prince of Peace.

Did God “want” the Romans to destroy Jerusalem?  Not according to Jesus.  He wanted to surround the city with protection.  But they “were not willing,” and eventually they were destroyed.

An easy lesson we could draw from this episode is that God allows us the freedom to choose what we want.  Do we want God’s protection or do we choose a path that leads to destruction? 

This might be a bit too easy.  Left to our own choices, would any of us choose God?  That possibility is something that the Apostle Paul, reflecting on the Jewish scriptures, seemed to consider impossible:

There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands,
no one who seeks God.  (Rom. 3:11)

So does God get what He wants, or does He let us choose for ourselves even if it is not what He wants?  The right answer seems to be “Yes” on both counts.  The Biblical witness emphasizes both God’s sovereignty and human free will.  It offers no systematic harmonization of this tension.

I suspect the scriptures allow this tension to lie open in part because the question of what God “wants” or of what any human person or human culture “wants” is irreducibly complex.  Most of us are unable even to penetrate the deepest recesses of our own desires.  Very often, we don’t know what we “want,” or we deceive ourselves about what we want to think we “want.” 

We know that God “wants all people to be saved,” but we also know that this is not all God wants.  He wants people to be free.  He wants justice.  He wants to expose and strip away evil until the good alone remains.  He wants the fellowship of His perichoretic love, unimposed and uncoerced, to be “all in all.”  God will get what He wants, but what He wants contains more than one element.  The entirety of it can’t be isolated to one passage from scripture — perhaps it can’t ultimately be isolated at all.

Roger Olson of Baylor University’s Truett Seminary weighs in on Love Wins.  I don’t agree with everything Olson has ever said, but I respect him as a moderate voice, and like him I identify as a “progressive evangelical.”  His comments on this are correct, I think.  I reproduce his post in full below. 

I finally received my copy [of Love Wins] yesterday.  (Sometimes I think mail has to arrive in my city by Pony Express!)  I read it last evening and this morning. 

First, it is obvious to me that early critics of the book were wrong and they owe Bell an apology.  Nowhere in the book does Bell affirm universalism.  (Let’s not quibble about what “universalism” means; we all know what the critics meant–that Bell was saying everyone will eventually be saved, go to heaven, and leave hell empty. He nowhere says that.)

Bell does say it is okay to “long for” universal salvation.  So did Pope John Paul II!  I’m sure some critics who jumped the gun and attacked Bell for promoting universalism without reading the book will come back around and use that to support what they said.  But they are not the same.  To long for universal salvation is not to affirm it.

On page 114 Bell says “So will those who have said no to God’s love in this life continue to say no in the next?  Love demands freedom, and freedom provides that possibility.  People take that option now, and we can assume it will be taken in the future.”  And nowhere else in the book does he say that eventually everyone will say yes to God’s love.  His emphasis on freedom as necessary for love requires him not to say that.  Can he hope for it?  Who is to say he can’t?

The point is–universalism is the assertion that eventually all will be saved.  Nowhere does Bell assert that.

Bell continues in that chapter to say that hell is getting what we want.  This is simply another way of saying “Hell’s door is locked on the inside”–something I think C. S. Lewis said.  (Or it may be someone’s summary of Lewis’ The Great Divorce.)

Chapter 6 is about what is usually called inclusivism–that salvation through Jesus Christ is not limited to those who hear his name.  (I’ve discussed problems with restrictivism here before.)  I find nothing in that chapter that Billy Graham has not said.  (Go to youtube.com and look up Graham’s responses to questions from Robert Schuler.)

While reading Love Wins I kept thinking “This sounds like C. S. Lewis!”  In his Acknowledgments Bell thanks someone for “suggesting when I was in high school that I read C. S. Lewis.”

One thing I disagree with in Love Wins (and I disagreed with it in The Shack) is Bell’s affirmation that God has already forgiven everyone through Jesus Christ.  I believe God has provided everything for forgiveness, but forgiveness depends on acceptance of God’s provision.  I don’t know how to reconcile universal forgiveness with Jesus’ statement that the Father will not forgive those who refuse to forgive.  Of course, if “forgive” means “forgive everyone of the guilt of original sin,” then I can accept universal forgiveness (which is how I and most Arminians interpret Romans 5).  But I don’t think that’s what Bell means.

Those who accused Bell of teaching universalism based on promotion of Love Wins jumped the gun and owe him an apology.  I won’t hold my breath.

Vilifying anyone based on what you think they are going to say is clear evidence of bad judgment; it breaks all the rules of civil discourse.  It is part of what I mean by “evangelicals behaving badly” and illustrates what I call the fundamentalist ethos.

