Rapture Fever
by Gary North by Gary North
A Ghtto Eschutology 127 all, the silent treatment the academic blackout). They are incorrect. You cannot beat something with nothing. When the long-awaited Christian revival hits, our views will sweep the field, both academically and politically, simply because nobody else will be on the field. We can surely beat nothing with something. Our heavy investment today will pay off in the future. This chapter should not be regarded as a denial that premillennialist and amillermialists can produce academic works that are useful for Christian reconstruction. What I am arguing is that any call by pessimillennialists to reconstruct society along Christian lines must always be accompanied by this warning in fine print “Warning: this call to Christian Reconstruction can never be achieved in Church history.” Full-time historical defeatists such as Dave Hunt have built their careers telling their dispensational followers – millions of them, if book sales are indicative of anything - that all such efforts to improve society are futile, that to argue otherwise is psychologically inconsistent for a premillennialist, and that those people who argue otherwise are either New .4gers or dupes of the New Agers. Conclusion Eschatology matters. If you commit yourself to any version of pessimillennialism, you will spend your life in a psychological ghetto. If every Christian were to do this, the messianic State would expand without resistance until it threatened to swallow the Church. Modern dispensationalism rests on a view of history that proclaims the future as lost to Christians during this, the socalled Church Age. The Great Tribulation after the Rapture will destroy the work of the Church that has been built up prior to the Rapture. That is, the legacy of Christ to His Church is doomed to total destruction when the Jews of the Great Tribulation era are confronted with the alliance against them led by the Antichrist and the Beast. The inheritance of the ages is incapable of being passed down by Christians to
128 IL4PTURE FEVER their spiritual heirs because of two future discontinuities: the Rapture and the Great Tribulation. No matter how good our work as Christians may be, it is doomed. This view of the fiture has produced a ghetto mentality a “form a circle with the wagons” mentality. It has placed a premium on cultural and intellectual defenses against the external world. It has also placed barriers against a systematic cultural and intellectual offense against the external world. Humanism’s victory prior to the bodily return of Christ is inevitable, we are assured; any other view is dismissed as “utopian.” This outlook has created an incentive for Christians to narrow their definition of personal responsibility to the local church, the family, and perhaps the lower levels of education. Above the high school level, Christians become openly dependent on one variety or another of humanism to provide the form and content of education. Christian colleges require their faculty members to earn Ph.D. degrees from accredited universities, knowing fill well that no accredited Christian evangelical university grants a Ph.D. This mentality lives on the academic and intellectual crumbs that fall fi-om the humanists’ tables. For over a century evangelical Christians have been content to live with this state of affairs. They see no alternative. They conform to this world because the~ acknowledge no hope for thti world. Unlike the Amish, who recognize their limits as ghetto residents and who therefore refuse to send their children to school above the eighth grade, fundamentalists send their children, intellectually unprepared, through the gauntlet of humanistic education, usually beginning in kinde~arten. The Amish lose few of their children to the world outside their ghetto; in contrast, fundamentalists have lost millions of theirs. Those who live in ghettos are at the mercy of the messianic State. They become willing to render everything to Caesar while they wait for the return of Jesus. A minority of Christian activists now recognize the sell-out involved in such a view of the fhture. They are steadily abandoning dispensationalism.
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- Page 128 and 129: 5 A COMMITMENT TO CULTURAL IRRELEVA
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- Page 148 and 149: A Ghetto Eschatology 111 clom is ac
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- Page 158 and 159: A Ghetto Eschatology 121 preach God
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- Page 182 and 183: 8 REVISING DISPENSATIONALISM TO DEA
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A Ghtto Eschutology 127<br />
all, the silent treatment the academic blackout). They are incorrect.<br />
You cannot beat something with nothing. When the<br />
long-awaited Christian revival hits, our views will sweep the<br />
field, both academically and politically, simply because nobody<br />
else will be on the field. We can surely beat nothing with something.<br />
Our heavy investment today will pay off in the future.<br />
This chapter should not be regarded as a denial that premillennialist<br />
and amillermialists can produce academic works<br />
that are useful for Christian reconstruction. What I am arguing<br />
is that any call by pessimillennialists to reconstruct society along<br />
Christian lines must always be accompanied by this warning in<br />
fine print “Warning: this call to Christian Reconstruction can<br />
never be achieved in Church history.” Full-time historical defeatists<br />
such as Dave Hunt have built their careers telling their<br />
dispensational followers – millions of them, if book sales are<br />
indicative of anything - that all such efforts to improve society<br />
are futile, that to argue otherwise is psychologically inconsistent<br />
for a premillennialist, and that those people who argue otherwise<br />
are either New .4gers or dupes of the New Agers.<br />
Conclusion<br />
Eschatology matters. If you commit yourself to any version<br />
of pessimillennialism, you will spend your life in a psychological<br />
ghetto. If every Christian were to do this, the messianic State<br />
would expand without resistance until it threatened to swallow<br />
the Church.<br />
Modern dispensationalism rests on a view of history that<br />
proclaims the future as lost to Christians during this, the socalled<br />
Church Age. The Great Tribulation after the <strong>Rapture</strong><br />
will destroy the work of the Church that has been built up<br />
prior to the <strong>Rapture</strong>. That is, the legacy of Christ to His<br />
Church is doomed to total destruction when the Jews of the<br />
Great Tribulation era are confronted with the alliance against<br />
them led by the Antichrist and the Beast. The inheritance of<br />
the ages is incapable of being passed down by Christians to