intermission: what a year so far

Let's see what 2011 has brought us so far. Uprising and overthrow of an Egyptian regime. Spreading unrest in the Middle East, burgeoning unrest in China. Japan's worst national disaster since Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 10,000 dead at this point with nuclear meltdowns and spreading radiation that will continue to kill long after the ground settles and the waters recede. Amidst all this, you have the nutty evangelical doom-sayers leaping up and down, pointing at the tragedies and shouting for joy that Jesus is returning soon. It makes me sick.

All that's happened is awful. But it's nothing new. Because we're in the middle of it right now, it seems so much bigger than everything else that's preceded it. Every year there are countless disasters and tragedies, and every year some hard-ass Christians take it as a sign that Jesus' second coming is quite literally just around the bend. You'd think that year after year and decade after decade of different disasters and over-the-top eschatological predictions, there'd be a bit of humility (or at least hesitancy) in declaring Jesus' imminent return. Last year I watched a documentary about premillennial expectations, about Jesus' coming in the very near future. The documentary covered a span of twenty years in the lives of various Christians and their eschatological hopes. What I remember the most is how at one point, one of the interviewees said she was sure Jesus would return before she had kids; then she was sure, several years later, that Jesus would come back before her kids reached high school; then ten more years, and she was sure Jesus would make his appearance before her kids graduated college; and then before her kids got married, and then before they had kids... It just stuck out to me because I wondered if she realized what was happening. Each disaster, each tragedy, each political unfolding convinced her Jesus' return was on the brink. And each time it appeared to be a "false alarm." Yet the prophecies and convictions continue, and they'll continue, and they'll continue, until--out of the blue--Jesus returns. Perhaps instead of getting all excited about these tragedies we should get down on our knees and pray for God's healing and mercy, God's restorative power, pray for flowers to emerge from the ashes, for God's kingdom to advance in the darkest and most shadowy sectors of our world.

Don't get me started on all the Jerusalem hype. This unrest in the Middle East has gotten more than a few people all up in arms about Jerusalem, as if the city and her temple were more important than anything else in Christian history. It's as if we fail to realize that the city and her temple were signposts to the Real Deal, the Messiah, and Christ took the place of the Temple and performed the functions of the Temple, and the Temple came under God's judgment; Jerusalem and the Temple have their place in Christian history, but it's not the place warranted them by many: they're redundant, symbolic graveyards. They've had their time. And as to Jerusalem's destruction being a sign of Jesus' coming, YES. I agree. But I also believe that it's already happened. Judgment already befell Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The city refused her Messiah and God judged her accordingly; vindication took place, but it wasn't the vindication of the Jews but the vindication of Christ and all his people. I guess what I'm saying is that all this focus and fascination on Jerusalem has no real warrant in the New Testament. Jerusalem's mentioned negatively again and again, except for the New Jerusalem, which is eschatological and spiritual in scope and discontinuous with the actual physical city of Jerusalem as it was then and now. Only when we do hermeneutical injustice to the texts can we build up some sort of eschatology that puts Jerusalem and the Temple in the center of it all.

I don't know where this post came from. I was going to write about brake problems with my car, adventures with Skyler, enjoying some time at home with Amanda. But instead this poured forth. Forgive me if my tone comes off as arrogant or blustered; that's not my intention. I'm not good at conveying tone on paper (see the post preceding this), and many of my closest friends hold to convictions which I don't share. Nevertheless, it's not a barrier to our friendship, toward our comraderie, towards our love for one another in Christ. Ultimately these matters are "non-essentials": in the early church, for example, there was no real consensus regarding when Jesus would come back or how it'd come about (though everyone agreed with what would happen when he did: resurrection, judgment--damnation or vindication--, and the recreation of the cosmos). The early church fathers encouraged individual Christians to come to their own conclusions but to co-exist in love and harmony, not letting these things come between them. Although I can be quite... domineering... in my attitude toward eschatological things, don't be persuaded that I loathe everyone who disagrees. Absolutely not the case. Besides, every group of friends needs a heretic to keep things interesting.