Page 4467 – Christianity Today (2024)

1. Florida prosecutors have filed criminal charges against Flag Service Organization, the main operating branch of the Church of Scientology, in connection with the 1995 death of 36-year-old Lisa McPhearson. On November 30, the church pleaded innocent to “abuse or neglect of a disabled adult” and “unauthorized practice of medicine,” both felonies. Pinellas County state attorney Bernie McCabe says an autopsy showed that McPhearson had been deprived of water for up to 10 days while under round-the-clock care of church members at the church-operated Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater. She died of blood vessel blockage after “severe dehydration,” according to the autopsy. Church officials say McPhearson, who had suffered a nervous breakdown, had to be given injections of vitamins and medications because she refused to eat.
2. Grammy Award winner J.D. Sumner, 73, died of a heart attack November 16 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Sumner, who had been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the lowest bass singer, had a 55-year singing career that included stints with the Sunshine Boys, Blackwood Brothers, the Stamps Quartet, and Elvis Presley. Sumner was instrumental in founding the Gospel Music Association.
3. Ollin Collins, 47, chair of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s board of trustees, resigned October 7, a day after being suspended as pastor of Harvest Baptist Church in Watauga, Texas. Two women who had counseling sessions with Collins have sued him, claiming sexual misconduct.

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Churches are burning again in Indonesia as militant Muslim mobs vent their rage against Christians. But this time mosques have also been set ablaze as Christian extremists retaliated in the nation with the world’s largest number of Muslims. Muslim rioters set fire to seven churches and looted 15 others in central Jakarta on November 22.

Six days later, Christians wrecked 15 mosques in Kupang, West Timor. Religious leaders acted swiftly for fear interreligious strife could escalate to civil-war proportions.

“We must not let fanatics and thugs—using religion for their own chaotic purposes—ruin our country,” says a Kupang pastor. Catholic bishops issued apologies, and Protestant evangelical leaders urged Christians to pray and fast throughout December to avert a further crisis.

Sularso Sopater, general chair of the Indonesian Communion of Churches, warns, “Indonesia’s future depends on enough people upholding the principle of religious toleration; if we cannot, we will Balkanize like Bosnia and our nation will be destroyed.”

The latest round of violence began November 22 with a gang fight between ethnic Ambonese, who are primarily Catholic, and Muslims in Ketapang, Jakarta. Fourteen people died in the violence. Arsonists then razed two churches, the Church of Christ and the Bread of Life Church.

During a day of mourning by Christians in Kupang, West Timor, where Christians are the majority, rival gangs began fighting November 30, resulting in damage to 15 mosques.

The spate of church burnings began two years ago (CT, March 3, 1997, p. 50).

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Australian civic leaders and Christians have joined forces in a controversial attempt to ban performances by androgynous shock rocker Marilyn Manson.

The most powerful opposition has come from the Gold Coast, a Queensland tourist resort scheduled to host the first of five concerts across Australia in January. Mayor Gary Baildon declared he would ban Manson after reading the band’s lyrics, which include messages about suicide and drug use. Local Christians launched a petition backing the mayor and have collected 2,500 signatures.

Manson has built a career on trying to be outrageous, including releasing a song titled “Antichrist Superstar” and tearing up Bibles and imitating sex acts on stage. In Australia, promoter Vivian Lees refuses to withdraw Manson from the bill. “He’s a controversial character,” Lees says, “but the kids want to see him. He’s a drawcard.”

Some Christians are concerned the protest has only given Manson free publicity. Anglican minister Don Campbell would prefer a focus on keeping kids away. “If it’s R-rated, then it should have an age restriction on the same basis as television and films,” Campbell says.

After lengthy and heated debate, Gold Coast city council members have refused to ban Manson but have placed restrictive noise limits on the outdoor event. The final possibility of banning Manson rests with Australian Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock, who may refuse the singer an entry visa. Anyone entering Australia must satisfy character requirements and must not “incite discord or disharmony or vilify a sector of the community.”

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Eight years into the United Nations’ economic sanctions against Iraq, the country’s one million Christians are facing increasing hardships along with the 15 million Muslim majority.

“The church suffers right along with the rest of the population,” says Len Rodgers, president of Venture Middle East, one of the handful of Christian relief-and-development agencies that has been trying to alleviate hardship since sanctions crippled Iraq’s economy and health-care system. Rodgers’s group alone has sent $2 million worth of medicines and pharmaceuticals in the past four years, and an assessment team recently tried to determine what needs are most critical in the future.

