October, 1995

Dear ICE Subscriber:

One of the most famous stories in the Bible is the story of Moses' call by God to return to Egypt, challenge the Pharaoh, and deliver the Israelites out of bondage. Here was a seemingly contented sheepherder who had been doing his work in total obscurity for forty years. God was calling him to a new occupation: national deliverer. As it turned out, the job was a lot like what he had been doing for four decades: herding sheep. This was how Jesus later described the pastorate — pastor as in pastoral — to Peter.

We know about Moses' resistance to God's call:

And Moses said unto God, Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt? (Ex. 3:11).

And Moses answered and said, But, behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The LORD hath not appeared unto thee (Ex. 4:1).

And Moses said unto the LORD, O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue (Ex. 4:10).

In short, "send somebody else." But God sent Moses. God offered Moses this explanation for His decision to send someone to deliver His people:

And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows. And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey. . . . (Ex. 3:7-8a).

The people of Israel were crying out, and God had heard. They wanted deliverance. As it turned out, once God had delivered them out of Egypt and into the wilderness, they grew impatient. Where was the promised land? Behind them, they concluded.

We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick (Num. 11:5).

And wherefore hath the LORD brought us unto this land, to fall by the sword, that our wives and our children should be a prey? were it not better for us to return into Egypt? And they said one to another, Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt (Num. 14:3-4).

The reality was this: the Israelites were slaves, through and through. They had cried out to God for deliverance from their servitude, but they wanted deliverance on their terms, not His. They wanted the safe and secure life of the slave but without the bondage. They wanted heaven on earth. Once in the wilderness, they wanted what psychologist Eric Fromm called an escape from freedom. Because of this, they died in the wilderness. They were not fit to conquer Canaan militarily, let alone build a new civilization.

When we look at the evangelical Protestant world in the United States, we see people in bondage. The major institutions are all in the hands of humanists. The judiciary, the media, the universities, the public school systems: all are explicitly non-Christian. Whoever wishes to participate in the professions must be screened and certified by those who are at war with God. They control the entry points of a bureauctaric society.

Christians know that they are second-class citizens. For two generations — from the Scopes "money trial" of 1925 until Jimmy Carter's candidacy — fundamentalists remained conscious of their impotence politically and culturally, and they reveled in it. "Impotent and proud of it!" was their battle cry. They were sure that Jesus was coming again soon to Rapture them to the great welfare State in the sky. The old line that "everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die" is the heart, mind, and soul of dispensational premillennialism. Dispensationalists really do expect heaven without death. Furthermore, they will not tolerate the idea of a Great Tribulation prior to the Rapture. "We're all pre-Tribs here!" So, the worse things got after 1925, the better they liked it.

Of course, things were pretty good. Compared to the lives of Christians living in Red China, behind the Iron Curtain, or in Saudi Arabia, America was fat city. But men judge the times by the times their parents had. Before 1917, ours was a Protestant culture.

What explains the enormous sale of science-fantasy novels like The Late Great Planet Earth? Fundamentalist Christians' desire to escape from freedom. Freedom brings with it responsibility. Responsibility brings with it the burden of solving the sin-cursed hard problems of life. Protestant fundamentalists for a century have wanted access to the Promised Land of heaven on their terms: no Red Sea crossing, no wilderness, no life-threatening battles, no conquest, and please, no manna. They want to eat quail.

In 1993 and 1994, a similar desire to escape from freedom flared up in amillennial circles. Harold Camping's book, 1994?, did for amillennialists what Edgar Whisnant's 88 Reasons Why the Rapture is in 1988 did for dispensationalists in 1988: goose bumps for readers and a goose egg for accuracy. In 1994, Hal Lindsey presented us with a poorly typeset re-hash of Late Great Planet Earth (but without C. C. Carlson to help him this time), Planet Earth—2000 A.D.: Will Mankind Survive? Mankind will survive, unlike Mr. Lindsey's book sales, which apparently got Raptured back in 1985 or thereabouts.

