Trends in Eschatology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
In ENGLAND the Reverend EDWARD IRVING, a charismatic London minister of the 1820s, preached Christ’s imminent return. Irving’s convert HENRY DRUMMOND, a wealthy banker and Tory member of Parliament, held a series of prophecy conferences on his estate in the 1820s and 1830s. In America the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming, popularly called SHAKERS, incorporated a strong eschatological strand in their THEOLOGY. In the Book of Mormon (1830), which JOSEPH SMITH offered as a divinely inspired history and revelation of future events, American history is refigured in sacred terms, with the newly founded Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (see MORMONISM) playing a central role in God’s unfolding plan.
Beginning in the 1830s, WILLIAM MILLER of upstate New York, drawing on calculations involving various events and time sequences in the Hebrew scriptures, proclaimed the second coming of Christ “around 1843 or 1844.” Eventually, Millerite leaders pinpointed the final date even more precisely: October 22, 1843 (later revised to October 22, 1844). The movement won thousands of adherents, and attracted thousands more of the curious. When the appointed day came and went, a crisis resulted that some called the Great Disappointment. From the wreckage, however, arose the SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST church, a Protestant denomination with millions of members worldwide that remains a bastion of eschatological belief, although modern Adventists carefully avoid date-setting.
Meanwhile, a system of eschatological interpretation known as premillennial DISPENSATIONALISM arose in England and spread rapidly to America. The person who systematized and promulgated this scheme, the Reverend JOHN NELSON DARBY (1800–1882), was a founder of a dissenting sect known as the PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. If rightly understood and arrayed in proper sequence, Darby taught, Bible prophecy reveals a series of divinely ordained epochs, or dispensations, each with its distinct means of SALVATION. The end of the present dispensation, the Church Age, he believed, would be signaled by a series of signs foretold by Christ, sometimes in parables, including wars and wickedness, natural disasters, and the restoration of the Jews to the promised land. Next on the prophetic calendar will come the RAPTURE, when all true believers will join Christ in the air, followed by the Great Tribulation (Matthew 24:21) and the rise of a demonic figure, the Antichrist. Antichrist’s reign will end after seven years, however, when he is vanquished at the Battle of Armageddon by a triumphant Christ and the raptured saints. Hailed as Messiah by the Jews who survive Antichrist’s persecution, Christ will establish his millennial kingdom in the rebuilt temple in Jerusalem.
An indefatigable writer and preacher, Darby toured widely, winning many adherents in America. One convert to dispensationalism, Cyrus Scofield, published in 1909 an annotated Bible with notes based on Darby’s system. Through the popular SCOFIELD REFERENCE BIBLE, prophecy periodicals and conferences, schools like Dallas Theological Seminary, and the preaching of dispensationalist ministers, Darby’s eschatological scheme pervaded American EVANGELICALISM. The rise of PENTECOSTALISM in the early twentieth century gave further impetus to end-time anticipations.
Other eschatological perspectives gained support as well, however, including the reformist version underlying the SOCIAL GOSPEL preached in many liberal Protestant churches in the early twentieth century (see LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM AND LIBERALISM). SocialGospel ministers and theologians offered a version of Edwardian postmillennialism adapted to an urbanindustrial age. By promoting slum-housing legislation, labor unions, worker-protection laws, the prohibition of child labor, and similar reforms, they taught, Chris-tians could hasten the prophesied KINGDOM OF GOD. In Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917), and other works, theologian WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH translated postmillennialist eschatology into a mandate for social reform. This reformist outlook profoundly influenced the Methodist and Presbyterian churches and other main-stream Protestant denominations, as well as the ecumenically minded Federal Council of Churches (FCC). “The Social Creed of the Churches,” adopted by the FCC in 1912, represents the high water mark of the Social Gospel. The young REINHOLD NIEBUHR (1892–1971) espoused the Social Gospel in his early ministry and writings, although he would later harshly criticize what he saw as its excessive optimism about the human condition.
Although the disillusionment that followed World War I undermined the postmillennialist eschatology of the Social Gospel, premillennial dispensationalism, with its darker, more apocalyptic view of history, remained strong in the evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal churches, which had continued to stress individual salvation and missionary work rather than the christianization of the social order (see FUNDAMENTALISM; PENTECOSTALISM). As the nineteenth-century evangelist DWIGHT L.MOODY memorably put it, expending one’s energies on social reform was like polishing the brass fittings on a sinking ocean liner.
After World War II premillennial dispensationalism gradually emerged as the dominant eschatology of grassroots American Protestantism, taking root as a kind of folk theology promulgated more by paperback popularizers, radio preachers, and televangelists than by established church institutions or mainstream theological seminaries. The atomic bomb; the United Nations; the movement for European unity; the establishment of Israel in 1948; the Israelis’ recapture of Jerusalem’s Old City in 1967; and later the rise of computers, a global economy, and a worldwide communications systems all struck prophecy writers as portentous signs of the times, making plain that the present dispensation would soon end.
