today's NYT article
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/weekinreview/16luo.html?8hpib=&pagewanted=print quotes Randall Balmer, professor of American religious history at Barnard
and Timothy Weber, a church historian and author of a book entitled "On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel's Best Friend".
I'm interested in the anatomy of the Religious Right because of what it is doing to the country I grew up in---my country's economy, it's social contract, it's military, it's moral standing, it's alliances, it's distribution of wealth, it's press, and it's democracy.
So I am interested in the history of the beast.
This may sound pretty obscure and academic: apparently there are 3 different schools of Doom-think depending on when a person called Christ is foretold to appear. The reference is "Revelations" chapter 20, and perspectives on it differ.
POST-millennialists were cheerful people who thought that Christians could evangelize the world, improve social conditions, and bring about a 1000 years of peace and brotherhood AFTER WHICH person X will appear. American post-ems were active in abolishing slavery in Civil War times, they often believed that America was chosen to play a special role in achieving the good millenium, they often believed in Progress. Ushering in the millenium, in the sense of utopian good times, was a human mission. X only showed up after the party was over.
More recently, PRE-millennialists have become predominant (perhaps with the decline of US industry and a growing sense of insecurity and frustration.) Here's a quote:
"It is those who read the passage most literally - the so-called
pre-millennialists - who hold the most pessimistic views. They believe history is irrevocably deteriorating, on its way
toward a period of terrible suffering, called the tribulation, which will only be broken when Jesus returns and rules for a thousand years.
Dispensationalism emerged as an offshoot of this last school, owing its spread in large part to the work of a 19th-century British evangelist,
John Nelson Darby."
The PRE-em scenario (especially the severely pessimistic Dispo version) has become influential in US society as never before. Here's a quote:
"dispensationalism ... only came to occupy a dominant place in American evangelicalism relatively recently.
"Dispensationalists have never had the kind of public exposure and the kind of political power that they have now,[/color]" Mr. Weber said. As a whole, evangelical Christians are united in their belief that Jesus will come back in human form at some point in history. Where they, as well as members of other Christian groups, have differed is precisely how this will occur, depending on how each interprets a single verse in the 20th chapter of the Book of Revelation and its allusion to a 1,000-year reign by Christ."
More about Darby, inventor of the "Rapture" idea (important in Dispo thought):
"Darby taught that history unfolds in various stages, or dispensations, and introduced several innovations to pre-millennialism, most prominently, the concept of the Rapture - that
before the tribulation, true believers will suddenly be whisked away to heaven. This belief is the basis for the popular "Left Behind" series of novels.
Darby also emphasized the role of the nation of Israel in the end of history; the Israelites' return to the promised land, he said, was a requirement of the Second Coming."
there is also a third type that the church historians call A-millennialism, meaning NON-milliennialism. There you just forget about the thousand years. What is important is the violence and suffering and rapture and the end of time----they, like, cut to the chase. time gets compressed as it comes to the End. I couldn't see much in the article about this third type. What seems influential and politically important is the Darby-Dispensationalism version of PRE-millennial thought.
