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Copyright 1995 News World Communications, Inc.
The Washington Times
June 19, 1995, Monday, Final Edition SECTION: Part SYMPOSIUM; Pg. 18
Question: Is apocalyptic religion bad for America? ;
Yes: It is breeding intolerance.
by Frank K. Flinn
Students of American religion always have claimed that America is a
millennial nation. The United States, they say, has perceived itself as the
harbinger of the perfect 1,000-year reign of God foretold in the Book of
Revelation, that most apocalyptic of all books in the Christian Bible.
This American self-perception is partly true and partly false. On the false
side, the Americas were not settled first by a millennium-thinking people but by
great Amerindian tribes. In those earlier civilizations, the Great Spirit was
not a God of time, calling people forward to a future apocalyptic kingdom.
Rather, God was, and remains, a God of space - one who is present in the
mountains and valleys, rivers and plains. America as a whole has yet to lay
claim to this rich theological tradition. We give it only halfhearted lip
service in a politicized ecological movement.
No one can deny that millennialism has contributed untold variety to the
lively experiment of religion in America. Without a doubt, American preachers,
including America's preeminent evangelist, Billy Graham, continue to espouse a
healthy-minded apocalyptic faith. It is significant that Graham led the
mourning at a worship service for bomb victims in Oklahoma City with President
Clinton in April. But Graham neither targets the "enemy" nor menacingly sets
the day or the hour of the Second Coming.
On the other hand, no one can deny that something has gone awry in our
penchant to live in the apocalyptic future. If we have a "paranoid style in our
politics," as historian Richard Hofstadter has written, we also have an
apocalyptic penchant in our religion. What is most distressing in our
present-day apocalypticism is the ever-increasing tendency to materialize the
dense and symbolic language of the Bible. This tendency was present from the
very start. As early as 1919, The King's Business, a dispensational
premillennial journal, identified signs of the Great Beast as heresy, higher
(biblical) criticism, social service, socialism and, most ominously, bolshevism.
In time, premillenialists have expanded the list to include the cabal of Jewish
bankers described in the bogus Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the
Rothschilds, the Trilateral Commission, the United Nations, the Rockefeller
Foundation and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Among radical
patriots, minions of the Great Beast now include agencies and personnel of the
U.S. government. Just underneath this material interpretation of the Scripture
lurks not only anti-Semitism, an ever-present danger in a Christian "redeemer"
nation, but also an anti-Catholicism that views the papacy as the whore of
Babylon.
Our Puritan forebears were a millennium-imbued people. They crossed a Red
Sea (the English Channel), sojourned in a desert (Holland) and passed over a
Jordan (the Atlantic) on the way to the Promised Land. They came in hopes of
setting up, in the words of John Winthrop, a "city upon the hill," a new
Jerusalem that was to be a light unto all nations. The Puritan God was a God of
time, one who acted in history and was to come again to judge the living and the
dead. This millennial vision sustained the new land through the peaks of the
18th Century's Great Awakening and the foundation of the Republic, as well as
the pits of the Half-Way Covenant and the Civil War.
Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), the chief theologian of the Great Awakening,
sensed that the 1737 revival of religion among young people and their families
in Northampton, Mass., signaled the preparation for the Second Coming of Jesus
Christ. Edwards' theopolitical position came to be known as postmillennialism.
Christ was to appear at the end of the great events depicted in Revelation
20:1-10. The postmillenialists were both optimistic and progressive. American
history, despite the aberrations of slavery and demon rum, was a continuous
record of God's election of this land as a redeemer nation.
But there were weaknesses in the postmillennial position. The divinely
spontaneous awakening of 1737 turned into a humanly engineered revival of the
1820s led by evangelist Charles Finney. The social gospel turned into social
action. By the middle of the 20th century, theologian Harvey Cox sang the
praises of the secular city, not the new Jerusalem. In short, postmillennialism
became secularized into the liberalism of Baptist advocate William Nelson Clarke
(1841-1912) and antifundamentalist tractarian Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969).
