Culture and the Apocalypse
P. Andrew Sandlin:
[Bill Moyers] is correct, however, that dispensationalists believe Christians will be transported to Heaven before a time of horrid, environment-wrecking tribulation on the earth and its population.
Moyers’ main thrust is too close for comfort, though it troubles me to acknowledge this fact. Moyers is a secularist, bent on de-Christianizing culture; and as a cultural leader, he employs his electronic platform at PBS to hawk his ideological wares. Sadly, he has accurately observed that a consistent application of “pop” dispensational theology might lead one to care little for nature. After all, God intends to blow it all up, to ravage His world; so why care about the environment? Indeed, why not crave its destruction, believing that destruction to be a fulfilled divine prophecy? An eschatology (view of the future) that perceives massive discontinuities before Jesus’ Second Coming is vulnerable to such disregard for God’s creation. If it is predestined that the world and its environment will be ravaged before Jesus returns to end human history — and particularly if we are confident that this ravage will occur soon (the escalating “rapture index,” to which Moyers also referred) — why devote futile time to applying the Faith in the culture and working toward gradual, godly renewal not just in the environment but in education, music, science, politics and so on?
Despite this scenario, Moyers himself is an optimist. He writes: “I can see in the look on your faces just how had it is for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist.” Me might say that Moyers is something of a secular postmillennialist.
[Bill Moyers] is correct, however, that dispensationalists believe Christians will be transported to Heaven before a time of horrid, environment-wrecking tribulation on the earth and its population.
Moyers’ main thrust is too close for comfort, though it troubles me to acknowledge this fact. Moyers is a secularist, bent on de-Christianizing culture; and as a cultural leader, he employs his electronic platform at PBS to hawk his ideological wares. Sadly, he has accurately observed that a consistent application of “pop” dispensational theology might lead one to care little for nature. After all, God intends to blow it all up, to ravage His world; so why care about the environment? Indeed, why not crave its destruction, believing that destruction to be a fulfilled divine prophecy? An eschatology (view of the future) that perceives massive discontinuities before Jesus’ Second Coming is vulnerable to such disregard for God’s creation. If it is predestined that the world and its environment will be ravaged before Jesus returns to end human history — and particularly if we are confident that this ravage will occur soon (the escalating “rapture index,” to which Moyers also referred) — why devote futile time to applying the Faith in the culture and working toward gradual, godly renewal not just in the environment but in education, music, science, politics and so on?
Despite this scenario, Moyers himself is an optimist. He writes: “I can see in the look on your faces just how had it is for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist.” Me might say that Moyers is something of a secular postmillennialist.
posted by Unknown at 5:18 PM
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