I see that Harold Camping has said that he miscalculated the date of the Last Judgment and Rapture and that it is now for sure going to be October 21. Myself, I think it is either going to be February 30 or 31. You can pick the year.
According to the New Testament, one of the signs of the "end times" is that there will be a great apostasy from the faith. It is certainly true that this seems to be happening today. There's a lot of folks out there who want very little to do with organized religion in general and Christianity in particular. Agnostics and atheists are also becoming more visible. So there does seem to be a decline going on. But is it going on for the reasons that the New Testament gives? I don't think so.
In the first place, Christianity started out as an apocalyptic sect. If you sit down and read all the references to the end time and second coming, it becomes very obvious that the earliest Christians all believed that this would happen within their lifetimes, within a few decades at best. They had no idea that two thousand years would pass before Harold Camping made his prediction. I think that is what won people over, the idea that very soon all their troubles would be over; they would be saved from this life and the next. This can be a very attractive idea to people who are burdened with troubles and don't know where to turn for help.
I suspect, though, as the decades started dragging by and life remained much the same, people started having second thoughts, and this is what prompted all the remarks about apostasy and the end times. Meanwhile Christianity was starting to splinter. All those warnings about false teachers? Paul and company had competition and they didn't like it. They wanted to be the only game in town.
Well, it turns out that the early church wasn't as unified as the nuns liked to tell us kids it was. There have been several "Great Apostasy's", depending on whose point of view it was. From the Catholic perspective, the Protestant Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries certainly qualified as one. I don't think that it was any coincidence that the Reformation broke out not long after Europe learned that there was a whole new world out there that they hadn't known about before. Prior to that there had been some breakaway groups like the Anabaptists, but nothing like what happened after Luther came on the scene. I suspect that learning about the existence of new continents caused some people to question what they had been taught as they tried to bring this new knowledge into line with what they had always "known" as true. The Catholic church at first tried to stamp out its newfound competition but when that failed, retreated to a "shut-down" mode in which it remained essentially frozen for 500 years until the reforms of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II in the early 1960's.
I think that the "apostasy" that we are seeing today has roots in the scientific revolution which started during the Enlightenment period. Both the BBC series "Lark Rise to Candleford" and the novel "Oil" speak of the conflicts people were having as they were trying to reconcile the new things scientists were saying with what their preachers had always taught. "Oil" comes right out and mentions that there are "books that are deadly to faith." The Catholic church agreed. In 1870 it came out with the Index of Forbidden Books. It was quite a lengthy list. I believe that it was abolished during Vatican II. At least it isn't spoken much of anymore. But it was a very serious matter to be found reading anything on that list. Darwin, naturally, was one of the banned authors.
It all goes back to the idea that faith is fragile and easily snuffed out, especially in its early stages. "Baby" Christians, especially, have to be protected. But seriously, what good is a faith that has to be coddled, that can't stand up to life's realities? Sooner or later, it will backfire, and I think that this is what is happening here with the "Great Apostasy" of our times.
According to the New Testament, one of the signs of the "end times" is that there will be a great apostasy from the faith. It is certainly true that this seems to be happening today. There's a lot of folks out there who want very little to do with organized religion in general and Christianity in particular. Agnostics and atheists are also becoming more visible. So there does seem to be a decline going on. But is it going on for the reasons that the New Testament gives? I don't think so.
In the first place, Christianity started out as an apocalyptic sect. If you sit down and read all the references to the end time and second coming, it becomes very obvious that the earliest Christians all believed that this would happen within their lifetimes, within a few decades at best. They had no idea that two thousand years would pass before Harold Camping made his prediction. I think that is what won people over, the idea that very soon all their troubles would be over; they would be saved from this life and the next. This can be a very attractive idea to people who are burdened with troubles and don't know where to turn for help.
I suspect, though, as the decades started dragging by and life remained much the same, people started having second thoughts, and this is what prompted all the remarks about apostasy and the end times. Meanwhile Christianity was starting to splinter. All those warnings about false teachers? Paul and company had competition and they didn't like it. They wanted to be the only game in town.
Well, it turns out that the early church wasn't as unified as the nuns liked to tell us kids it was. There have been several "Great Apostasy's", depending on whose point of view it was. From the Catholic perspective, the Protestant Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries certainly qualified as one. I don't think that it was any coincidence that the Reformation broke out not long after Europe learned that there was a whole new world out there that they hadn't known about before. Prior to that there had been some breakaway groups like the Anabaptists, but nothing like what happened after Luther came on the scene. I suspect that learning about the existence of new continents caused some people to question what they had been taught as they tried to bring this new knowledge into line with what they had always "known" as true. The Catholic church at first tried to stamp out its newfound competition but when that failed, retreated to a "shut-down" mode in which it remained essentially frozen for 500 years until the reforms of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II in the early 1960's.
I think that the "apostasy" that we are seeing today has roots in the scientific revolution which started during the Enlightenment period. Both the BBC series "Lark Rise to Candleford" and the novel "Oil" speak of the conflicts people were having as they were trying to reconcile the new things scientists were saying with what their preachers had always taught. "Oil" comes right out and mentions that there are "books that are deadly to faith." The Catholic church agreed. In 1870 it came out with the Index of Forbidden Books. It was quite a lengthy list. I believe that it was abolished during Vatican II. At least it isn't spoken much of anymore. But it was a very serious matter to be found reading anything on that list. Darwin, naturally, was one of the banned authors.
It all goes back to the idea that faith is fragile and easily snuffed out, especially in its early stages. "Baby" Christians, especially, have to be protected. But seriously, what good is a faith that has to be coddled, that can't stand up to life's realities? Sooner or later, it will backfire, and I think that this is what is happening here with the "Great Apostasy" of our times.