Beginning in the 1840s, another version of the millennium began to take hold
on the nether side of American Protestantism. The advocates of this position
came to be called premillennialists. They taught not that things were getting
progressively better but catastrophically worse. The Second Coming was to occur
not at the end of the millennium but at the beginning. The most famous
premillennialist of the early 19th century was William Miller, a Baptist lay
preacher who predicted in ads taken out in the New York Herald Tribune that
Jesus would return Oct. 22, 1844. Many heard Miller's trumpet call and
experienced a great disappointment when the day came and went. Out of those
ashes was born the Seventh-day Adventist Church which, along with the Mormon
Church and numerous other millenarians from Oneida in New York to New Harmony in
Indiana, began to dot the religious landscape of North America.
But far and away the most pervasive premillennialist to touch American
shores was Irishman John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), founder of the Plymouth
Brethren and inventor of a form of premillennialism called dispensationalism.
Believing he was "rightly dividing the word of truth" (Timothy 2:15), Darby
conflated the texts of Revelation, Daniel and Ezekiel, coming up with seven
dispensations, or divinely appointed periods, that show humans their utter
failure to effect their own salvation. In contrast with the postmillennial
theology of the "liberals," the premillennial schema of Darby was pessimistic.
This world was slated for destruction and devastation. Christ would come at the
beginning of the millennium, snatch away to heaven the true spiritual church
from the apostate (i.e., liberal) Protestants and (whorish) Papists. Then God
would let loose the events of the last days: wars, famines, earthquakes, the
Great Beast and the Antichrist, the restoration of the earthly Israel (Jews),
the conversion to Christ or damnation to hell, a short reign of Christ with his
saints (a Third Coming!), the loosening and final binding of Satan, the final
destruction of this world and the creation of a new heaven and new earth.
Darby evangelized Canada and the United States between 1859-1874. When he
returned to England, he took his Plymouth Brethren into an ever-more separatist
stance, away from the "corrupt" church-state arrangement in the Church of
England. Today, the branch of the church he founded is called the Exclusive
Brethren and has so separated itself from the mainstream of society that it has
lost its "charity" status in British law. In America, Darby left behind a vast
and long-lasting theological heritage. He directly or indirectly shaped the
theological visions of Dwight L. Moody, Congregational evangelical revivalist
of Chicago; James Hall Brookes, Presbyterian preacher of St. Louis and
cofounder of the Niagara Bible Conference; and A.J. Gordon, Baptist cofounder
of the the Bible Conference and founder of Gordon Theological Seminary. Darby's
heritage is enshrined at Dallas Theological Seminary, home of the world-famous
Scoffield Reference Bible (1909) and alma mater of Hal Lindsay, author of the
latter-day apocalyptic best-seller The Late Great Planet Earth (1970).
If the principles of dispensationalist interpretation were heady stuff in
the 19th century, what happened in the 20th makes for a real steamy brew.
Dispensationalism became sequentially merged with evangelism, fundamentalism,
anti-Darwinism and anticommunism. Finally, Darbyite or Darby-like millennialism
has, in varying degrees, entered the theological vocabulary of numerous
Christian conservative groups, ranging from the Christian Coalition to the
Christian patriot and militia movements. In the Christian Identity movement,
millennial dispensationalism allows the separatist "true" patriots (like the
"true" church of the century earlier) to identify themselves as the "authentic"
lost tribes of Israel. The followers of Christian Identity are ready to trigger
the woeful events of the last days in the name of Christian "values," the
Constitution - as they see it - and the Bible. In their mind, the prevailing
liberal, socialistic politics have written these founts of cultural authority
out of the American social contract.
Hitherto, America largely has been exempt from wars of religion, something
the founders of this republic wanted to avoid at all cost. However, the
Missouri and Illinois state militias were called out against the Mormons in the
19th century; more recently the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the
FBI were used against the apocalyptic sect (not "cult") of the Branch Davidians.
The theopolitical landscape is radically changing. America's penchant for the
apocalyptic no longer is creative but incendiary, both on the side of religion
and on the side of the state.
At times one would wish for a return to the balanced millennialism of
Jonathan Edwards. His vision of the end of all things always was tempered by a
creation faith that celebrated what he called "the beauty of the world." At
other times it seems that society has burned out both ends of the millennial
candle. Now is the time to listen to the great unlearned lesson from our primal
Amerindian forbearers. All of us - Jew and Gentile, Muslim and Hindu, believer
and nonbeliever - belong to the same creation and partake of the same land.
God's rain falls on all alike.
Flinn is adjunct professor of religious studies at Washington University and
coeditor of Interreligious Dialogue: Voices From a New Frontier.
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