February, 1996

Dear ICE Subscriber:

Americans live, at best, in a Baptist culture. This has been true for over a century. From under 500 congregations in 1780 to 54,000 in 1900, this has been a Baptist culture. Only the Methodists have rivaled the Baptists: from under a hundred congregations in 1780 to almost 50,000 in 1900.

What have we got to show for it culturally? Country music. Country music is hardly a substitute for Bach. Much as I like it, neither is bluegrass. Bach is better.

We live in a world in which some five billion people are now alive. Maybe it's six billion. Anyway, more people are alive today than have ever been alive in recorded history. Every one of them has, in Franklin Roosevelt's words, a rendezvous with destiny. If the Holy Spirit does not act to bring revival in our generation, the vast majority of these people will be resurrected with perfect bodies to experience an eternity of screaming agony in the lake of fire, tortured without mercy by the God of the Bible forever (Rev. 20:14–15). That prospect so disturbs modern neo-evangelicals that over half of the 400 or so neo-evangelical theologians who met in 1989 voted against accepting the doctrine of hell. Evangelism for these men has become this: "Are you saved?" "From what?" "Why, from soul-sleep — you know: what the Seventh Day Adventists believe in."

If revival comes, the Baptists will get most of the converts in North America. Baptists have the most churches here, and new converts will go where it is convenient. The Pentecostals will get most of them in South America. The question I ask is this: What difference, culturally, would the conversion of five billion people make? That is to say, what difference does the Baptist subculture make today? The answer is obvious: hardly any. That is what the Baptists and Pentecostals implicitly teach.

Baptists and Pentecostals are for the most part dispensationalists. Dispensationalism teaches that the Church will be removed from history at the secret Rapture. So irrelevant is the Church that its removal will be a secret. What follows? The build-up of the Antichrist's military forces to surround Jerusalem for three and a half years.

Think about this. First, the massed armies of the whole earth cannot subdue tiny Israel, basically only Jerusalem, for three and a half years. Improbable? This improbability has been believed by the vast majority of fundamentalists for over a century. Second, the Antichrist will have no trouble gathering his massive, though remarkably inefficient, army. There will be tanks, Cobra helicopters, and all the other military paraphernalia that give goosebumps to readers of dispensational novels. (Dave Hunt asked Whatever Happened to Heaven? I ask: What ever happened to dispensational theology? Novels are everywhere.)

Consider what this means. Without the presence of the Church of Jesus Christ in history, the only difference will be that Jerusalem is surrounded for 3.5 years. There will be no breakdown in technology, no loss of income to the State, no great discontinuity in culture. The only difference is that Jerusalem will be surrounded. That is to say, the only significant function of the Church of Jesus Christ today is to act as a political buffer for the State of Israel. In dispensational theology, this is the Church's highest eschotological function — not the preaching of the gospel, not the building of the kingdom of God in history, not the extension of the Great Commission across the face of the earth, but its buffer function for the State of Israel. The post-Rapture world will blunder along quite well, thank you, without the presence of Christ's Church, under the reign of the Antichrist, except for the "Jerusalem thing." That will bring God's wrath upon the Antichrist and his followers. But until then, it will be smooth sailing. This is the heart of dispensationalism's political theory.

Dispensational theology teaches that the Church of Jesus Christ must remain a side show in world civilization. What matters — really, truly matters — is what goes on in Palestine. The State of Israel will persevere through time; the Church will not. The Church will be raptured out of history for seven years, and the world will barely notice its absence. But the State of Israel? Not even the massed forces of the New World Order's armies will be able to defeat the State of Israel. It is clear who the apple of God's eye really is, historically speaking, in dispensational theology: the State of Israel.

At the heart of dispensational theology, therefore, is an unstated assumption. I have never seen any reference to it. It hit me a few months ago. "The Church is so irrelevant that its removal would make almost no visible difference in the day-to-day operations of the world." The defenders of dispensationalism have made a matter of prophecy what is clearly the case today, namely, that the Church of Jesus Christ makes no visible difference. This is why the secret Rapture will be such a secret. No one will miss the Church. That is to say, the Church plays no significant role in history today except as Israel's buffer.

Consider legalized abortion. What difference has the Church made? What difference has the Southern Baptist Convention made in the South? Baptists are in a majority politically in the South. What difference have Southern Baptists made in the crusade against the legalization of abortion? None that I can see. When we think anti-abortion in America, we think Phyllis Schlafly (Roman Catholic) or Randall Terry (Pentecostal). We do not think "South"; we think "Midwest" or "Northeast."

