Eschatological Terrorism
Among many churches it is a strongly held belief that people must always be given a chance to respond to the preaching of the word. The churches I grew up in were of this persuasion. This meant that just about every service would conclude with a time to respond to the message by coming forward and praying and/or being prayed for. Quite often the message that elicited the response was a general call to "get right with God" because (and this was always tagged on even if it was not part of the message) "Jesus is coming soon." It could be any time, and if he came when I was not right I would miss the rapture and be left to face the wrath of God and the Antichrist in the horrible seven years of the Great Tribulation.
When faced with various decisions of life people sometimes ask, "What's the worst that could happen?" For me missing the rapture was the worst thing that could happen. I know of few who grew up with this teaching that have not experienced the horror of coming home fully expecting family to be there, only to find no one . . .yet signs indicating they should be (food cooking, doors unlocked, etc.). The primal fear that comes over the "rapture children" (as I call them) has few comparisons. I remember loosing our firstborn in the mall for a short time and after finding him realizing that I had not felt such panic and fear since my childhood "left behind" experiences.
Eschatology was a basic staple of the altar call, but especially the altar call of prophecy teachers. I grew up with them. When I was a kid Jack Van Impe came to my hometown of Salem, OR (youtube search the name!). He preached a full week about end-time events that were quickly rushing to their fulfillment. At the end of the Friday night sermon I vividly recall the statement that he could see no way that Jesus would not return before the end of 1972. It was 1969. People didn't walk to the altar; they ran. I was in the 7th grade and those services had a profound impact on me. I link the eschatological subject of my PhD dissertation to events like that. On that regard I'd like to say it did some good.
But it also did a lot of bad. Who of this generation has not been manipulated by the phrase, "Jesus could return before we leave this room tonight"? And who wouldn't respond to the altar after an hour and a half of hearing about how the then Soviet Union was poised to invade Israel; the Antichrist was ready to appear somewhere in Europe, even naming the names of prominent up-and-coming figures; the plans for the third temple in Jerusalem were in the finishing stages and stood ready for implementation. The only event in God's eschatological timeline between heaven and me was the rapture. The world crisis du jour was easily fit into the preacher's scenario of the end while the audience, mostly in awe, sat devouring the message as if it were from Jesus himself. Eschatology and the return of Jesus were used as a club to beat people to the altar; the Holy Spirit was not needed, fear worked much better. You may as well have put a gun to the audience's head and told them to convert or die.
From hindsight, other than the reestablishment of Israel, I cannot think of one prediction of the prophecy teachers that actually came to pass. Their record is so dismal that if it were not so serious, I would have to laugh. It is serious because I believe it has had a very detrimental effect on the preaching of the gospel over the last generation. The boy cried wolf just too many times, and people quit listening to everything he had to say.
I have been saying the above for some time, but I ran into a book the other day that was written by someone who said it long before me. The book was written by Dwight Wilson (great first name!) an Assemblies of God minister and former professor of history at Bethany University in Santa Cruz, CA. The book is entitled Armageddon Now! The Premillennial Response to Russia and Israel Since 1917 (Baker 1979, reprinted in 1991, but available free online here). When I first saw the title I thought, "Oh, just another crazy screaming that the end is near." I like to collect books of this genre because unlike many, I don't want to forget what these preachers have said in the past. But this book was entirely not what I expected. The book is about how the Bolshevik Revolution, leading to the rise of modern Russia, and the Balfour Declaration, which led to the return of Jews to Israel, had been exploited by prophecy teachers as a tool of evangelism to the detriment of the gospel message. Wilson was more of a prophet than any of those he wrote about. In the final chapter of the book he gives one of the most eloquent synopses of the failure of prophecy teachers that I have ever read:
"The premillenarians' credibility is at a low ebb because they succumbed to the temptation to explain every conceivably possible prophetic fulfillment for the sake of the prime objective: evangelism. The doomsday cry of "Armageddon Now!" was an effective evangelistic tool of terror to scare people into making a decision for Christ and to stimulate believers to "witness for Christ" to add stars to their heavenly crowns before it was everlastingly too late. Voices of moderation were less likely to find mass appeal. Times of crisis tend to produce feelings of insecurity in the general populace as a matter of course. The evangelical message was found to be most effective when couched in terms of confident, dogmatic overstatements, rather than a carefully reasoned moderate theology that offered indefinite conclusions. The success of such evangelistic approaches was to the premillenarians well worth the risk of false identifications in the interpretation of prophecy. It would be unfair to accuse any one preacher or writer of such insincerity; they were True Believers (sometimes caught up in the snare of their overtly zealous rhetoric), but, nevertheless, the result as a whole has been gross opportunism" (p. 218).
In other words, when it came to getting people saved the ends always justified the means.
2 Peter 3:3-4 warns, "that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and indulging their own lusts and saying, 'Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!'" Scoffers exist today, but I would suggest that many of the scoffers in our own day were created by the dogmatism of the prophecy teachers in the last generation.
With this I end. I grew up being taught that I should live every day as though Jesus would return tomorrow. I just cannot live that way. I tell my students to live as though you are going to die of old age. Look to the path that God has set you on and work toward the long-term goals to which that path leads. If Jesus comes in the middle of that time (an event I still believe in), he will be pleased. Doing the work of God takes time and people who believe they only have until tomorrow will not do it. The kingdom parables of Mathew 25 all speak to this effect. As you walk the path take your oil, multiply your talent, and show God's kingdom to all you encounter.