Nowwwwww I understand the Rapture

Top: Nicholas Cage is Left Behind. Bottom: Gregory Peck and Lee Remick are unwitting foster parents in The Omen.

As many of you know, I routinely scan the radio dial for religious programming, often to educate myself on the extremists, which are entertaining in a sad way, and present a sort of metaphysical workout, since I'm constantly deflecting rounds of absurdity.

So happens Dr David Jeremiah is on after I take Dee Dee to the bus stop, and I like him, even though I often disagree.

As I write this, he's doing a series on Revelation and the Antichrist, False Prophet, etc. A few days ago he spent some time on the declining church, citing a congregation that hadn't used its baptistery since the 1950's.

Now, end times teaching in the Baptist tradition is very complicated. It involves cabalistic terms like Pre-Trib, Mid-Trib and Post-Trib, the number 666, the Antichrist, a thousand years of peace, folks getting caught up in the air, and the molecules of the dead being reassembled into their physical bodies.

A few comments:

1. The decline anyone is seeing in the Church is filtered through their own experience. (I've been hearing "the graying of the church" ever since I was a kid.) There are in fact sound denominations growing. My own church has had 4 or 5 baptisms in the last couple months. Evangelicals might say those churches are apostate, but that would be wrong. I think rather evangelicalism met a generation's need for revival, saw a hundred+ years or so of growth, but is now struggling to find its role.
   
2. Jeremiah was able to explain in an hour what I failed to understand after years of childhood exposure. That might be because the Rapture is a complicated concept. Since evangelicals are free to refine their own models, they do, and so there are dozens of competing perspectives with subtle differences.
   
3. Jeremiah is using unfortunate imagery in the allegories he uses to kick off each lesson. His Antichrist and False Prophet conduct their nastiness in Rome, obviously putting the papacy at the center of the story and encouraging listeners to work outward from there.
   
   And that's too bad, because his sermons have otherwise been much more ecumenical.

BTW, all mainstream Christian sects teach Jesus' return, but the oldest of them teach simply that he's coming back to judge both the living and the dead, and the faithful will live with him in heaven.

It's not complicated, and is (slightly) more like The Omen (>) than Left Behind (>), if a Hollywood version is helpful.

[2014-10-19]

c0

I haven't seen Left Behind. I have see The Omen, and it scared me out of my wits.

[2014-10-24]

c0