Monday, February 19, 2007 AD
Perhaps today!
Cross-posted, with comments enabled, at www.confessingevangelical.com. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds.
In my previous post, I looked at the loosely-drawn parallels that can be made between different religious groups - for example, Shia Muslims and various disparate groups within the church - whose outlook is dominated by a belief in the rapid betrayal of an earlier "golden age".
As I observed in that post, this can often lead to an idealistic and activist approach. After all, if a golden age existed once, then who's to say we can't make it exist again? However, these dreams of a newly-forged age of gold almost inevitably end in failure and disillusionment. This leads to another parallel, as the frustrations of those who look back to the "golden age" are sublimated into a forward-looking longing for a "messiah" who will come and set things straight.
Hence the (mainstream) Shia look for the return of the twelfth Imam. Similarly, while virtually all Christians confess, in theory, that Jesus will "come to judge the living and the dead", I'm sure there is a strong correlation between having a worldview in which the decay of church and society from an earlier state of purity is a key theme, and having the return of Christ as a vivid, central part of daily Christian experience ("Perhaps Today!"). It shouldn't be that way, but it frequently is.
This may go some way to explaining the observation made by a certain "Pirate" on the BHT the other day, concerning Southern Baptists:
In my previous post, I looked at the loosely-drawn parallels that can be made between different religious groups - for example, Shia Muslims and various disparate groups within the church - whose outlook is dominated by a belief in the rapid betrayal of an earlier "golden age".
As I observed in that post, this can often lead to an idealistic and activist approach. After all, if a golden age existed once, then who's to say we can't make it exist again? However, these dreams of a newly-forged age of gold almost inevitably end in failure and disillusionment. This leads to another parallel, as the frustrations of those who look back to the "golden age" are sublimated into a forward-looking longing for a "messiah" who will come and set things straight.
Hence the (mainstream) Shia look for the return of the twelfth Imam. Similarly, while virtually all Christians confess, in theory, that Jesus will "come to judge the living and the dead", I'm sure there is a strong correlation between having a worldview in which the decay of church and society from an earlier state of purity is a key theme, and having the return of Christ as a vivid, central part of daily Christian experience ("Perhaps Today!"). It shouldn't be that way, but it frequently is.
This may go some way to explaining the observation made by a certain "Pirate" on the BHT the other day, concerning Southern Baptists:
I oddly admire certain things about Baptists. I admire their crazy eschatology for the simple reason that at the heart of it is a belief that Jesus really could return at any minute. Honestly, if Jesus actually did return today, 95% [of] the Lutherans, Presbyterians, Catholics, Orthodox, and Anglicans in the world would be completely dumbfounded, despite being orders of magnitude more orthodox in our abstract formulations of eschatology. An actual return in our lifetimes just doesn’t fit into our outlook. Heck, there’s a whole system of theology out there explaining why it won’t be now or any time in the near future. But the Baptists would be saying “I knew you were coming soon!” That’s gotta be worth something.I think Pirate is absolutely spot-on here. We have friends from independent evangelical churches who amended the standard marriage vows to read, "Till death us do part, or the Lord returns", and if some of us think that sounds strange or "hyper-spiritual", then I suggest we're the ones with some rethinking to do about how seriously we believe in the return of Christ.
Labels: eschatology
