From: masimo@netcom.com (Michael Maas)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: There are two years left! [+ moderator's comment on apocalyptic]
Date: 13 Sep 92 02:20:42 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest)

[In response to the discussion on Camping's prediction of the end --clh]

I have seen Harold Camping, and heard him on the radio as well.  I tend to 
turn him off almost as quickly as I encounter him because I find his 
exegesis naive and trivial.  However, I have seen and heard enough to believe
that the man is sincere.  

That said, I want to bring up only one more point on this issue.  First, though
lest anyone guess wrong, I find this thread to be of only remote interest, and
that mainly because it amazes me how many people take this kind of thing
seriously in view of the dismal record such predictions have.

My question is this.  If the gospel must be preached onto all nations, how
can we know that this has happened when we can't even necessarily agree on 
what the gospel is amongst ourselves.  I think I know what the gospel is,
and it sure as heck doesn't have anything to do with the topic at hand.  
I'm sure that many of the contributors to this thread will disagree with
me about that just has they have about other issues. 

But, the bottom line for me is that I'm afraid that all of this literalism and
focus on rapture and stuff (the best term I can think of for it) only 
serves to draw us away from God, a God who quite simply calls us to love
God and neighbor as ourselves.  

If I had to take a stand on this, I guess I would have to side with those who 
maintain the best policy is to be always ready for we know not when the hour 
will come.  

However, I doubt that this stuff is really even relevant to our world today.  
We don't carry around the apocalyptic expectations that were such an ingrained 
aspect of the Judaism and Christianity of that time.  If we did, we would be 
thinking and speaking of it a whole lot more than we do.  Instead what we 
have is a different world view ripped out of its context and planted in a 20th
century context that is completely foreign to it.  The only way it is
understandable is to read a book, the bible, which any reasonable impartial
individual would read as a simple history of the development of two 
religious traditions, as somehow divinely inspired so as to be a book of
a class entirely different from other books of that milieu, and further to
read that book in a very limited literal sense that denies both the human
sensibilities of the authors and of the current readers.  In other words
the belief forces the literalism.  They go together.  

I think this is probably enough for now.

God calls us to live here and now not in the past, 
God calls us to our neighbors in Somalia, Yugoslavia, and down the street.
God calls us to help and to heal through God's love and the healing
	light of Christ.
God calls us to bring God to those who don't know God that they might
	know God as they are known by God personally, intimately and lovingly.

Mike

[God also calls us to be ready to meet him.  That's the focus of many
of Jesus' parables.  The apocalyptic outlook does look foreign to most
of us.  This is not new.  Rev. is one of the few books which Calvin
almost never quoted.  I may never exactly recover the 1st Cent.
attitude towards apocalyptic.  But I do think Christianity needs to
have some appreciation for eternity as well as for this world.

From the perspective of this world, human beings look like transitory
and unimportant things.  History is made by nations and other
long-lived institutions.  Even buildings (though not most that are
being built these days) outlast us puny people.  It's all too easy to
say that the interests of a few people should be overriden by the need
to build up the State, or the Church, or whatever.  From the
perspective of eternity, this perspective is reversed.  The material
world is transitory, a place of preparation for humans.  This does not
mean we should fail to respect God's creation.  But ultimately it will
pass away (and we will pass away from it).  What will last is our
communion with God and each other.

This view should enhance our concern for other people.  With the NT,
we should see the Church as the place where a foretaste of eternity is
present in the world.  The remade City of God, the new Jerusalem of
Rev 3:12, is not just future.  It is continually in the process of
coming from God.

--clh]