It was late July in New Jersey. By early evening, the day\u2019s stifling heat and humidity had given way to a soft breeze.\u00a0\u00a0 For many twelve year old boys, this was the golden hour, a time to play barefoot wiffle ball or hide-and-seek.\u00a0 For me, it was time for our family\u2019s bi-weekly pilgrimage to the Summer Bible Conference at\u00a0the Gospel Church.<\/p>\n
Inside the church building, the crisp air conditioning, mauve carpets and polished pews bespoke comfortable suburban affluence.\u00a0 This week\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Anticipation and delight of a sort that must once have been reserved for Gnostic initiates crackled through the room.\u00a0<\/p>\n
During the ensuing hour, Dr. Breese unraveled the twin mysteries of the Bible and geopolitics.\u00a0 Daniel\u2019s sixty weeks, the Beast of John\u2019s Apocalypse, the State of Israel, Godless Soviet Communism, the United Nations\u2019 designs on world government, the idolatry of Roman Catholicism and the apostasy of the World Council of Churches, the European Community\u2019s secret reconstitution of the Roman Empire, nuclear conflagration, hippies and rock and roll and drugs and sex, the Four Horseman and Armageddon \u2013 all of it made sense <\/em>in a grand narrative of consummation and judgment.\u00a0 We were the terrifyingly privileged generation chosen to observe so many of scripture\u2019s prophesied signs line up before the Rapture of those who had entrusted themselves to Christ.\u00a0 It was spectacular religious theater, a Key to Understanding Everything, a palpable sense of heightened reality unavailable to the lost mass of ordinary humanity.<\/p>\n Dr. Breese\u2019s presence, vocabulary, and knowledge of world affairs appealed to my sheltered, understimulated pre-teen lawyer\u2019s mind in the making.\u00a0 I drank it up.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n But my gut, even then, told me something was wrong.\u00a0 First there were discrepancies and mistakes \u2013 and even what seemed to be misrepesentations \u2013 in the various \u201cend times\u201d presentations I heard through my teen years.\u00a0 Things like the \u201cten nations of the European Union, which clearly correspond to the \u2018ten horns\u2019 of Daniel\u201d \u2013 when there were already twelve EU nations and more poised to join.\u00a0 Or the ways in which Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Iran seemed to play interchangeable roles as the \u201cGog\u201d and \u201cMagog\u201d of Ezekiel, depending on what was in the news at the moment.\u00a0 Or the venom towards Roman Catholics, who seemed to say many of the same things about Jesus we were saying.\u00a0 Or, perhaps most vexing of all, the way in which our \u201cChristian Nation,\u201d the United States, the most powerful nation in the world, seemed to play no part at all in consummation of history.<\/p>\n On the heels of these technical difficulties followed deeper existential concerns.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Why did we continue \u201cmarrying and giving in marriage\u201d if the end was near?\u00a0 Why did we attend school, watch TV, play baseball, vote for Nixon and Ford, fight communists, or build new church buildings in New Jersey?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And worst of all — what if I wasn’t really among the saved few after all?\u00a0 What if my conversion wasn’t really good enough?\u00a0 What if my doubts about this picture of the “end times” signalled a basic failure of faith?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was late July in New Jersey. By early evening, the day\u2019s stifling heat and humidity had given way to a soft breeze.\u00a0\u00a0 For many twelve year old boys, this was the golden hour, a time to play barefoot wiffle ball or hide-and-seek.\u00a0 For me, it was time for our family\u2019s bi-weekly pilgrimage to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-uS","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1914\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}