John Piper on Hal Lindsey & End-Times Speculation
Well, if I haven’t thoroughly outed myself as a “Piperite”, two posts in one day featuring my favorite pastor should do the trick.
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I read Piper’s 1974 essay on Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth this morning, and could not pass on the opportunity to forward it along.
Since reading Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind and witnessing the ensuing marketing phenomenon more than a decade ago, I have been uncomfortable with the assurance, and often the stridency, with which some adhere to the Premillennial/Dispensational eschatological system.
I occasionally listen to a weekend radio program on the local Christian AM station that deals exclusively with this topic. While I do not doubt the sincerity of the host’s faith, I am often disturbed at the passion attached to such a tangential issue (the precise outworking of Biblical prophecy in current events). I am more disturbed by the passion with which this host often criticizes her brothers and sisters in Christ who don’t subscribe to this particular eschatological system (a system that has no history in the Church predating the 19th Century).
Piper writes:
This is the most important: among those who calculate about the time and sequence of the coming events and who try to give detailed descriptions of how it will be, there is, I think, a fundamentally wrong focus, a dislocation of our “blessed hope.” Throughout the New Testament the all-important focus of our hope is personal fellowship with God and our Lord Jesus Christ…
… But for the calculator of the end times this all-important personal focus of our hope gets blurred in a mass of secondary (often speculative) details.
Amen! This is my chief concern with so many Christian ministries wandering into various aberrant teachings. Dispensational end-times speculation, fixations on mystical experience and supernatural charismata, the Prosperity Gospel, the Megachurch self-improvement progams, and a myriad of other modern errors all have this in common: They are all a giant distraction from the main thing – Jesus Christ and His Gospel.
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I completely agree! John Piper reminds us that our “blessed hope” – from eternity past and to eternity future – points to the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is only in Him that we have hope at all.
I believe it is an escapist point of view, this concentration on prosperity, prophetic mysticism, signs and wonders, and end times fantasies that has become such a large part of Christian genre in recent years.
So many people are not given the meat of the gospel in their churches any more, nor is the consistent assurance of the faithfulness of God passed on as much from generation to generation in families.
Rather than modeling for folks truly Godly methods of dealing effectively with the harsh realities of this inconsistent world, much of religion seems to be grasping at straws itself – needing a security blanket of signs and wonders, rapture fantasises, material blessings and the like to have proof itself that Christ is real any more.
Jim, What is John Piper’s eschatalogical stance? He doesn’t seem to talk about it much, but I’m curious. I heard a sermon he did on Israel a while back, like years ago, In it he sounded a little pre-mill. At least in his interpretation of God’s plan for Israel.
Therefore just curious.
http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/TopicIndex/29_End_Times__Return_of_Christ/603_Questions_on_the_Second_Coming/
Pastor John rarely ever preaches on end-times (at least not in the last three years we’ve been attending). I like that. While the topic certainly shouldn’t be completely avoided (if Scripture speaks to it, it’s important), I think the American evangelical Church in my lifetime has spent WAY too much time obsessing over it. I think obsessive end-times speculation tends to appeal to something unholy in us, and – as Piper states in the above link – distracts us from Christ and His Gospel.
I believe Piper is a historic premillennialist. That is, he believes the millennium is in the future, but is not a dispensationalist and is therefore post-tribulational.
Personally, I am uncommitted, but bounce between Piper’s view and amillennialism.
Hello There,
Just stumbled on your site while in between reading Piper’s response to N.T. Wright. Something Piper said confused me and so I looked it up.
Just had a few questions:
1 Why do you lump “Dispensational end-times speculation”, with “fixations on mystical experience and supernatural charismata, the Prosperity Gospel, the Megachurch self-improvement”?
2 Regarding your comment “system that has no history in the Church predating the 19th Century”
-is it possible that because after the destruction of Isreal in the 1st century, that no one though it possible that Isreal would ever be a nation again, 18+ centuries later in 1948?
-is it possible that in trying to defend God, well meaning Christians started to equate the promises made to Isreal as to those made to Christians to make sense of God’s Word because Israel was no more?
-now that Isreal has been back almost 60yrs, how do we as Christians deal with promises to Isreal? Is God done with the Jewish people, and so do we, as Gentile, believers in Jesus still get to inherit those promises as if made to us?
I don’t really understand the scholarly stuff because I am just reading, attending Church and trying to understand myself, so I am just asking to get clarification.
Dat,
1. I wasn’t directly relating dispensational end-times speculation (the kind of speculation that obsessively reads today’s news events into biblical prophecy) with these other things, but making the point that all of them similarly serve as a distraction to the main thing: Christ and His gospel.
2. No, I don’t. Christians understand the Church as God’s new covenant people (contrasted with His old covenant people – Israel), because the New Testament (covenant) writers do. The the Church is the olive tree of Israel with Gentiles grafted in – it is one tree. God does not have two covenant peoples, He has one – comprised of Jew and Gentile.
3. Non-dispensational Christians don’t believe God is “done with Israel”. Most Christians expect a massive turning to Christ among Jews near the End. However, non-dispensational Christians are not committed to viewing the modern state of Israel as inheriting any biblical promises for land, etc. Those Jews residing today in the modern state of Israel – I say this as a big supporter of Israel – is not God’s chosen people (unless they are Christians). The Church is God’s chosen people. Christians should be pleading with Jews to recognize their Messiah, Jesus Christ, and run to Him.
Hope that helps.
God Bless
Thank you for your gracious clarifications Jim. Dat
The NEWEST Pretrib Calendar !