Although twentieth-century Protestant ministers and theologians outside the evangelical and fundamentalist subcultures displayed little interest in combing the biblical prophecies for clues to end-time events, successive generations of scholars, especially in Germany, contributed to a renewed awareness of the importance of eschatology in early Christianity. Johannes Weiss’s Die Predigt Jesu Von Reiche Gottes (The Sermon of Jesus on the Kingdom of God) of 1892, and ALBERT SCHWEITZER’S Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906), published in English in 1910 as The Quest for the Historical Jesus, insisted on the urgency of the first Christians’ eschatological expectations. Schweitzer contended that Jesus’s entire ministry was founded on the belief that the world would end very soon. This theme was reiterated by later German theologians such as Klaus Koch, whose Ratlos vor der Apocalyptik (1970) appeared in English two years later as The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic, and Ernst Kasemann, who in an influential 1969 article declared the apocalyptic worldview “the mother of all Christian theology.”
The well-known Swiss theologian KARL BARTH (1886–1968), as part of his larger reassertion of an orthodox tradition that he believed had been lost in post-ENLIGHTENMENT theology, sought to recover a renewed sense of eschatology as a central element in Christian doctrine and in the Protestant REFORMATION. Fundamental to the Christian life, Barth contended, were moments of decision confronted from an eschatological perspective. (For Barth, such a moment had come in 1935 when, teaching in GERMANY, he had refused an oath of allegiance to Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime.) The German Lutheran theologian PAUL TILLICH (1886–1965), who came to America in 1933, drew on existentialism and depth psychology in defining eschatology as “ultimate concern” in his Systematic Theology (1951–1963) and The Courage to Be (1952), which won a large readership.
Although Continental scholars reasserted the importance of eschatology in early Christianity, millions of American Protestants embraced present-day end-time speculation ever more fervently. As the nation’s liberal, mainstream Protestant denominations lost ground after 1970, evangelical, fundamentalist, and charismatic denominations such as the ASSEMBLIES OF GOD and the SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION, as well as independent community churches and Bible fellowships with no strong denominational ties, surged in membership. Premillennialist eschatological belief loomed large in these churches. Bible prophecy also figured prominently in countless radio and television ministries by such figures as JERRY FALWELL, PAT ROBERTSON, Jack Van Impe, and James Hagee, a San Antonio pastor with a flock of thousands. Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and Paul and Jan Crouch’s Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) frequently showcased eschatological themes (see TELEVANGELISM; PUBLISHING, MEDIA).
Paperback writers spread the end-time message as well. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), a popularization of premillennial dispensationalism, became an all-time bestseller and remained in print thirty years later. Many other eschatological popularizers gained prominence in late twentieth-century America. A multivolume series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B.Jenkins, launched in 1995 with Left Behind, offered a fictionalized version of Darby’s system. The Left Behind series became a publishing phenomenon, with thirty million copies sold by 2001. Movies such as Donald Thompson’s “A Thief in the Night” (1972), Matt Crouch’s “The Omega Code” (1999), and Peter LaLonde’s “Left Behind: The Movie” (2000), based on the LaHaye and Jenkins series, reached large audiences with their eschatological message. Continuing a long tradition in popular Protestant eschatology, these writers, televangelists, and filmmakers wove current events into their scenarios, from communications satellites and the Trilateral Commission to global warming, radical feminism, and Islamic fundamentalism, as signs of the end times or anticipations of Antichrist’s rule.
The terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in September 2001 pushed popular interest in eschatology to still higher levels. Within weeks prophecy books appeared on the bookshelves incorporating these events, including James Hagee’s Attack on America: New York, Jerusalem, and the Role of Terrorism in the Last Days. The global reach of U.S. mass culture, including the prophecy-oriented TV programs and paperbacks, reinforced by thousands of charismatic and evangelical Protestant missionaries, spread premillennialist eschatological belief to Latin America and Africa as well.
As the twenty-first century began, eschatology remained central in the Protestant tradition. In the liberal churches, Christ’s Second Coming was interpreted allegorically, residually acknowledged in the recitation of a creed, or simply viewed as a mystery whose details were best left unexplored. In the vibrant and expansive evangelical, fundamentalist, and charismatic sectors of American Protestantism, however, and in parts of the world proselytized by U.S. Protestant missionaries, eschatology was not merely a matter of credal affirmation or historical interest, but a vibrant reality, stirring fervent expectations of the approaching end and encouraging believers to search the scriptures and scan the headlines for signs that history’s final climax was drawing ever nearer.
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