What to Make of White Evangelicals?

 We ran across this interesting article written by a Dartmouth professor and published in the LA Times.  It was then posted to MSN where we saw it.

The article may have been brought to the front of things because of the recent death of Hal Lindsey at age 95.  He was the author of a best-selling book called THE LATE, GREAT PLANET EARTH and sold millions of copies in the 1970's.  This coincided with the Jesus Revolution that swept the USA and led to a huge revival.  If you haven't seen the movie THE JESUS REVOLUTION, you should.

The article seems to make fun of many Christian things and yes, we agree, there are many funny things you can make fun of about people who call themselves Christians.  Remember, not all people who call themselves "Christians" are actually followers of Christ who have surrendered and been filled with the Holy Spirit.  Apostle Paul judged many of these folks and had some very harsh words for those who would follow another gospel rather than the one he was preaching.

For many years in America, many Christians thought there job was to make heaven on earth.  Heal society and make the world a great place!  When this happened and the world was nice enough, Christ would return!

Most of us now have a very different idea about this.  We think the world is going to get worse and worse with wars and rumors of war, lovers of self, lovers of violence, ignorant of the Word of God, rejection of Jesus and living in full rebellion towards the Creator.  100 years ago most Christians had NO CLUE that the State of Israel was going to be resurrected from a pile of bones so they simply could not believe God's Word when he said I WILL RESTORE ISRAEL IN THE LAST DAYS.  For many Christians this led them down the road of replacement theology...the belief that God is done with Israel and any promises He had made for them has now transferred to The Church.

So read this article and see if you can spot all the problems that you and I have with it.

The death of Hal Lindsey on Nov. 25 symbolically brings to a close a chapter of evangelical theology that was popular for more than a century and has had an outsize effect on American politics.

Born in Texas, Lindsey graduated from the University of Houston and then from Dallas Theological Seminary, with a master’s degree in theology. He worked for Campus Crusade for Christ in Southern California and then, cribbing from his seminary notes, wrote what became one of the bestselling nonfiction books of the 1970s, "The Late Great Planet Earth." (Whether the book qualifies as nonfiction is a conversation for another day.)

Lindsey’s book popularized an approach to biblical interpretation called premillennialism, which posits that the world as we know it will come imminently to an end, as predicted in both the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible and in the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament.

Christians through the centuries have tried to make sense of these prophetic writings, especially Revelation with its filigreed imagery of multiheaded dragons and vials of judgment, the antichrist and the numerals 666. A key bone of contention is whether Jesus will return to Earth before (premillennialism) or after (postmillennialism) the 1,000 years of righteousness predicted in Revelation 20.

The difference might be dismissed as theological nitpicking, the equivalent of counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. But evangelical understandings of premillennialism and postmillennialism have had a profound effect on American history.

In the early decades of the 19th century, evangelicals by and large were postmillennialists — that is, they believed that Jesus would return after the faithful had reformed society according to the norms of godliness. This doctrine in turn animated a variety of social reforms — peace crusades, public schooling (called common schools in the 1800s), prison reform, women’s equality, opposition to slavery (in the North) — all aimed at bringing about the kingdom of God on Earth, and more particularly in America. The Rev. Charles Grandison Finney, the most influential evangelical — a Presbyterian, by the way — of the era excoriated free-market capitalism because commerce elevated avarice over altruism.

By the late 1800s, however, evangelicals were becoming disillusioned. The carnage of Civil War battlefields and the squalid tenements in Lower Manhattan, teeming with labor unrest, hardly resembled the precincts of Zion that evangelicals had so confidently predicted earlier in the century.

To the rescue came a theologian from Britain, John Nelson Darby. He told American evangelicals that they had it all wrong. Jesus would return before not after Revelation's thousand-year utopia kicked in.

As Darby’s interpretation became popular, American evangelicals’ attitudes toward society changed radically. They had been activists trying to reform society, to make the world a better place. But if Jesus was going to return at any moment, why bother? This world was doomed and transitory, they believed, so why worry about social amelioration?

Theologically, the emphasis shifted from social reform to an individual reckoning — accepting Jesus as your personal savior. Premillennialism stoked political apathy; it absolved evangelical Christians of the task of social reform.

In many ways, Lindsey’s “Late Great” book represented the culmination of that sentiment. The churches and believers considered to be evangelical lost a fixation on the Sermon on the Mount (“blessed are the peacemakers”) and Matthew 25 (care for “the least of these”), and gained one on salvation and prophecy, especially the ways Israel figured into that prophecy.

Read all the rest here;  Opinion: Evangelical Christians once agitated for women, prisoners, the poor and ending slavery. What happened?

I'll point out the straw man of John Darby and how this article also introduced him as someone to knock down.  "To the rescue came John Darby."

John Darby didn't invent the rapture and the premillennial view of scripture.  It was there all the time!  He maybe just helped Bible readers get BACK ON THE TRACK that Apostle Paul and John the Revelator were on from the very beginning.  

So don't let one of your Christian friends knock you down with, "The rapture was never heard of until the 1800's when Darby invented it!"

That's a lie and it's very easy to prove that it is.