Christians in Iraq worship in the ancient Chaldean and Assyrian churches; evangelicals number only a few thousand in five congregations in the cities of Baghdad, Mosul, Karkuk, and Basra. Sanctions have driven many Christians to flee Iraq, where a month’s salary for a government worker now buys only a carton of eggs. In neighboring Jordan, churches hold Iraqi services each week with hundreds of expatriates in attendance.

Organizers of the Middle East Council of Churches and the U.S.-based Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding are planning a clergy conference in Iraq to try to help Christians. Two similar conferences have been held in the past five years (CT, July 14, 1997, p. 69) with full cooperation from Iraq’s Ministry of Religious Affairs.

While the UN maintains pressure for sanctions so Iraq will allow weapons inspections, Rodgers is focusing on the people. “We’re trying not to look at politics but remember the 5,000 children every month who are dying of preventable diseases,” he says.

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Students raising money for missions trips and choir tours now have an alternative to selling candy bars and wrapping paper. Concerned Crafts (School-Fundraising.org), a nonprofit ministry based in Chicago, produces a catalog of developing-world crafts, offering school and church groups a fundraiser that also helps the poor.

Andy Sturges of Jesus People USA started Concerned Crafts in 1991 after several short-term missions trips to Mexico. The focus switched to Guatemala, where Sturges saw extreme poverty, especially among the widows and repatriated refugees of the 4 million Mayan descendants.

“We’re trying to refashion business to be a tool of compassion,” Sturges says.

The project earns about $60,000 annually and creates an estimated 70 jobs in developing countries. Sturges and three other staff members do not receive a salary.

The catalog features 22 handmade crafts, including woven purses from Guatemala, a wooden giraffe from Kenya, and a bamboo flute from Bangladesh. Gift prices range from 75 cents for a friendship bracelet to $20 for a large purse. Fundraisers keep 35 percent of gross sales.

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1. Muslim extremists are suspected of murdering eight members of a Christian family November 18 in their northern Pakistan home in the city of Nowshera. The father, Sabir John Bhatti, 70, had conducted regular Christian healing meetings that attracted Muslims seeking cures for ailments. Most of the murdered had their throats slashed by knives. Other victims included Bhatti’s 65-year-old wife, Ruth; their daughter; daughter-in-law; and four grandchildren, including a six-month-old infant. Muslim radicals have been emboldened by recent proposals to implement Islamic law (CT, Dec. 7, 1998, p. 22).
2. Militant Hindus are suspected of murdering 34-year-old Vasu Sritharan, pastor of Canaan Fellowship Church in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, on November 5. Sritharan, who had a successful 13-year outreach to Hindus in the northern Sri Lankan city, had been threatened with death in a phone call a week earlier. Police say three unidentified men entered Sritharan’s bedroom after he had gone to sleep and slit his throat.
3. Elmer V. Thompson, 97, founder of West Indies Mission (now called World Team), died October 20 in Columbia, South Carolina. His missions career spanned more than 60 years, including 20 years as a missionary in Cuba and 18 years as general director of West Indies Mission.

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One of the interesting things about Augustine of Hippo, the famous North African who converted in A.D. 386, is how and why he changed his views during his 45-year writing career as a Christian. Perhaps his most influential change is found in City of God, Augustine’s greatest work. Its massive length (about a thousand pages in modern translations) took him a dozen years to complete.

There, in book 22, Augustine sets out his mature understanding of the “thousand years” of Revelation 20:3-6. His new position—which is often called amillennial—became the view of most Christians in the West, including the Reformers, for almost a millennium and a half.

Millennium now

Augustine had previously followed the view of most earlier Christians, which was known as chiliasm (from the Greek word for a thousand years). He translated this into Latin as millenarianism.

Now, in City of God, Augustine viewed the thousand years of Revelation 20 not as some special future time but “the period beginning with Christ’s first coming,” that is, the age of the Christian church. Throughout this age, the saints reign with Christ—not in the fullness of the coming kingdom prepared for those blessed by God the Father, but “in some other and far inferior way.”

In fact, if God’s people did not now reign with Christ, Augustine said, the church would not now be the kingdom of Christ, the kingdom of heaven (though he does distinguish different meanings of kingdom in Scripture).

