Rapture Fever

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.