Rapture Fever
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Rapture Fever

by Gary North by Gary North

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Preface xxvii the bureaucratically certified, highly educated, well-finded academic masters of this age. To make this challenge, a Christian needs a uniquely Christian world-and-life view, which includes a rival system of law and truth. Dispensationalists possess the rival view of truth, but they do not possess a rival view of law. They have adopted the view of law espoused by pre-Darwin humanism and no longer taken seriously in academia or politics: natural law. Dispensationalists have yet to develop their own view of law based on biblical creation. Darwinists had captured law, political science, history, and the arts within three decades after the appearance of The Origin of Species (1859). Dispensationalists have yet to make the attempt to conquer these fields in terms of their anti-Darwinian view of the origin of the universe. (See Chapter 9.) The Goal of This Book I wrote this book for the same reason that I have written about two dozen books of Christian scholarship and published dozens of others with my own money or money I have raised: I am determined to offer Christians, especially college students, a biblical alternative to humanism. I want to provide them with something that no one provided me. I was converted to saving ftith in Jesus Christ in July, 1959, in the summer between my senior year in high school and my first year in college. This took place when a friend invited me to attend a local Bible church: premillennial, dispensational, and fimdamental. I had been a very good student in high school. I had won a California State Scholarship to attend the most prestigious undergraduate liberal arts college in the West Coast, Pomona College. My faculty advisor at Pomona College was later to come within one percentage point of defeating Jerry Brown (“Governor Moonbeam”) for the governorship of California. So, I was tossed into the middle of humanism’s gauntlet at age 17. I had been a Christian all of two months.

. . . Xxvlll RAPTURE FEVER In the second semester of my freshman year, I transferred to the University of California, Riverside, which at the time was the only four-year liberal arts college in the University of California system. It did not add a graduate school for another four years. I studied there, on and off, for the next dozen years, taking my doctorate in 1972. But what changed me the most was my realization in the second semester of my freshman year that there had to be a Christian approach to economics. I realized that free market economics is true and socialist economics is not true. I knew that the Bible is true. Therefore, I concluded that the Bible must have something unique to say about economics. I spent the next three years searching for someone who had written on Christian economics. I found nothing. There was nothing.z Today, three decades later, things are a lot better. There are a few books that deal with Christian economics, including a dozen written by me. There is even an Association of Christian Economists, although its hundreds of members rarely write explicitly Christian economics; rather, they are Christians who write academically acceptable articles on topics that are occasionally interesting to other Christians academicians. But, in 1959, there was nothing. There was also nothing in the other fields. No one was talking about an explicitly Christian world-and-life view except a handful of Dutch-American Calvinist scholars whose work was unknown outside of Michigan. Henry Van Til’s Ch-istiun Concept 01 Culture appeared in 1959, but I did not come across it until I enrolled at Westminster Theological Seminary a Calvinist institution, in 1963. For a fundamentalist scholar, there was nothing available in 1959. There was not even The Genesis Flood, which appeared in 1961, and only because Calvinist scholar R. 2. The twice-monthly tabloid newspaper called Chrktian Economics was in f%ct a humanist free market newspaper that was financed by a billionaire Calvinis~ J. Howard Pew. There was no attempt by its writers to use the Bible to provide the content of their economic opinions and analysis.

Preface xxvii<br />

the bureaucratically certified, highly educated, well-finded<br />

academic masters of this age. To make this challenge, a Christian<br />

needs a uniquely Christian world-and-life view, which<br />

includes a rival system of law and truth. Dispensationalists<br />

possess the rival view of truth, but they do not possess a rival<br />

view of law. They have adopted the view of law espoused by<br />

pre-Darwin humanism and no longer taken seriously in academia<br />

or politics: natural law. Dispensationalists have yet to develop<br />

their own view of law based on biblical creation. Darwinists<br />

had captured law, political science, history, and the arts within<br />

three decades after the appearance of The Origin of Species<br />

(1859). Dispensationalists have yet to make the attempt to conquer<br />

these fields in terms of their anti-Darwinian view of the<br />

origin of the universe. (See Chapter 9.)<br />

The Goal of This Book<br />

I wrote this book for the same reason that I have written<br />

about two dozen books of Christian scholarship and published<br />

dozens of others with my own money or money I have raised:<br />

I am determined to offer Christians, especially college students,<br />

a biblical alternative to humanism. I want to provide them with<br />

something that no one provided me.<br />

I was converted to saving ftith in Jesus Christ in July, 1959,<br />

in the summer between my senior year in high school and my<br />

first year in college. This took place when a friend invited me<br />

to attend a local Bible church: premillennial, dispensational,<br />

and fimdamental. I had been a very good student in high<br />

school. I had won a California State Scholarship to attend the<br />

most prestigious undergraduate liberal arts college in the West<br />

Coast, Pomona College. My faculty advisor at Pomona College<br />

was later to come within one percentage point of defeating<br />

Jerry Brown (“Governor Moonbeam”) for the governorship of<br />

California. So, I was tossed into the middle of humanism’s<br />

gauntlet at age 17. I had been a Christian all of two months.

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