So what about the evil that people experience in Christ’s kingdom? Augustine said, “The devil is bound throughout the whole period, from the first coming of Christ to the end of the world, which will be Christ’s second coming.” This does not mean the devil is incapable of enticing Christians away from Christ, but rather that “he is not permitted to exert his whole power of temptation, either by force or by guile to seduce people. …”

Even when the devil is unloosed for “a little while” at the end of the church millennium, his assault will reveal not only the depth of “his malign power” but also the marvelous endurance of Christian people: “The Omnipotent will unloose him, so that the City of God may behold how powerful a foe it has overcome, to the immense glory of its Redeemer, its Helper, its Deliverer.”

Augustine said the “first resurrection” of which John speaks is a spiritual resurrection, and it takes place throughout the church’s history as the spiritually dead “hear the voice of the Son of God and pass from death to life.” They continue hereafter “in this condition of new life.” Those who have not come to new life in this era will, at the second resurrection, pass into the second death with their bodies.

Augustine never left a problem unsolved if he could help it. He took the thrones of Revelation 20:4 as “the seats of the authorities by whom the church is now governed.” The judgment they exercise is what Jesus spoke of when he said, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.”

This interpretation, coupled with his emphasis on the church as the kingdom, led to notions that Augustine could not have envisaged: in the Middle Ages, the church was viewed as the place where God’s rule was exercised on earth through a papal monarch.

Heaven’s the thing

This was a new way of understanding last things, and the question naturally arises: Why would Augustine abandon the dominant interpretation of Christians, many of whom he deeply respected?

First, Augustine owed a lot to a remarkable African Christian writer named Tyconius, who died around A.D. 400. We know too little about him, but enough to be sure that his writings shaped Augustine’s beliefs.

Second, Augustine increasingly focused on the life of heaven, both now and hereafter. Earthly and historical realities were less and less important to him. True fulfillment lay beyond this world. The idea of a literal Millennium on earth after Christ’s return was, to him, too crass.

Third, Augustine was wrestling with reactions to the sack of the “eternal city” of Rome by the Goths in 410. Too many Christians, in his view, had invested too much spiritual capital in the permanence of the Roman Empire—and hence had been distraught when the city fell. Augustine wanted to cut all secular history down to size. All that mattered was the story of the City of God.

Fourth, Augustine had come to see the whole period between the first coming of Christ and his second coming as a single era—uniform and uninterrupted by any special events initiating new eras in salvation-history. Thus, he showed remarkably little interest in “the Constantinian revolution.”

Augustine believed God’s purposes were always being fulfilled, the gospel was always advancing into “the nations at the four corners of the earth.” The saints who had been spiritually raised to life were always reigning with Christ—and always suffering from demonic hostility.

The decisive historical events had happened at Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Jerusalem, and these would reach fulfillment only when Christ came again. Christ’s first coming had begun “the last times” of earthly history. The consummation lay beyond this world, when Christ will fully reign in the midst of his restored people, when the struggles and ambiguities of this age are past.

David Wright is professor of church history at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is also an adviser for Christian History.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

What could Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) have to do with a study of millennialism? When we think of the great explorer, we remember him for anything but eschatology. His Spanish royal sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella, were indeed stirred by the prospect of wealth beyond their dreams. So was Columbus. But all three had something else on their minds.

Ferdinand and Isabella combined political ambition with spiritual desire, nurturing the hope of a final crusade to liberate Jerusalem. Deterred by a lack of funds, they were attracted by Columbus's proposal that finding a shorter route to the fabled wealth of the East would give them up front financing against the infidel—and prepare for Christ's coming at Jerusalem.

Columbus had another reason to undertake this journey. He held a millennialist faith derived from an assiduous study of Scripture and a familiarity with the eschatology of Joachim of Fiore. If there were a shortcut to the East by sea, missionaries could be sent there faster. Thus Christians could meet the provision for world evangelization before the Lord could return. Like John the Baptist at the first coming, he had helped prepare the way for the second.

"God made me the messenger of the New Heaven and the New Earth," he wrote.

