At least three basic paradigms for interpreting end times and apocalypse for world civilization exist in protestant Christian eschatology. I wonder how each might interact with the best present empirical end-times inducer: Global Warming? Not only must scientists and the shade tree mech. measure the parts per million of greenhouse gases and oceanographers the temperature of the oceans; social scientists and theologians, philosophers and politicians must consider how to measure the body politics’s attitudes toward global warming, its relationship to economics, theology and their willingness to change or even to understand the public domain issues and ways the end of days* could effect them.
Those Christians-largely evangelicals that believe the apocalypse is yet ahead and will occur when and anti-Christ appears and a great tribulation occurs at the start of which Christians will be raptured into the sky and away from the world’s doom like kids in a movie theater transported to the snack bar during the scary scene perhaps have a fatalist vision of greenhouse gas emission comparable to that of people that log old growth forest and destroy ecosystems; indifference because the world is doomed anyway and God will make a new world later anyway.
Amillenialists tend to view some of the events of the Revelation prophecy as having already happened yet not entirely. Generally amillennialists are opposed to post-millennialists who have the view that the events of the first century during the reign of Nero unto the destruction of the Temple in a.d. 70 largely yet nit entirely fulfilled the prophecy. Post-millennialists believe the world should now be in an indeterminate time of Christian evangelization, peace, harmony and working together to make the world a better place. Amillennialists generally dissent with that and are somewhat more of a recurrent doom point of view with perennial struggle for Christians against forces of evil.
Because amillennialists have something of a culture-kampf perspective they are perhaps too concerned with a dualistic viewpoint of good and evil to take a side on something like global warming that is largely a secular issue. Amillennialists like pre-millenialists tend to discredit empirical reality in a Buddhist like manner-it is contingent being and not too worthy of regard. One might expect millennialism however to combat evil more so than the rather defeatist premillennialist camp. The trouble with amillenialists is that there view of evil is perhaps largely based upon issues coinciding with social politics and matters of how one treats Christian amillennialists financially. Fortune 500 descendants of Presbyterians may treat the amillenialists rather well while Godless evolutionists of the left don’t. The left has adroitly expropriated the anti-global warming issue for themselves from the corporate producers that manufactured it and have thus a solid political advantage regarding populist support. This latter fact isn’t good for Christian evangelization.
I believe that part of the difficulty amillennialists have with the post-millennialism viewpoint is based on over-reliance upon tradition as well as misunderstanding of tradition and the history of Christian thought in the church throughout history. Amillennialists tend to use false alternative or straw man arguments about post-millennialist beliefs in order to change meanings and to create logical inconsistencies. Perhaps 90% of the prophecies of John were fulfilled in the first century A.D. largely by 70 a.d., yet there will be a second coming of the Lord down the road someday, and there will be a decisive removal of anti-Christian elements from the world. It doesn’t mean though that the period before the end times must either be entirely Utopian with a Christian accent or that Christians won’t have any struggles or persecutions-for assuredly we do (meaning us Christians inclusive of the persecuted Chinese Church if Christ).
Post-millennialist eschatological viewpoint’s may be somewhat more adaptable to modern times and yet also more accurate in analysis of the Revelation and additional eschatological references such as those found in Matthew. They may also be consistent with the viewpoints of reformers such as John Calvin generally, though none should rely upon non—Biblical sources as infallibly correct. The reformed faith is about discovering truth rather than obfuscating it. Martin Luther said that the Revelation had a lot of straw; that expresses his feeling that his understanding f it wasn’t right or that it differed from other New Testament books in percent of amorphous content. Of course it did. The Revelation referred largely to first century events that were fulfilled and largely forgotten after the 2nd century a.d. It is remarkable that the common sense interpretation of the Revelation was lost to history as first century historical viewpoints were lost to history.
In northwest Alaska on the Chukchi Sea Arctic coast a little village that formerly was protected by fall storm wave surges by virtue of that fact that the sea water was frozen now suffers the storm ravages because the sea doesn’t freeze over until much later in the season. One might take the little village of Kivalina as a global warming index; If the premillennialists are right, even as an end-times index for predicting when the Lord will return (as the sea level rises and temperate regions become deserts wars and social catastrophes will ensue and things on the radical left side of the doom index will flourish hastening the Lord’s rescue and wrap it up mission).
Of the fifteen hottest years of global average temperatures fourteen have occurred since the year 2000. The world is getting hotter though there are local variations. The world oceans are warming too. Cristian post-millennialists can take an active role in working to moderate or halt global warming as good neighborliness and common sense while premillennialists can only wring there hands and look to the sky in hope that there deliverer draweth nie. Amillennialists might think its a temporal recurrence of the doom of immoral humanity and that a closer relation to corporatism would end the problem if one exists outside the minds of the leftist global conspiracy.
At Kivalina the first people’s descendants -who were actually the last to arrive in America from Sibir and raced across the continent in record time with dogs and dog-sleds -must cross their lagoon to escape the warm-water storms. They want a road built to a mine 60 miles away for safety instead of relocating the village beyond the Lagoon with the seacoast frontage becoming something like Cape Hatteras resort village for subsistence people. Yet putting more global warming gases from SUVs at high latitudes is a way to enhance global warming. Building one crisis highway becomes a herring bone of new sprout roads with roadhouses, trucks and accelerated global warming contribution. The relocation efforts of the village are stalled as are efforts to substantively reverse global warming.
Post-millennialists might search to find a way to solve the storm and housing security issues of Kiivalina yet probably not pre-mills or amills. So one can make something of a global warming index and measuring device from the seashore village of Kivalina politically and empirically perhaps. The human solutions to repairing damage they have caused themselves is to make more damage. Even the churches that have sanctified gay marriages have repeated the lie that the Apostle Paul mentioned in reproof in the book of Romans. Jesus was the founder and sponsor of the Christian efforts to make the social environment a better and Godly place. It is true that humanity cannot do that without the Lord, yet it does seem that some of the saved cannot work toward that purpose even with.
Garrison Gibson: books and blog 