#110 – Putting together a new Christian worldview (part 5)

Piecing together what the previous four episodes showed us about the End Times and Christ’s second coming.

After four weeks of talking to experts on various aspects of “End Times” theology, this episode is our chance to put together many pieces of the puzzle into a coherent picture. In part, this means we have to pull apart some pieces that had been put into the wrong place, or even didn’t belong to this puzzle, and add in some new pieces that we got from those previous four episodes. This debriefing was guided in part by feedback we received from our listeners as the mini-series unfolded (so it’s a little bit of a mailbag episode too).

We talked a bit about a new theological worldview that emerged in the 20th century — “Dispensationalism” — which is responsible for the wild distortion of End Times theology within Evangelical circles today. And we contrasted that against another theological worldview — “Preterism” — which sees the highly symbolic images and events described in the Book of Revelation as having been fulfilled in the 1st century.

We also felt we had to delineate one more time the negative impact of this traumatizing and damaging form of End Times theology, to impress on the listeners why this topic was worth devoting four episodes to exploring it, and why it needs to be pushed back on.

Another question we debated: why the Book of Revelation is even in the Bible in the first place, if it’s so problematic and easily misunderstood. My point of view is that in the same way that Genesis is not a science book, Revelation is not a history book. Instead, it’s there in our Bible because the human authors thought that way, and human editors compiled the book into the canon we call Scripture. At the same time, divine inspiration could also come into play here in the same way that we suggested divine inspiration was behind the sordid story in Judges 19, 20 and 21 (Episode #98): the passage doesn’t so much give readers an accurate perspective on the Divine, but exposes the flaws of the human heart.

Both Scott and I also compared our respective personal positions on whether the world will end in a violent, divinely-orchestrated destruction, or whether we eventually meet up with some kind of cosmic higher power (alien race? God?) that helps us get our act together; and what to do with the many passages predicting Christ’s Second Coming … “riding on the clouds”.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like Episode #82, where we talk specifically about Jesus being the Jewish Messiah.

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