The conviction grew with the years, especially after his famous voyage. Columbus devoted himself to gathering what he called the Book of Prophecies. More than a collection of biblical and classical predictions of the end and the return of Christ, this volume showed how Columbus believed his explorations had served a divine plan. He quoted ancient writers like Augustine and Stoic philosopher Seneca to show how the discovery of the Western islands had been the foretold prelude to God's final victory. He drew on Old Testament references to islands as support for his conviction that his voyages had been part of God's strategy.

Like others, Columbus believed the world would come to its terminus 7,000 years after the creation. The world was thought to be 5,343 years, 318 days old when Jesus was born. Since then, another 1501 years had gone by, leaving only 155. By that reckoning, the end would be the year 1656. Clearly there was no time for the believers to waste. Jesus had promised that all prophecies would be fulfilled before the end, and his followers should dedicate themselves to accomplishing their part in that fulfillment.

One requirement of the Lord's return was preaching the gospel "in all the world." Such a task was now possible because Columbus had shown Christians how they could finally reach the entire globe. Another was recovering the Holy Land for Christ, so that all the world's peoples could be gathered at Zion to witness the Lord's return.

Reginald Stackhouse is principal emeritus and research professor at University of Toronto's Wycliffe College. This article is adapted from his book The End of the World? (Paulist Press, 1997). Used by permission.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Sandwiched exactly between the lives of John Nelson Darby and Steven Spielberg, Abel Gance directed La fin du monde (1931), France’s first feature-length talking picture. In it, a comet threatening the earth divides humanity between those who spend their last days indulging in wanton orgies, and those who unite in the name of peace, following a man first seen playing Christ in a passion play.

Apocalyptic themes didn’t really take off, however, until the 1970s. Society was in a state of turmoil, exploited by films about conspiracy theories and disasters both natural and supernatural. In both Stephen King’s 1978 repackaging of Revelation, The Stand, and in The Omen (1976), the Antichrist is pop culture’s ultimate, serious, bad guy.

That decade also saw the rise of a parallel popular culture, best exemplified by the Jesus music scene. The Rapture and the Second Coming were especially common topics. Larry Norman wrote perhaps the definitive early Christian pop song when he composed “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”: “Life was filled with guns and war / And everyone got trampled on the floor … / There’s no time to change your mind / The Son has come and you’ve been left behind.”

The song is played several times in A Thief in the Night (1972), the first in a four-part film series. It set the mold for Christian apocalyptic fiction: a one-world government, a bar code “mark of the beast,” and an evangelistic appeal to become a Christian now.

The end times became both more and less urgent in the 1980s. The fear that gripped popular culture now was not one of political and economic instability but of outright annihilation, usually in nuclear war (The Day After [1983], Testament [1983]) or afterward (Mad Max trilogy [1979-1985]). The Terminator (1984) told a modernized nativity story against the backdrop of an impending nuclear holocaust; the apocalyptic overtones were made explicit in the title of its sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

To skeptics, it sometimes seemed that Christians who dwelled on the end times were unconcerned with the present world and perhaps all too ready to let it go to hell—as shown in Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture (1991). Mimi Rogers plays a Christian widow who goes to the desert with her daughter to await the Second Coming. When it looks like Jesus might not return, she shoots her daughter and thus sends her to heaven right away. However, when the Rapture does take place, the Rogers character condemns herself to a lonely eternity rather than committing herself to a God who would allow such suffering.

At the same time, Christian music was establishing itself and toning down its more radical aspects, particularly where the end times was concerned. Popular culture in the 1990s has settled into a sort of ironic nostalgia; to paraphrase the rock group R.E.M., it may be the end of the world as we know it, but we feel fine. Disaster movies and conspiracy theories are in vogue again, but they lack the urgency of their 1970s predecessors. Nuclear bombs have become our saviors, rescuing us from the comets and asteroids of Armageddon (note the title) and Deep Impact (in which the spaceship carrying the bombs is dubbed “the Messiah”). The apocalypse will become even more ironic in the upcoming film, The End of Days, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a former cop who has to save the world when the devil visits New York City.

Peter T. Chattaway is a film critic from British Columbia and an instructor at Trinity Western University.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

In this issue we’ve dipped into every era and shown how Christians have thought and acted about the last days. The variety is surprising and the results are sometimes horrifying.

Many books have tried to put this all into perspective, but one of the better ones is Richard Kyle’s The Last Days Are Here Again: A History of the End Times (Baker, 1998). So Christian History talked with the author, professor of history and religion at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, to find out what we might learn from the history of the end of history.