Dispensational churches have rarely sounded the alarm against paperback prophetic sensationalism. Every time a wave of prophetic nonsense sweeps through the fundamentalist world, the pastors remain silent, knowing that the latest wave will pass. But silence is not enough. People get burned out by eschatological sensationalism. Meanwhile, the old-time dispensational theology receives scant attention in the pulpits of the church growth movement. When Dallas Seminary replaced theology courses with counselling courses in the late 1970's, the handwriting was on the wall. The market was shifting. It still is.

Scofield's dispensationalism is in decline. There will continue to be outbreaks of Rapture fever, but each time, the victims are left weaker than before. Like malaria, Rapture fever keeps returning to afflict the original victims, but the quinine of church growth theology, self-help theology, and other symptom-fighting theologies will be applied to the victims. Like quinine, these theologies do not cure the patient, but they at least relieve the worst of the spasms. (Actually, the new malarial strains are unaffected by quinine.)

The problem with imminent return eschatologies, whether premillennial or amillennial, is that they resign the slaves to their bondage. The slaves do not pray to God for deliverance out of servitude. Instead, they pray for deliverance out of history. If deliverance means deliverance out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, through the wilderness, and across the borders of Canaan, they want no part of deliverance. They, unlike the Israelite slaves in Egypt, have no illusions about the costs of deliverance in history: freedom, authority, and responsibility. They want no part of deliverance in history. They want no contemporary Moses because they know what Moses brought with him: ten commandments and a lot of responsibility. They are like the slaves of Moses youth: content to live under Egyptian bondage rather than under God's revealed law. They complain, but they do not mature. They cry for deliverance, but only out of history. God understands exactly what this modern prayer for deliverance means:

We would rather remain in bondage to the religion of secular humanism, living on the scraps that fall from humanism's table, rather than preach Christianity as God's mandatory replacement for humanism's worldwide civilization.

Christians today hate the biblical ideal of Christendom with all of their hearts, minds, and souls. So, God grants them their prayer. He allows them to remain in bondage.

Having prayed this prayer, Christians then seek to justify it. They have invented entire theologies to justify it. These theologies combine an eschatology of earthly defeat for the Church, a rejection of biblical law, and the acceptance of political pluralism. They all rest on some version of natural law and "equal time for Jesus." The humanists grant this request only in the early stages of humanism. Once humanists have captured the reigns of power, they replace "equal time for Jesus" with "as little time for Jesus as we can get the courts to decree." Christian intellectuals say they are astounded by this. "No fair!"

Christians believe in natural law theory. They think there is some neutral realm of ethics and civil law to which all people can successfully appeal. Well, not quite all people. There are exceptions. These exceptions include Muslims, Hindus, Communists, feminists, New Age mystics, Zen Buddhists, relativists, existentialists, and members of the National Education Association. But just about everyone else does. So we are assured.

The trouble is, no one has ever produced a natural law theory, let alone a natural law-based international constitution, that has gained agreement across national borders. Also, no Christian has ever produced an explicitly Bible-based theory of politics that shows how natural law principles can serve as the judicial basis of a civil order. But Christians keep pretending that someone has written such a book, and that there have been many practical applications of it in history. They preach natural law and equal time for Jesus. Jesus preached differently:

All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen (Matt. 28:18b–20).

The Great Commission's comprehensive claims are the inescapable implications of Christ's ascension. But the doctrine of the ascension is barely mentioned in modern systematic theologies, and its implications are never pursued. There is no New Testament doctrine that is more self-consciously ignored in our day. The doctrine of Christ's bodily ascension defines the limits of the Great Commission. There are no limits. Not wanting to admit the existence of such an enormous responsibility, the evangelical Church categorically refuses to discuss the doctrine of the ascension.

Modern pessimillennialism has transformed the message of Christ's bodily ascension into the doctrine of the Church's bodily ascension. Such an ascension there will be, but not before the fulfillment of the Great Commission. The modern Church wants bodily ascension out of history prior to its fulfillment of the Great Commission. But Paul explicitly denied that this is possible. The resurrection of the dead will come only after the last enemy, death, has been put under Christ's feet (I Cor. 15:24–26). No doctrine is more hated by premillennialists and amillennialists than this one. This is the great stumbling block. This is why Kenneth Gentry's book, The Greatness of the Great Commission, is so important. It is the most effective New Testament-based response to pietism that I've ever read.

Sincerely,