Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Leaving Behind "Left Behind"




Leaving Behind “Left Behind”

by Roger Olson
[Illustrations, links, videos added by R.E. Slater]
October 15, 2014

I haven’t seen the new movie starring Nicholas Cage and don’t intend to, so this is not a movie review. Instead, I intend to respond to the whole phenomenon of what I call “rapture fever” that has gripped segments of American society for the past fifty years.

I grew up in a home and church that fervently believed in the “rapture”—the premillennial, pre-tribulational, departure of God’s true people from the earth by Christ to be with him in Paradise during a seven year period of the wrath of God poured out on the earth and the rise and domination of the “Antichrist.” Most of the people in my home church and denomination owned a Scofield Reference Bible whose footnotes included this eschatological vision. Many also owned books by Clarence Larkin, a major promoter of it. I remember being taken to “Prophecy Conferences” where Larkin’s “biblical timelines” ending with the rapture, the tribulation, and the millennial reign of Christ on earth were posted up around the auditorium or sanctuary. (This was before overhead projectors [to say nothing of PowerPoint]!)

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A bible timeline by Clarence Larkin from his book, Dispensational Truth

We were caught up in rapture fever long before ninety-five percent of Americans knew what “rapture” meant (in this sense). I remember asking God to “tarry longer” (postpone the rapture) until I could get married and enjoy sex. Every boy in every similar church did the same! I heard numerous sermons and Sunday School lessons about the “imminent return of the Lord” which, in our context, always meant the imminence of the rapture that would come “like a thief in the night.” The point was that we should be ready at all times, because even carnal Christians were likely to be “left behind” to endure the horrors of the “Great Tribulation.”

Jesus Returns for His Holy Church

This belief (which we considered [certain] knowledge) was our secret; it belonged to us. We knew that attempting to explain it to non-Christians (including nominal Christian church members of “mainline churches”) was like throwing pearls before swine. They would never be able to understand it and they would scoff at it.

Then came the Cuban Missile Crisis, talk of a “European Union” and a single world government and currency, and technologies that would make placing the “mark of the beast” on people’s forearms or foreheads invisible to all but those with that technology. And, of course, Israel’s Six-Day War. How well I remember watching television during those frightening years of the 1960s and thinking of the imminent rapture. I didn’t enter a movie theater until I was twenty because my spiritual mentors warned me that people in movie theaters would be left behind when Jesus returned to gather his true and faithful people to himself to escape the Tribulation.


Seeds of doubt about the rapture were planted in my mind by a book that was supposed to offer biblical and theological support for it—Things to Come by dispensationalist theologian Dwight Pentecost. I read it when I was nineteen or twenty and sensed something was wrong. Why would it take hundreds of pages of convoluted exegesis and argument to establish something so simple? I thought the book’s case for the “secret rapture” was weak and yet it was supposed to be the most scholarly case for it yet published!

1970 saw the publication of the book that took our arcane doctrine of the rapture public: The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. This was the height of the Jesus People Movement, too, and nearly all Jesus People believed fervently in the rapture. I remember wondering if it was really a good idea to publish a popular book for public consumption about the rapture. It made me uneasy.

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For $4.95 you too can know the Prophetic End Times of Mankind

1971/1972 saw two events where I was present at Ground Zero (or nearly so) (of the public rapture fever that still persists). In 1971 I attended the Tri-State Youth for Christ rally in Evansville, Indiana. Larry Norman sang his new song “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” and electrified the audience. In 1972 I attended the world premier of the movie “A Thief in the Night.” (The premier was held at Hoyt Sherman Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa.)

Larry Norman, I wish we'd all been ready




A Thief in the Night 1972 Full [Movie]


Those events and ones like them (Lindsey’s book, Norman’s song, the movie) launched what I call “public rapture fever.” The imminent secret rapture was no longer a secret; it was “out there” for everyone to know about—whether they believed in it or not. As millions rushed to believe in it (or at least be entertained by the idea), including many who showed no signs of being evangelical Christians, I gradually left it behind.

But by leaving rapture fever and a belief in a “pre-trib” rapture behind was not solely, or even primarily, due to the doctrine’s vulgarization by its Christian popularizers. While attending a fundamentalist Christian college I began to wonder about the biblical and traditional basis for several beliefs taught by my spiritual mentors. Search as I might, I could not find clear biblical evidence for them as doctrines (that is, as more than opinions) and they seemed to have gone unnoticed by even the church fathers closest to the apostles themselves (e.g., Irenaeus). But, alas, when I attempted to mention my doubts to my teachers and spiritual mentors (pastors, evangelists) I was shamed for even asking such obviously unspiritual questions.

Finally, while attending an evangelical Baptist seminary, I discovered one could be a “God-fearing, Bible-believing, Jesus-loving” evangelical Christian and not believe in those sectarian doctrines. One was the “pre-trib” rapture. One evangelical biblical scholar who guided me in shaking off that doctrine was Robert Gundry, long-time New Testament professor at Westmont College, an evangelical Christian liberal arts institution in California. His book The Church and the Tribulation (1973) confirmed my suspicion that the doctrine of a secret, pre-trib rapture of Christians was both unbiblical and against the best of even evangelical tradition. Dave MacPherson’s The Incredible Cover-Up (1975) convinced me that the whole idea originated in some prophecies given in England and Scotland in the mid-19th century. While in seminary I read books about eschatology by the dean of evangelical New Testament scholarship George Eldon Ladd that convinced me of the truth of “historic premillennialism” or what some call “post-trib rapture” (in which no “rapture” as that is interpreted by Lindsey, et al. happens).

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One of the most surprising things that has happened during my lifetime is the explosion of entertainment centering around the old “secret, pre-trib rapture” myth beginning, I suppose, with the Left Behind series of books by Tim LaHaye {and Jerry Jenkins] and the movies based on them. Many non-Christians have jumped on that bandwagon for the sheer entertainment of it. I suppose they regard it as little more than another dystopian futuristic fable. Well, in my opinion, that’s how it’s presented there. What I keep waiting for is a book or movie (or both) depicting the millennium which is, of course, the denouement of the wider eschatology onto which “rapturism” has been grafted. But, I conclude, that wouldn’t make for very good entertainment for people fascinated with evil and horror.

- Roger

P.S. For you who are interested in reading a good book that lays out the premillennial alternative to pre-trib rapturism, I recommend A Case for Historic Premillennialism: An Alternative to “Left Behind” Eschatology edited by Craig Blomberg and Sung Wook Chung (BakerAcademic, 2009).










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END TIMES ESCHATOLOGIES

CHARTS, TIMELINES, WARNINGS

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