What prompted you to write a book about the history of the end times?

I was raised in the Plymouth Brethren church, and I knew of only one view—dispensational premillennialism. I didn’t even know there were alternatives. As a teenager, I remember the invasion of Egypt in 1956 with Israeli, British, and French forces fighting together. This stirred up my passions in this area, but I had always been interested in the subject. In my study of church history, I became acquainted with the mainstream Christian views—postmillennialist, amillennialist, and premillennialist.

Then in 1993, I wrote a book on the religious fringe, and I began to see that so many groups had very fascinating views on the end of the world. And as I talked to my environmentalist friends, I began to realize it isn’t limited simply to the Christian community. A look at movies and modern literature shows there are all kinds of end-time themes. It’s embedded in our cultural psyche.

What was the most surprising thing that you discovered as you researched this topic?

Through much of history, people have been looking more for the Antichrist than for Christ. The Antichrist has to come first, before Christ, in most of these views. Also, there’s more interesting speculation about who the Antichrist is.

Also, with my background—I’m still a moderate premillennialist—I associated millennialism with the Christian mainstream. But in most of history, millennialism (in which people expect the world to end soon) has been the view of fringe groups. In the Middle Ages, the mainstream Catholic church held what became known as amillennialism, but the Joachites, Franciscans, and Taborites, for example, were far more millennial. Even when millennialism was popular during the Middle Ages, it wasn’t the official view of the church.

In nineteenth-century America, when most of the country was postmillennial, other millennial views were championed by groups like the Mormons, Shakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Millennial views are persistent throughout history, but I don’t want to exaggerate them. It’s like a virus; it may be dormant at times, occasionally situations activate it, and it burns to a fever. And so you have these periods of time when the end-time thinking reaches a much higher pitch.

Since many evangelicals believe in the nearness of the end, has millennialism moved beyond the fringe?

Through much of history, many minority groups who have either been depressed, disenfranchised, or poverty-stricken have held apocalyptic views. But today many millennialists, especially many in the religious right, are wealthy and in seats of power. They almost long for an end because they see the world in such bad shape. According to one theory, they’re millennialists because their views are out of sync with the modern world.

Why did evangelicals mock premillennialism in the early nineteenth century yet embrace it today?

Postmillennialism became predominant in the late eighteenth century because the world seemed to be getting better. Progress was being made, especially in the United States. Jonathan Edwards saw the first Great Awakening as the first robin of spring, and figured the millennium to begin around the year 2000. Even in the Second Great Awakening, evangelists thought they were witnessing the opening shots of the Millennium.

After that, we moved into more pessimistic times, and premillennialism, which has a pessimistic view of humanity, took root. In a century like ours, with more to survive than to rejoice in—two world wars, a depression, Hitler, Mussolini, holocausts, nuclear weapons, environmental crises—premillennialism can thrive in a context like this.

Can postmillennialism make a comeback?

If something in the culture changed. For example, between A.D. 300 and 400, a shift took place: Christianity was legalized and became increasingly the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. So eschatology moved from a vague premillennialism to, thanks to Augustine, amillennialism.

One thing that made dispensationalism popular today was that dispensationalists discussed the return of Israel well before it happened. Israel stands at the center of dispensational thinking. If for some reason, the state of Israel ceased to exist, it could cause a major reinterpretation. However, dispensationalists can make adjustments. When the Soviet Union crumbled, they modified their thinking, even though prophecies about the Soviet Union had been a key feature in their views.

There has been a lot of excitement about the end-times prospects for the year 2000. Have Christians invested too much in the turn of the millennium?

In some ways we shot the works in the 1980s. The real catalyst was Hal Lindsey pinning so much on 1948 and implying that the Rapture would occur in 1988. Such hopes for the year 2000 will probably taper off. It won’t be like the Millerites, with people throwing up their hands in despair and dissolving in embarrassment.

In spite of the fact that so many Christians in so many eras have been wrong about the details of the Second Coming, we still retain a vibrant hope in it. Why is that?

I think it’s inescapably biblical. If you’re any kind of a sober, sincere Christian, you have to expect and believe that Jesus Christ is going to return physically at a particular time.

The Bible hasn’t given us many details about this, and so, unfortunately, the hope of Christ’s return has become the fodder for the curious and for fanatics. But that doesn’t change the essential biblical teaching: Christ will come again.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.