Hal (serial polygamist) Lindsey and other pretrib-rapture-trafficking and Mayan-Calendar-hugging hucksters deserve the following message: “2012 may be YOUR latest date. It isn’t MAYAN!” Actually, if it weren’t for the 179-year-old, fringe-British-invented, American-merchandised pretribulation rapture bunco scheme, Hal would still be piloting a tugboat on the Mississippi. roly-poly Thomas Ice (Tim LaHaye’s No. 1 strong-arm enforcer) would still be in his tiny folding-chair church which shares its firewall with a Texas saloon, Jack Van Impe would still be a jazz band musician, Tim LaHaye would still be titillating California matrons with his “Christian” sex manual, Grant Jeffrey would still be taking care of figures up in Canada, Chuck Missler would still be in mysterious hush-hush stuff that rocket scientists don’t dare talk about, and John Hagee might be making – and eating – world-record pizzas! To read more details about the eschatological British import that leading British scholarship never adopted – the import that’s created some American multi-millionaires – Google “Pretrib Rapture Diehards” (note LaHaye’s hypocrisy under “1992″), “Hal Lindsey’s Many Divorces,” “Thomas Ice (Bloopers)” and “Thomas Ice (Hired Gun),” “LaHaye’s Temperament,” “Wily Jeffrey,” “Chuck Missler – Copyist,” “Open Letter to Todd Strandberg” and “The Rapture Index (Mad Theology),” “X-Raying Margaret,” “Humbug Huebner,” “Thieves’ Marketing,” “Appendix F: Thou Shalt Not Steal,” “The Unoriginal John Darby,” “Pretrib Hypocrisy,” “The Real Manuel Lacunza,” “Roots of (Warlike) Christian Zionism,” “America’s Pretrib Rapture Traffickers,” “Pretrib Rapture – Hidden Facts,” “Dolcino? Duh!” and “Scholars Weigh My Research.” Most of the above is written by journalist/historian Dave MacPherson who has focused on long-hidden pretrib rapture history for 35+ years. No one else has focused on it for 35 months or even 35 weeks. MacPherson has been a frequent radio talk show guest and he states that all of his royalties have always gone to a nonprofit group and not to any individual. His No. 1 book on all this is “The Rapture Plot” (see Armageddon Books online, etc.). The amazing thing is how long it has taken the mainstream media to finally notice and expose this unbelievably groundless yet extremely lucrative theological hoax!
I’ll use an analogy I saw on the Internet once that describes how people are fooled by the prophecy hoaxers. A traveler sees an archer in the woods and notices five arrows in five trees each one right dead center in the middle of a white circle. The traveler approaches the archer and asks, “How did you ever become such a great shot? How did you get all those arrows so perfectly in the middle of those circles?” “Easy,” said the archer, ‘”First I shot the arrows and then I painted the circles around them.”
There you have it. In the Bible the arrows are the prophecies and the circles the fictional events written to conform to earlier prophecies. The set up and pay off of ancient classical literature. That’s all it is. So all you believers can stop believing the Bible has magical boogy powers now. It doesn’t, it says the earth is flat.
Wow, Boris, thanks for the heads-up! I’d never heard that analogy before. Yawn…
Of course, you presuppose the non-existence of the divine or supernatural, so you are forced to assume (not prove) that all prophecy is bogus. This leaves very little room for an open and honest dialogue on these matters.
For example, the title of the blog you link to is “Jesus Never Existed”. Interestingly, I recently listened to Prof. Bart Ehrman – no friend of orthodox Christianity – argue with a radical atheist radio host that NO RESPECTED HISTORIAN BELIEVES JESUS NEVER EXISTED. The problem, Boris, is that your hatred of Christ blinds you to historical realities that even the best agnostic/atheist academics readily admit.
So, Boris, you’re just as much a “fundamentalist” as those you rip.
I always find it curious when the anti-dispensational, anti-pre-trib rapture folks say that these doctrines did not exist until some specific time, often seems to be around the 19th century as mentioned above. Have they not read the Bible? God has dealt with mankind in different ways at different times. To give just two examples we have the Old Covenant from whence comes the title in English of Old Testament and the New Covenant from whence comes the title in English of New Testament. These are two manners of God dealing with humans. They represent two different dispensations. I could go on, suffice it to say that even non-dispensationalists believe in dispensations, even if they despise the terminology. Concerning a pre-tribulation rapture, it can certainly be soundly supported from the Bible even if not proved as certain, the same could be said of a mid-tribulation rapture stance. I would find it difficult to support a post-trib. rapture stance and the amillenial stance strikes me as coming from someone who has either never read the Bible or just doesn’t understand what it says. Jesus had a lot to say about end-time events. I am not sure why so many Christians disdain the observation of the our present time and lining things up with Scripture.
Mike in Mound (Mound, MN?) -
First, why do you find the challenge of novelty “curious”? I think it’s a very good challenge – one of many that dissuaded me from holding the position. Does it not concern you at all that your eschatological views have been held by NO ONE outside the last 200 years (at best)? It should.
Second, it is an awfully ignorant and uncharitable charge against those who disagree with your eschatological system to say that they “never read the Bible or just doesn’t understand what it says”. Do you really believe this? Virtually all the Reformers were Amil. Jonathan Edwards was Postmil. Do you really believe all these men and others today – like R.C. Sproul – have “never read the Bible or just don’t understand what it says”? Good grief…
While I strongly disagree with a Pre-trib/Dispensational Premillennialism, I know there are very intelligent and godly men – like John McArthur – who hold the position. Eschatology is not an issue to divide over.