A historian takes us on a journey through two millennia of evolution of Christian understanding about “the End Times”.

In last week’s episode, we compared two pictures of “the End Times”: one drawn by modern day Evangelicals, and the other drawn by Jesus while he was teaching in Palestine. And we found that those two pictures look completely different; the modern Evangelical picture always includes four main ingredients which Jesus’ picture just does not have:

• the Rapture
• the mark of the Beast
• a personified Antichrist
• complete global destruction (especially in America)

I fully expect push back on that claim, so let me be clear: there are elements in the Gospel accounts which can be manipulated and distorted to resemble those four ingredients (John’s Book of Revelation is a different story). And the first two of those are the ones that are the biggest causes of anxiety and fear in people who suffer psychological trauma from the Left Behind books/movies (we’ll explore that psychological perspective next week).

We wanted to understand how/why/when that understanding of “the End Times” changed so much in the two thousand years since Jesus. So we brought in Dr. Gord Heath, a Professor of Christian History, to take us on a journey through church time. At each important stop along that journey, I keep asking him: “is this where they start talking about the Rapture or the mark of the Beast?” [Remember: #1 and #2 in my list above, and which cause the most psychological trauma] And the same answer keeps coming up: “well …. no, actually.” Not until we get to the 19^th and 20^th centuries do we find that those four elements are brought in by a strand of thinking referred to as Dispensationalism. It’s completely a modern invention (when we’re measuring on a time-frame stretching 2000 years)!?

We also found out last week that this Dispensationalist-invented version of “the End Times” is especially prevalent in the Evangelical world, Pentecostals being the strongest proponents of all. The only reason why I single this group out so starkly is that when I asked our expert historian to try to look over the horizon and speculate how this End Times thinking might change over the NEXT few hundred years, he also said that this theology is a “critical mark” of a Pentecostal thinking which has been on a dramatic growth streak in the southern hemisphere (Latin America, Africa, and Asia). In fact, he said they were the fastest growing strand of Christianity, and are estimated to reach over a billion across the globe by 2050! And here’s his ominous warning: that volatile mixture of exploding numbers of people looking forward to a global Apocalyptic Ending are in many cases situated … on the borders of many Islamic countries. You better buckle up your seat-belt, folks!?

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like the other one we did a year ago on “the End of the World” …. episode #33, or one we did previously with Dr. Heath, looking at the evolution of the Evangelical world and how it morphed away from Jesus’s Gospel Message … episode #39.

Find more information about Dr. Gord Heath at his faculty web-page.

Episode image by Myriams-Fotos of Pixabay.

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