Why would it happen in your lifetime?

[Bob_Crowley]

Most of the “last days eschatology” these days originates in the good old USA. If I were to walk through a protestant bookshop in Australia these day, I’m pretty sure that 90% of the titles would be American based. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the same held true wherever there’s a significant Protestant population.

Hence amongst Protestants world wide the American view of eschatology tends to prevail.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran martyred by the Nazis not long before the end of WWII. However he visited the US in 1937, and could have taken safe refuge there if he wished, but returned to Hitlerian Germany to participate in the struggles of the Confessing Church.

He had this to say about American Protestantism from his experience.

From “Protestantism without Reformation”.

It has been granted to the Americans less than any other nation of the earth to realise on earth the visible unity of the church of God. It has been granted to the Americans more than any other nation of the earth to have before their eyes the multiplicity of Christian insights and communities…

Even the concept of ‘Church’ is suspect. The characteristic concept is that of the denomination…

From this state of affairs one might conclude that there must be in American Christianity particularly favourable conditions for a right understanding of the unity of the churches of Jesus Christ. Where no struggle for truth divides the churches, the unity of the church should already have been won. The actual picture, however, is just the opposite…

The history of the church of Jesus Christ in America is distinct from the histories of all other churches on earth by virtue of the fact that from the beginning America has been a refuge for persecuted Christians from the European continent… At the same time America has been consciously a ‘Protestant’ land. Americans have always been taken with the idea of a special providence which postponed the discovery of America until the rise of Protestantism…

Perseverance or flight in times of persecution have been the two Christian possibilities throughout the whole of church history since the days of the Apostles…"

He goes on in this vein.

The point is that in American Protestant consciousness, exacerbated by the events of the Civil War, there is this sense of persecution at the back of things, since they are based on a church in flight.

It doesn’t take much imagination to think then, as the world so often seems to teeter on the edge of self-annihlation, that we are in the “Last Days” from an American Protestant perspective.

And from this, due to the fact American protestantism underwrites so much of the rest of the world’s protestantism, we get the American interpretation of “last days” thinking spread wide.

Whether it’s true or not is another matter.

For myself, I think God intends to drive us off the planet and well and truly out into the universe before the Second Coming. I don’t doubt there’s going to be one, **but I don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime. **I do however, expect a lot of trouble.

 

[anodos]

For genuinely Catholic and well researched considerations of eschatology, let me recommend the books - ‘Trial, Tribulation and Triumph’ and ‘Salvation is from the Jews’. Both are fascinating and offer real food for thought on this topic from a Catholic perspective.

Other end-times books by Catholics that might be helpful:
“Will Catholics be Left Behind?” by Carl E. Olson
“The Rapture Trap: A Catholic Response to End Times Fever” by Thomas Paul Thigpen
“Lord of the World” by Robert Hugh Benson (end-times fiction)

I am going through a class on Revelation with someone who studies Tim LaHaye’s views. One reason that she believes the end-times could happen in our lifetime (though she agrees that “no one knows the day or the hour”) is the technology that allows personal information on microchips to be embedded in the skin. The hand and forehead would both be convenient places to embed something like health needs or credit information. It is possible that, in the future, cash might be phazed out, and without something like this microchip implanted in your hand or forehead you would not be able to buy or sell; and if you did not agree with whatever government requirements might be in place for getting the microchip, you wouldn’t receive it and you could starve, or lose your home, or not be allowed to legally operate a vehicle, etc.

 

[Zooey]

Funny, this topic just came up on another board where I post…

Anyhow, I will repeat what I said there:
My mother (may she rest in peace) went to college back in the 1930s. While she was there, there were a flurry of “prophecy experts” who went around speaking at various churches, & being a curious sort, she went to hear 3 of them. (Yes, three; in the same city, in the same year, even).
E$ach one had a different time table; each one used the same Bible verses to say something different; and each had a candidate for the Antichrist:

1. 
   *]Joseph Stalin
   *]Adolf Hitler
   *]Franklin Delano Roosevelt
   
   She said, she figured she would wait & see “what the Lord had in mind & not listen to anymore of them”. Mama went to be at home with our God in 2000…without seeing the Antichrist. (She did see, and greatly enjoy the coming of the new millenium, but she cautioned anyone who would listen that “Jesus Christ said that NO man knows the time”, & that her trust was in Him, not in mere humans.
   I recommend her advice & pass it on to all here.
   
   God bless.

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

And the Dark Ages were no fun at all – yes, the Church grew by leaps and bounds, but there were still pagans and town-sackings aplenty.

The Church itself was also far from the perfect moral paragon what with conquistadors using the Faith to justify slavery, colonial conquest, and greedy imperialism.