"The real tragedy" - sure sounded like it.
No, the tragedy is that among Christians who still recognize what is a sin, they are distracted by eschatological speculations motivated by concepts unknown in the Church before John Nelson Darby introduced them in the 19th century as part of his novel “premillenial dispensationalism”, introduced in the context of the restorationist Plymouth Brethren, a denomination known for innovation and for underemphasizing the value of repentance among its own members in favor of a holier-than-thou disposition regarding the outside world, based on an extreme triumphalism, particularly among the Closed Brethren with which John Nelson Darby was affiliated.
Thus, the eschatological speculations of Christians distracted by his eschatological innovation distract them from the task of repentance, the very idea of which is downplayed as “works righteousness” despite the fact that St. Paul wrote that we must work out our salvation with fear and trembling, and likened the Christian life to a race, that is to say, a struggle to resist sin, and warned that various categories of unrepentant sinners, not limited to sodomy but also including many sins that the decision of the mainline churches to embrace sexual immorality and pride has distracted attention away from. Thus, we speculate about the Rapture and about the details of a future tribulation, and who will be taken up, and how, and when, and what will become of those “left behind” and what nations will make war on what other nations corresponding to Gog and Magog, which are, I propose, idle speculations, for we cannot fully know until these events have happened, and also since none of us knows when Christ will return, whether it will be tomorrow or a hundred trillion years hence, or any other future time you can think of, instead of focusing on praying to God to forgive our sins and asking for God the Holy Spirit and our angels to assist us in resisting the temptation to engage in them, we instead have churches that take the time that should be spent on that part of the Gospel, which is asking for the forgiveness that Christ promises we will receive if we ask for it, and also in forgiving others who have sinned against us, and asking God’s forgiveness for those occasions when we have failed by not immediately seeking the forgiveness of others, or indeed in presuming moral superiority, which to be clear, I do not presume; I am not by any means claiming I am morally superior to John Nelson Darby, for I have no doubt he was a more decent man than myself; I object only to his erroneous teaching and the adverse affect it has had on the life of the faithful.
The essential reality of why eschatological speculation of the sort promoted by Premillenial Dispensationalism is a spiritual distraction and has become unhealthy for Christians is that we will face the judgement of Christ Pantocrator following our death, unless Christ comes before our death, but since so many things can happen that will kill us, we must prepare for to face Christ on that basis, with the knowledge that we ourselves could die tomorrow, perhaps die an hour before his return, but the effect would ultimately be the same, for we will be judged by Him regardless. This is why we should repent of our sins rather than focusing on eschatological speculation, particularly of the sort encouraged by premillenial dispensationalism, which seems to, with its concept of the Rapture and a pre-millenial tribulation, arouse a certain morbid curiosity which manifests itself in the success of works like Left Behind, the writings of preachers of that inclination such as Rev. Hal Lindsay, and in other respects.
That is the real tragedy, that those Christians, particularly in Protestant Christianity, since premillenial dispensationalism has been condemned by the Eastern churches and Eastern Christians are blessed with a unique ability to resist adverse change, so while on occasion, bad decisions have been made, usually they are resisted (for example, the bishops at the Council of Florence voted to subordinate the Eastern Orthodox to the Pope, with the noteworthy exception of St. Mark of Ephesus, but the people resisted and prevented the implementation of the council, knowing that this would mean the probable fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Turks, sacrificing their personal freedom for the preservation of the Orthodox Christian Faith as they had received it. And they endured three hundred years of oppression, and the so far permanent loss of Asia Minor (also known as the Anatolian Peninsula) and some portions of Europe to the Muslims, but in return were blessed with many crowns of martyrdom and the preservation of the central stability of their faith, which we have lost in the West as a result of the mainline churches, for reasons obviously unrelated to Premillenial Dispensationalism, since obviously, premillenial dispensationalism had nothing to do with the rise of of the liberal movement within the mainline Protestant churches, for indeed during the lifetime of John Nelson Darby, liberal Christianity was being invented by the Unitarians and the Universalist Church, which would later merger in the US to form the UUA, and become almost entirely apostate, with the exception of a few parishes which continue to practice an heretical non-Trinitarian degenerate form of Christianity, but unfortunately liberal Christianity would not be contained there, but would infect the entire Western Church, taking root in Roman Catholicism and in all of the branches of Protestantism.
This is why I am particularly surprised that I had to write this post explaining my earlier post, because to me, the idea that premillenial dispensationalism, for all of its faults, caused the disaster that is the fall of the mainline churches is a complete non-sequitur, and I had assumed, which is so often a bad idea, but I had nonetheless ill-advisedly assumed in error that my fellow members on this forum would understand that the “real tragedy” I was referring to was not that premillenial dispensationalism caused the disastrous embrace of pride and sexual immorality by the mainline churches, but was rather the extent to which conservative Protestants who have correctly resisted this embrace of the world by the mainline churches are, owing to a popular morbid fascination with the End Times, allowing themselves to be distracted from the work of repentance, and even marketed to (Left Behind has made its authors and many publishers and persons in the motion picture industry, not all of whom have motives driven purely by Christian piety, but in some cases could be, knowing Hollywood, motivatved purely by pecuniary considerations, as Hollywood has frequently aggressively marketed to Christians throughout its entire history, since Christianity is the largest religion in the world and by far the largest in the United States, and indeed the marketing teams for some films which are theologically … questionable, to put it mildly, such as Evan Almighty, made a specific effort to reach out to Christian churches.
