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Existential Threats. Lisa Vox
Читать онлайн.Название Existential Threats
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isbn 9780812294019
Автор произведения Lisa Vox
Издательство Ingram
Though the story ends on an optimistic note with the narrator declaring, “We must build again,” Benét followed up the story with a poem the following year in the New Yorker.122 “Nightmare for Future Reference” looked forward to a third world war—“the one between us and them.”123 The poem describes the second year of the war when the birthrate decreases precipitously; as a result, women all over the world destroy the centers of government, and the war ends. Nevertheless, children do not start being born again, and the narrator in the poem concludes, “Well, we had a long run. That’s something.”124 Though not strictly grounded in science, Benét’s anticipation of wars so catastrophic captured the feeling that technology had advanced to the degree that humanity might not be able to withstand any further conflicts.
While promoters of science in the United States only gradually questioned the idea of progress, at the core of Christian premillennialism was the idea that no real progress was possible because sin had doomed the world. In the late nineteenth century, the new notion of progress as the accumulation of knowledge sanctioned rapid urbanization and industrialization. Evangelicals not only rejected the possibility of social progress but also pegged limits to the knowledge humans could attain on their own. For disillusioned Americans who didn’t see a progressive narrative shaping their own lives, the alternative narrative of dispensational premillennialism may have made more sense.125
The growth of dispensationalism occurred during the same time that the white South returned to power after the war. The racist terror in scientific apocalypticism was largely lacking in Bible prophecy, but so was the participation of African American evangelicals. Premillennialism was attractive to black evangelicals in a way that differed from white evangelicals. Premillennialism fit easily into the tradition of seeing the end of racial injustice as part of God’s promise for a new world. Yet premillennialism could also excuse inaction on civil rights. That tension between anticipating the End while still working for betterment in the present was evident among white dispensationalists in other ways, but the white architects of dispensational premillennialism most often just ignored black evangelicals on theological matters.126 White Southerners and Midwesterners’ ecumenical approach to Bible prophecy may have helped heal the sectional divisions within Protestantism that the war created, but it did nothing to further racial relations.
As white conservative evangelicals exchanged dispensationalist ideas in the late 1800s, they also debated whether science could inform their interpretations of Bible prophecy. A congregational minister, E. P. Goodwin, at an 1886 prophecy conference in Chicago, condemned modernists who tried to temper biblical accounts of miracles, creation, and the end of the world with scientific conclusions: “The only question for us is, what do these authorities—these books of God’s revealed will teach? No matter whether we can understand or explain, or harmonize their teachings with our view of things or not. They give us what God says, and we believe them because of that, and not because of our ability to explain or expound them.”127 In addition to believing that the Bible should be read as a God-inspired, infallible source, Goodwin criticized the notion that events in the Bible must be compatible with known physical laws: “With Him nothing is impossible, and the resources of omnipotence are as ample now as when they availed, however unphilosophically, or in contravention of natural law, to create a universe out of nothing, and make the original man out of the dust of the earth.”128 At the same conference, a Baptist minister, J. D. Herr, tackled the subject of a naturalistic end of the world, seizing on the uncertainty of how the world might end without God as a weakness: “Scientists have attempted to demonstrate the peculiar methods by which the present world is to be destroyed, together with the heavenly bodies beyond us. Yet no theory has ever been promulged receiving a hearty and unhesitating approval from intelligent thinkers.… In the Bible alone do we find the sure word of prophecy.”129 American premillennialists in the late nineteenth century, like Goodwin and Herr, were not interested in using scientific data to bolster the Bible; in their opinion, science was only being used to undermine it.
This concern continued into the twentieth century, particularly when conservative evangelicals responded to modernist attacks on their theology. A Baptist minister, Isaac M. Haldeman, in a response to a 1917 essay by the modernist theologian (and Social Gospel promoter) Shailer Mathews, made it clear that a belief in premillennialism was essential for true-believing Christians: “the Second Coming as recorded in the New Testament is so bound up with every fundamental doctrine, every sublime promise and practical exhortation, that it is impossible to read them in that connection without being impelled to accept and confess them.”130 James M. Gray at the Moody Bible Institute in 1922 responded to the liberal Presbyterian Harry Emerson Fosdick, a faculty member at Union Seminary, saying Fosdick’s “conception of his text is purely naturalistic, or rationalistic, if you prefer. The supernatural is excluded from his vision entirely.”131 In another essay, he criticized Fosdick for believing that “the revelation in the Bible must now be qualified by modern philosophy, by the evolutionary hypothesis, and by comparative religion.”132
In spite of the attempt of some conservatives to protect a literal interpretation of the Bible by eschewing the use of science, other evangelicals used scientific data to explain events in the Bible, especially when not responding to modernist theology.133 George M. Marsden observes that “dispensationalist thought was characterized by a dual emphasis on the supernatural and the scientific. Supernaturalism was a conscious and conspicuous organizing principle. Underlying dispensationalist thought, however, was an almost equally important set of ideas concerning how to look at things scientifically.”134 As Brendan Pietsch has shown, dispensationalists promoted the use of scientific techniques, such as taxonomy, to explain common objections to a literal and infallible interpretation of the Bible. One such criticism was that modern Christians should obey the Mosaic laws, even ones that counter modern culture, such as strictures against eating particular animals. Dispensationalists explained that in their interpretation, those laws applied only to the dispensation, or age, of ancient Israel. Christians lived in the age where God judged individuals according to their faith in Jesus Christ. (Historically Calvinists stressed the uncertainty of salvation, but in practicality American Calvinists have watered down the doctrine of predestination in favor of a more democratic vision of God.) This approach differed from what modernists were doing; far from using science to suggest that the Bible was untrue or metaphorical in parts, conservative evangelicals used science to show the Bible was consistent with itself as well as how an event that seemed unlikely could occur.
Dispensationalism may have encouraged a scientific approach in particular, but other premillennial evangelicals were similarly open to scientific revelation. Seventh-day Adventism (SDA), the evangelical denomination that grew out of the Baptist William Miller’s failed end-of-the-world prophecies in 1843 and 1844, endorsed a premillennialist view of Bible prophecy, but one that held events predicted in the prophetic books of the Bible had been taking place since the first appearance of those prophecies. This historicist approach was more problematic than the futurist approach of dispensationalists, who located prophetic events as taking place right before the Second Coming. From the example of the historicist SDAs, dispensationalists learned the cautionary tale of setting specific dates.135
Dispensationalists could constantly shift their apocalyptic expectations according to current events, whereas the Adventist approach lent itself to the danger of failed prophecy by fixing prophetic events in the past. In practice Adventists and dispensationalists often sounded similar when it came to interpreting current events, but Adventist beliefs, like the necessity of a Saturday Sabbath, could be anti-ecumenical in emphasis.136 The authority that the SDAs gave to the visions and writings of Ellen G. White, the nineteenth-century leader who had helped shape the denomination after the failed predictions of 1844, guaranteed that fundamentalists would view SDAs with suspicion.137 Fundamentalist Christians rejected modern-day miracles and saw Christians who believed in prophetic visions, speaking in tongues, and faith healing as misguided at best and doing the work