Theological Notebook: Why Not To Prepare For The Rapture Today

[novak]

In talking about strange specifics of American Christianity with my students, I have to say that few things boggle me as much as the sorts of predictions like today's confident end-of-the-world announcement by Harold Camping, a California preacher whose prediction has been taken up with great hilarity by media outlets and people around the world.

Comments

[novak]

I know. I spent some years as an evangelical myself, before I realized that I had, in fact, accidentally catechized myself with all my patristic and medieval reading, and that I had moved myself back to the Catholic position, which was the tradition I was raised in, if not well educated in. But that's why I did try to qualify in this entry that I was playing fast and loose in giving a simple definition of what was involved in inerrancy, as well as giving a broad generalization about dispensationalism. (To be sure, I've not looked closely at Camping's teaching: I made the assumption, as I think is usually accurate in these kinds of theologies, that I would likely find all sorts of dispensational roots underneath it. Your comment that he had a Reformed background is interesting, although I certainly remember most people I knew who thought in dispensationalist ways were also steeped in Calvinist theologies as well.) Obivously, there's a sense of "inerrancy" in Catholic theologies of the inspiration of scripture, although those are generally so flexible as to not seem like inerrancy at all to those in stricter Protestant schools of thought. So I'm sorry if I overstated in this: my struggle is always in trying not to say too much (my Mum, who's a history buff herself, still finds it wearisome that her historian son thinks any well-told story needs two or three centuries of background to get going), but saying something briefly necessitates the loss of nuance. The age-old trade-off. But in the particular case of broadly public predictions of the end of time, in the face of a few pretty blatant dismissals of such speech or activity in the apocalyptic vision of the New Testament itself, I felt more safe in expressing a certain frustration.

[sk8eeyore]

Yes, I'm right there with you in the frustration, and, just to be clear, I think your post is quite well put! Thanks for these additional thoughts.