Eschatology applies to all of us in the same way, in that Christ will sit in judgement over all of us as Pantocrator, and this is the case regardless of when He comes, what the rapture consists of, whether the early church with the Nicene Creed was correct or the modern day Chiliasts are correct and his reign will be forever or limited to a thousand years, and other issues. Thus, regardless of how we feel about the idea of the Temple being rebuilt and animal sacrifices being resumed during a hypothetical future millenial Kingdom, the New Testament makes it clear that we must repent and focus on doing those things Christ taught us to do.
Now, to be clear, I am not accusing anyone in this thread of overly concentrating on eschatology, rather, I am merely seeking to make a point that this is happening, and we ought to be trying to put out the fire of an excessive fascination with what are, I think, in terms of Christian salvation, secondary details about the return of Christ and the Last Judgement, because the primary things to remember are that Christ will return, and we will see Him, and be judged by HIm, whether or not we are around when He returns in glory or whether we die beforehand, and so it behooves us to repent and with great humility, encourage others who seek to follow Christ to repent as well, without claiming moral superiority over them.
There is also the important point that many non-Christians and apostates claim that the focus in evangelical churches on eschatology, driven by premillenial dispensationalism and works of this sort like Left Behind, the deceptively titled “King James Study Bible” which was given to me as a gift many years ago but which is also still available for sale, now with color illustrations, but which does not contain the entire text of the King James Bible, nor does it contain any Anglicans or members of the Church of Scotland, and there are many traditional Christians of conservative faith left in the Church of England, and even in the Episcopal Church USA, and also in the Continuing Anglican churches and ACNA, and in the Church of Scotland there are still some traditional Christians as well, and the King James Bible was originally made the Authorized Version by King James I of England and VII of Scotland in order to have one Bible for the two realms over which he was king, where previously the Presbyterians who controlled the Church of Scotland and their allies who wished to convert the Church of England to the same system had preferred the Geneva Bible, which featured traditional Calvinist commentary (likewise, the Roman Catholic Douai-Rheims features Roman Catholic doctrinal commentary), and the Anglican Bishops’ Bible did not, but was not trusted or accepted by the Presbyterians, probably because of the name, since they rejected the order of Bishops institutionally; the KJV is really an improved version of the Bishops’ Bible, but the wording is similar, so the translators of the KJV were essentially revising the former to improve its accuracy by comparing it with more sources, and it did include those books which the Anglicans call the Apocrypha, because they use them for moral instruction, but not as sources of doctrine, under the 39 Articles, particularly in the Divine Office of Morning and Evening Prayer (Mattins and Evensong). I don’t see how a book can be advertised as a KJV Study Bible while omitting those books, with a mere few pages dedicated to the concept, rejected by a majority of Christians (that is to say, by Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Orthodox Christians, who collectively outnumber Presbyterians, Baptists and other low church Protestants who doctrinally reject the Deuterocanonical books as a matter of dogmatic principle, despite their use in the early church; actually on this point I agree with the Ethiopian Orthodox, who alone include 1 Enoch in their Bible; everyone else excludes it, despite the fact that it is quoted in the Epistle of St. Jude, but I digress; the problem here is that the Western Church almost exclusively uses Antiochene literal-historical hermeneutics or a liberal reaction to them of extreme anti-literalism, whereas in the East both the Antiochene and the Alexandrian method of a more metaphorical approach are used together in a Christological-typological-prophetic method, which best fulfills the point made by Christ our True God at the end of the Gospel according to Luke, where he showed the disciples how all the books of the Law and the Prophets spoke about Him.
This segue takes us to my concluding criticism of Left Behind and of Premillenial Dispensationalism and the popular fascination with an erroneous eschatology that it engenders, that being that it does not treat the prophecies of the end times in a sufficiently Christological, Incarnational or Trinitarian manner. It is not sufficiently clear in the works of Premillenial Dispensationalists that Jesus Christ is God, coequal with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and the prophecies of the End TImes starting in the Old Testament and continuing right through the Apocalypse of St. John (Revelation) are not read in a sufficiently Christological matter. Not enough weight is placed on the point, depressing though it may be, that we will, regardless of whether or not we are alive when Christ returns, be judged by Him in the same manner. Ecclesiastes shows us that everything worldly is ultimately vanity; the Word of God became flesh and in the person of Jesus Christ, showed us that He was willing, as our creator, to condescend to become a part of our creation so as to liberate us from the endless evil and vanity that King Solomon realized dominated worldliness in Ecclesiastes, but not through the Escapism of the Gnostics, but through repentence and the redemption of our own flesh, so that we would be resurrected and raised incorruptible. So the outcome is the same whether we are alive when Christ returns or not. We will either be forgiven and spend an eternity with Christ in the light of the World to Come, or we will be condemned, for our own sake, and at our own desire, to the Outer Darkness, lest we be tormented by the Wrath of God, which is the experience of His Love by those people who have aligned themselves against Him, and thus experience His presence as an intolerable torment, for God is a burning fire, according to scripture.
I encourage members so inclined to check everything I have read against Scripture, and against the faith of the Nicene Church as expressed by St. Athanasius of Alexandria, St. Basil. St. Gregory Nazianzus, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Ephrem the Syrian, whether you agree with them or not (because if you disagree with the fourth century church fathers, then you can know the extent to which I might inadvertently fail to reliably repeat their doctrine).