Perhaps the time has come for moderate and progressive evangelicals to say “Farewell neo-fundamentalists.”  There’s no point in prolonging the long kiss goodbye.  We are two movements now–fundamentalists and neo-fundamentalists, on the one hand, and moderate to progressive evangelicals on the other hand.  This painful parting of the ways happened between the movement fundamentalists and the new evangelicals in the 1940s and 1950s.  It is happening again (among people who call themselves “evangelicals”) and the time has come to acknowledge it as, for all practical purposes, done.  It’s just a matter now of dividing the property.

So why have I approached my “review” of Rob Bell’s Love Wins with these various stories of my own faith journey?  These stories illustrate, I think, some of the common baggage of Evangelical-Fundamentalism.  Books like Bell’s are attractive because they encourage those of us who carry these bags to put them down and rest.

The religion of Evangelical-Fundamentalism, as I experienced it, was based on Rigid Certainty, Fear, Performance, and Defensiveness.  In this context, questions such as “how could God condemn Ghandi or Anne Franke to Hell” or “how can our little group be the only ones to have gotten all this stuff about heaven and hell right” were basic existential threats.  The answers on offer usually boiled down to this:  “be thankful you’re one of the saved ones, stop asking questions, and keep performing if you want to stay in the club.”

For many evangelicals of my generation (mid-40’s), as well as for younger evangelicals who grew up in our “seeker-friendly” but theologically fundamentalist churches, a book like Love Wins resonates.  As did Brian McLaren before him, Bell asks the questions we are afraid to ask, voices the doubts we dare not speak, and for once gives something more than the usual Four-Spiritual-Laws-approved talking points.  When someone who has had experiences like mine reads a book like this for the first time, the reaction often is visceral — “I’m not alone!”  “There really is more to this!”  When I first read Brian McLaren’s “A New Kind of Christian” — a similar sort of category-busting book — I cried.  In public.  On an airplane.  During a business trip.

In this sense, I am glad for Love Wins. 

But why the qualification — “in this sense?”  It takes a time, distance, maturity and wisdom that I haven’t yet mastered to understand that a reaction to an extreme usually starts as an over-reaction.

This is true even concerning the stories we tell ourselves about our own experiences.  I narrated a few vignettes that illustrate the far edges of an unbalanced theology and church praxis.  If the only choices were between Rob Bell and the Left Behind novels, I’d choose Bell in a heartbeat.  However, I can also tell lots of stories about good lessons learned, about parents who loved me and softened some of those hard edges, about the priceless gift of education at a broadly evangelical college, about people freed from addictions, about brothers and sisters in Christ meeting each other’s needs, about leading worship with joy.  Growth is the wisdom gained from all the bad and all the good together.

The soteriology and eschatology I once imbibed, that which produces a spirituality and missiology of Certainty, Fear, Peformance, and Defensiveness, was quite mistaken.  But this doesn’t mean all knowledge, warnings, and standards are bad.  If it is mistaken, even arrogant, to claim Ghandi and Anne Franke and so on must be in Hell — and it is — it is equally mistaken, even arrogant, to shy away from the reality of God’s final judgment. If it is mistaken, even arrogant, to claim certainty about the ontology of Hell — and it is — it is equally mistaken, even arrogant, to deny the finality of God’s final judgment.

Love does indeed win because the last word is God’s and God is love.  Love and justice are not two sides of a coin but rather are seamless perfections of the one ousia of the Triune God.  God will be “all in all,” love and justice will be one, and all the hope of goodness will be realized in the finality of God’s judgment.  The final judgment is an essential part of our hope even though it paradoxically represents the cessation of hope for persons subjected to the “No” of judgment, because the “hope” of sin and evil ultimately is a violent “No” to grace and peace.

Flags from over twenty different countries lined the church steps and snapped in the crisp autumn breeze.  A display of African spears and hand drums graced the atrium.   A preacher wearing a jacket screen printed with an image of the globe strode to the pulpit.  It was time again for the annual missions conference.

We were treated to exciting stories of sometimes dangerous work in exotic places, where thousands of tribes people were coming to Christ.  There were charts and statistics and terms like “10-40 Window” and “people group.”  These were marshalled to support the electric claim that in this generation the task of world evangelization could be completed, if only we would pray and give and go.  The completion of that task would speed the return of Christ:  “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.”  (Matt. 24:14).

But Christ could not yet return because there were people groups who had not yet heard the gospel.  Without hearing the gospel, these groups were “lost” — that is, bound for Hell.  And until they heard the gospel, the prophecy of Matthew 24 would remain unfulfilled.  Both the souls of these “unreached people groups” and the timing of Christ’s return therefore urgently depended on us.

After these missions conferences, most of us would pray, for a while; some would give, many generously; and here and there, a few would go.  Occasionally, someone I knew would abruptly quit his or her job and head off to the mission field.

