Deprogramming : Doomsday Part I
By Anthony David Jacques on November 13, 2011
I can recall the day my father explained to me how most software since the invention of the computer used a two-digit numeral system for keeping track of the year, and why this was a potential problem for the coming new millennium. It was the mid-nineties, and his job was to debug what became the most notable non-apocalypse in recent memory.
I was transitioning from middle to high school, Y2K was coming at the speed of life, and people like my father were hard at work to protect civilization from its all but certain collapse into anarchy.
Some (though probably not many) will remember Jerry Fallwell’s video, A Christian’s Survival Guide to the Millennium Bug, where he told his followers to stock up on food, gasoline and ammunition in preparation for the end of the world once the ball dropped on New Year’s Day.
The year 2000 came and went, and other than the ravenous purchase of canned foot, bottled water, gasoline and ammunition leading up to the end of that year, nothing much happened and the world moved on. Still, it gives me some measure of comfort to know that the perceived threat had a tangible connection to reality. There really were computers that really could have crashed and caused real problems.
Now think back with me to May 20th of this year, when the rapture was once again scheduled to jump start some of the most exciting parts of the Bible. Remember when nothing happened? Some of you may have even had rapture parties to thumb a lighthearted nose at the whole debacle. I know I did.
As May 21st rolled around, did Harold Camping make any attempt to contact those he’d swindled out of close to seventeen million dollars in donations and arrange some sort of refund? Hardly. What he did was disappear for a few days, and I don’t blame him. It’s a spineless move, but if that whole debacle had been my fault, I wouldn’t want anyone, especially those whom I had financially ruined, to find me either.
What I’m drawing here is a contrast between the way we have learned many things from the Y2K fiasco, which had some connection to reality, yet when it comes to unfounded, unverifiable doomsday prophecy, for many the motto remains whitewash, rinse, repeat.
In the face of verifiable disconfirmation, guys like Camping never admit they were wrong. His follow-up Armageddon prophecy last month coasted by almost entirely unnoticed. And most have forgotten that he first predicted the end of the world in 1994. That’s three strikes.
My family wasn’t taken in by Camping, nor by Fallwell and his Y2K fears, and I can venture a guess as to why.
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I must have been seven years old when my mother told me that it didn’t matter what I wanted to be when I grew up because the world was about to come to an end. Nauseous, I remember how I gathered my Legos and Hot Wheels around me in my bedroom and cried.
My mother had been reading Hal Lindsey’s Late, Great Planet Earth and she believed that the eighties were probably going to be the last decade of human history. That was 1988, and a lot has happened since then.
Not long after my mother dashed my dreams of growing up to be the next Van Halen, I rather wryly asked a Sunday School teacher what Jesus meant when he said that he would return within the lifetime of the people he was talking to (Matthew 16:28).
The joke I was aiming for was that those men would have to be really old by now since Jesus was still gone. Yet I remember this woman gasping, red faced, dragging me up stairs to sit with my parents in “big church”. I just thought it was sort of funny, the image in my head of two-thousand year old men hobbling around, amazed at things like cars and light bulbs. I had no appreciation for the broad scope of theological implications related to the discrepancy I’d picked up on.
Later that day, (and many times since then), I was told that Jesus didn’t really mean what Matthew reports him saying. At an age where I implicitly believed anything an authority figure told me, I just nodded my head and said, “Oh, okay”.
Imagine my surprise when, sometime in high school, I found out that the early church really did radically change their lives because of the expectation of Christ’s Second Coming within their lifetimes. They believed that scripture as literal, and they should have known. It was their lifetime’s Jesus was talking about.
I was further amazed (long after Bible college) to learn about the Doctrine of the Wandering Jew which, many scholars say, finds its roots directly connected to that verse in Matthew. This doctrine plainly states since Jesus could not have lied, someone standing there with him the day he uttered that prediction must still be alive, bound to wander the earth until the Second Coming. I couldn’t help feeling a little burned that the many professors I had approached about that passage in Matthew had all essentially explained it away with semantics.
Let’s make it simple: If Jesus didn’t mean what he said, why did people in the first century drop everything and live communally in expectation of His imminent return? Why did the Catholic Church feel the need to create this Doctrine of the Wandering Jew and maintain it for so long? If either of these are the case, then the church itself would lose credibility in understanding their own text from the very beginning.
No, this will not do. It is crystal clear that these semantic excuses are post-hoc reasoning crafted by modern apologists in order to save face in the light of historical and textual criticism. A failed prophecy is a failed prophecy no matter how you squint at it. For those who claim it is a metaphor I simply ask, for what? No one has ever answered that question without logically floundering.
The conclusion on this point is clear: One of the three largest religions on the face of the planet today is quite literally founded on belief in Jesus and his teachings, on his words and deeds as reported the four Gospels and what they imply about life, the universe and everything; and yet we can see that one of the most basic, clear and verifiable predictions he (allegedly) uttered has unambiguously failed.
This is why I think most Christians don’t really read their Bibles, and those who do only read looking for “what is God telling me?” when they should be asking themselves, “Is the evidence solid enough to base my entire life on?”
As I related in my previous post, according to Matthew, Jesus couldn’t even predict the amount of time he’d spend in the grave (he says three days and three nights, or 72 hours, and each of the four gospels reports it was only 36 hours. Jesus was wrong by half. Half!)
Is anyone even paying attention?
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Deprogramming Series
Good post and overall series so far. I think it helps your case that Paul also thought the end was imminent. Many Christians seem to actually revere Paul over Jesus.