Excerpt:
End Times Dispensationalism
So what are these End Times beliefs that have converted much of the remaining Protestant establishment in American into a disastrous death cult? It’s complicated.
Christians have always believed that Jesus would one day return, but that belief started out vague, and grew steadily less important as this key event kept failing to occur. In first decades after Jesus’ crucifixion, the Apostle Paul believed that Jesus’ return was so imminent that people needn’t bother getting married. Naturally, that belief didn’t age well.
As time passed and Christians who initially thought themselves immune from death started dying, these young churches needed an explanation. New Testament writers offered a series of oblique pronouncements about an End of Days, but their attention gradually moved from the imminent return of someone who persistently failed to return, toward a focus on Heaven and the Afterlife.
One Biblical writer, influenced apparently by persecutions of Christians in the Second Century, wrote a psychedelic screed which came to be titled Revelation. To the extent that anyone can derive context or meaning from this rant, it seems to be directed squarely at the writer’s most hated targets, the Romans and the Jews.
In it Jesus is said to condemn the unbelieving Jews as the “Synagogue of Satan” and their future torments are described with sadistic color. It also imagines a series of exquisite horrors to be vengefully visited on its other main character, Rome, at the End of the World.
The Book of Revelation barely made it into our New Testament canon and the Christian belief in Jesus’s return faded into a minor element of the faith. Down through the centuries, End Times theology flared up in times of plague, disorder, or mayhem, but it remained the playground of religious zealots and outcasts, never developed with much interest by conventional theologians.
Ask an American evangelical today about Armageddon or the End of the World, and you’re likely to hear a story gleaned from popular literature that descends not from the early church or the Bible, but from the colorful imagination of a 19th century English cultist.
After being seriously injured in a fall from horse in 1827, lapsed cleric John Nelson Darby began to write down the theology God had revealed to him.
Most of his work was forgotten, and his teachings flopped entirely in Europe. However, one element of his cult mythology caught fire in the US, especially in the South. By crafting together bits and pieces of Biblical text like the disconnected words on refrigerator magnets, Darby invented a story of The End Times perfectly suited
for the needs of slaveholder religion in the South. It was called Dispensationalism.
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