I prayed, and I gave (though not as generously as I ought), but I never went.  And because I never went, I knew that I was a second-class Christian, at best.  I had graduated law school with honors, I had gotten married to a wonderful Christian woman, I was working at a large corporate law firm, I was generally honest and free of obvious sins, I was active in every Church committee imaginable — including chairing the committee that put on the annual missions conference — but, I knew, none of it was adequate.  Millions upon millions of unreached people were dying every day, and I was fiddling while they burned. 

Only occasionally did we glimpse the difficult reality of the actual mission field.  There were many stories of disappointment, failure and heartbreak, and very few of triumph, when the conversation turned to real people and real families who went.  Some came back psychologically spent and broken.  Some persevered. 

As I participated in the missions conference year after year, the world both changed and remained the same.  The Church, in some parts of Africa and South America, really did grow explosively, and began to take on an indigenous second-generation quality, warts and all.  In other places, such as China and the Arab world, progress remained painfully slow.  Throughout much of the world, poverty, war, disease and injustice continued to claim countless millions of lives.  One thing became perplexing and obvious:  God seemed to have purposes and timetables, for individual missionaries, peoples, nations, and the parousia, that the missions conference couldn’t handle.  Somehow, I felt, there must be a better way to think about God’s mission and our role in it.

For a serious Evangelical kid in the 1980’s, Youth Group was the setting that mattered.  We met every Friday night in the dusty church gym.  Those were good times in so many ways — wholesome friends, volleyball, a space free of drugs and other evils that were already beginning to consume kids in the high schools.

Our youth pastor at the time, Pastor Knutsen, was an intense man who wore a bad hairpiece and led worship choruses using a banjo.  He often talked in gruesome detail about his multiple surgeries for some obscure digestive tract ailment.  And he literally scared the Hell out of me. 

Pastor K had been deeply influenced by Charles Finney.  I doubt that he knew this.  He was of course not an immediate disciple of Finney, who preached during the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century.  But Pastor K often echoed Finney’s notion of true versus false repentance.  If your life wasn’t right, Pastor K said, then you probably have not really surrendered it to Christ.  Christ is savior and Lord.  If Christ is really your Lord, you will not think the wrong things, dwell on lust, make out, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or enjoy worldly entertainments.  If Christ is really your Lord, you will want to serve him in missions and evangelism, and you will read your Bible and believe whatever it says.  If Christ is really your Lord, you will defend your faith against all the onslaughts of the world, and particularly against false liberal Christians.

Being a sensitive and introspective person, it was not hard for me to find ways in which I had failed to live up to Pastor K’s standards, no matter how hard I tried.  And I tried hard.  I only listened to Christian music.  I openly shared my faith in school.  I argued with my science teachers against evolution (I vividly recall one such argument about the lack of mutations in fruit flies).  I didn’t drink or smoke.  I was sexually utterly naive.

But there was always something.  Once in my Senior year in high school I decided to go fishing instead of attending the evening service at church.  Here it was:  I had failed again to live up to perfection, and so I probably was not really saved.  As a sort of penance, after I got home from fishing I read through the entire book of Job and wrote up an amazingly complex, and if I recall it correctly, quite brilliant outline of the text. 

Since certainty was eluding me based on my conduct, just about every time there was an altar call, I responded, even if only quietly “in my heart.”  And there were many, many altar calls.

Part way through high school, a new young pastor, Pastor John, took over Pastor K’s role as youth director.  Pastor John’s soteriology (of course I didn’t know that word then) was rather different than Pastor K’s.  At the time, the so-called “Lordship Salvation” controversy was raging through Evangelical-Fundamentalism.  Pastor John went to the leading “Free Grace” seminary, which taught that so-called “Lordship Salvation” was really a diabiolical theology of salvation by works.

Sometimes I found Pastor John’s altar calls soothing — I didn’t have to worry about perfection after all!  But usually I found myself on the horns of a dilemma:  either Pastor K or Pastor John was right, I reasoned.  If I chose the wrong one, I’d be damned.  Either I would not work hard enough to justify the claim that Jesus really was my Lord, or I would try to earn my salvation through works and thereby forfeit salvation by grace alone.

This was torture.  I became highly attuned to the nuances in the altar calls of various preachers who would visit our church or who I would hear on the radio or at Christian rock concerts, and I would respond accordingly, so as to cover all the bases.  My obsessive-compulsive personality grabbed on to this impossible conundrum, and I flagellated myself with it day and night, often resulting in very deep and very dark nights of the soul. 

I was rewarded by our system — I was a very, very good kid, President of the Youth Group, chaste boyfriend of the prettiest girl in church, a model for the parents of wayward sons and daughters.  But internally, most of the time, I was dying, guilt-ridden, confused, and profoundly insecure.

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?