Before our local abortionist died on the ski slopes of Colorado — the last time things seemed cool to him — a handful of us would picket his clinic regularly. There was a Roman Catholic who picketed every morning — unfortunately, before there were any clients in the parking lot. Ray Sutton and I picketed two hours a week. One other lady picketed regularly. That was it, for five years. A few Pentecostals came out once a year to picket for a day or two. They would shout, "God loves you!" to the reprobate as he drove to work in his new Oldsmobile. They were wrong. God hated him. But he was a member in good standing in some local liberal mainline denomination, and he could as easily have been a Baptist. Why not?

One day, a local TV news crew came by to do some interviews. It was during the week of January 22, as I remember. We were reminding people (we hoped) of the Supreme Court's death sentence to (then) 20 million Americans. There were a lot of picketers out that day. I was not asked any questions, but I told this to the lady doing the interviews:

We pro-life people ought to spread the rumor that the abortionist gives a glass of beer to his patients after he has aborted their children in order to steady their nerves. If the Baptists in this town heard that, half of them would be down here picketing tomorrow.

I live in a "dry" county. You can't buy a bottle of beer. But you can get an abortion — or could, until that man died on the ski slopes of Colorado in 1991. Today, I am happy to say, nobody performs abortions in my town, as far as we know. A few picketers placed a kind of barrier of embarrassment around the practice. But not one of them was a Baptist minister.

From the repeal of the 18th Amendment in 1933 until the Carter candidacy of 1976, Bible-believing American Protestants had nothing unique to say. They disappeared from the political radar screens of American life. They were without a national spokesman until Billy Graham appeared on the scene in the Los Angeles crusade in 1949, and William Randolph Hearst sent down his memo, "Puff Graham." Puff indeed. And huff. But what difference has Graham's ministry made, culturally speaking? What prophetic witness has he made against legalized abortion or anything else, at least since the day that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., donated $75,000 to his 1958 New York Crusade, and Graham accepted co-sponsorship of the crusade by the National Council of Churches? Blue eyes do not a prophet make.

The problem we face today is that the Church of Jesus Christ is at peace with the world. Its members laugh at the same salacious TV sitcoms, cheer for the same professional sports teams on Sunday afternoon, and vote for the same Presidential candidates — none of whom has ever been an evangelical Christian in over two centuries — every four years. There is no distinguishing cultural mark of the evangelical Christian today. He does not tithe to his local church. He does not picket the local abortionist every week. In the South, he is far more concerned with the win-loss record of the local public high school's football team than he is about the content of its textbooks.

Dorothy Parker, when informed that Calvin Coolidge had died, responded: "How can they tell?" If the pre-tribulation Rapture doctrine were true, that would also be the world's proper response to the announcement that today's evangelical Church was gone.

In a pragmatic culture, whatever works is considered good. What works today is abortion-on-demand. As long as the U.S. stock market is rising, nobody cares that over a million pre-born infants are destroyed each year in this country, and about 35 to 50 million worldwide. For as long as God pours His positive sanctions on the heads of a rebellious civilization, few people will pay attention to the Bible's warning of hell to come. If there is no visible cause and effect between covenant-breaking and negative corporate sanctions, then men will not believe in negative sanctions to come in eternity. Jonah did not get Nineveh to repent with a message of humanly unpredictable negative corporate sanctions. They responded to this warning: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown" (Jonah 3:4b).

Today, prophecy has ceased. No one has the authority of an Old Testament prophet, whose word took precedence over civil law. The canon of Scripture is closed. But we need to believe that the covenant still operates in history: there is a cause-and-effect relationship between corporate evil and corporate negative sanctions.

The modern Church does not believe this. This is what threatens our civilization today. If five billion people are not to perish eternally, there must be a great, unprecedented revival. But where will the new converts go? Into churches that make no cultural difference and are proud of it? Into churches that are at peace with their role in the world as sideline cheerleaders for this or that humanist political fad, this or that Enlightenment worldview? Into churches whose presence in their communities makes no visible difference?

Or is a revival more likely to begin in the midst of God's corporate negative sanctions? Is it more likely to occur when

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end. Then they cry unto the LORD in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven (Psalm 107:23–30).

It is our job to plant seeds of doubt, of discontent, regarding the long-term viability of the covenant-breaking world around us. It is also our job to plant seeds of reform. We cannot legitimately expect to beat something that is comprehensively evil with nothing in particular. My prayer is that we can provide alternatives, so that when God's negative sanctions come, and a great revival follows, Christians will not be struck dumb when new converts in places of authority ask them: "How should we then live?" Francis Schaeffer asked this question, but his premillennialism and his forthright rejection of biblical law made it impossible for him to answer it, as his book eloquently reveals. We must do better. We are not afflicted with Schaeffer's eschatology or his common-ground ethical theory.

Sincerely,