Episode Details

A historian takes us on a journey through two millennia of evolution of Christian understanding about “the End Times”.

In last week’s episode, we compared two pictures of “the End Times”: one drawn by modern day Evangelicals, and the other drawn by Jesus while he was teaching in Palestine. And we found that those two pictures look completely different; the modern Evangelical picture always includes four main ingredients which Jesus’ picture just does not have:

• the Rapture
• the mark of the Beast
• a personified Antichrist
• complete global destruction (especially in America)

I fully expect push back on that claim, so let me be clear: there are elements in the Gospel accounts which can be manipulated and distorted to resemble those four ingredients (John’s Book of Revelation is a different story). And the first two of those are the ones that are the biggest causes of anxiety and fear in people who suffer psychological trauma from the Left Behind books/movies (we’ll explore that psychological perspective next week).

We wanted to understand how/why/when that understanding of “the End Times” changed so much in the two thousand years since Jesus. So we brought in Dr. Gord Heath, a Professor of Christian History, to take us on a journey through church time. At each important stop along that journey, I keep asking him: “is this where they start talking about the Rapture or the mark of the Beast?” [Remember: #1 and #2 in my list above, and which cause the most psychological trauma] And the same answer keeps coming up: “well …. no, actually.” Not until we get to the 19^th and 20^th centuries do we find that those four elements are brought in by a strand of thinking referred to as Dispensationalism. It’s completely a modern invention (when we’re measuring on a time-frame stretching 2000 years)!?

We also found out last week that this Dispensationalist-invented version