The End of All Things?
By David W. Virtue, DD, Virtueonline:
In the US, 39% of adults believe humanity is ‘living in the end times.’
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere. The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” William Butler Yates.
If you think that we might be living in the last of the last days, you might be right.
Of course, we have been living in “the last days” for over 2000 years, and current apocalyptic predictors who are usually American and British end of the world doomsdayers, believe the world is coming to an end with the righteous raptured and those “left behind” to face God’s wrath, damnation and ultimately, hell. Of course, the Second Coming Has Been ‘Imminent’ for 2,000 Years.
A lot of this comes from the End Times theology of John Nelson Darby, a former Irish Anglican priest who went on to found the Plymouth Brethren movement whose dominant dispensational theology and exegesis was later exported to the U.S. becoming the rallying cry of Moody Bible Institute and Dallas Theological Seminary.
Socially active evangelical para church movements had a hard time with this theology which implied that the worse things become the faster Jesus would return and rapture his people home, thus making attempts to alleviate poverty only delaying Jesus’s inevitable return.
However, evangelicalism took a sharp turn with evangelical social activists like Tony Campolo, Tom Sine, Waldron Scott and Ron Sider, to name but a few, offered a different understanding of Jesus’ ministry, which they believed focused on the poor.
With the recent emergence of extreme right wing evangelical movements and their attendant ideologies pushed by Donald Trump, all four would now be classified as Cultural Marxists or Commie sympathizers, possibly woke, and should be consigned to outer darkness.
However, a number of world class organizations emerged in the mid-twentieth century including World Vision Int, Food for the Hungry, the prison outreach ministry of Chuck Collins, Bread for the World and numerous other ministries believing Jesus wanted evangelicals to reach out to the “least of these” in his name, taking Jesus both literally and seriously. “If you have done it unto one of the least of these you have done it unto me.” (Mt. 25:40)
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