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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
Tait, like other SDAs, did not believe that God had blessed the United States as a country.139 God had chosen the church itself as His representative, and as early as the 1850s, SDAs even argued that God would destroy America because it was the beast described in Revelation 13.140 Likewise, Tait departed from many of his premillennialist colleagues in his willingness to see American industrial activity as displeasing to God. The way humans treated their environment indicated that the End was near: “The departing of earth’s vigor of youth, and the infirmities of age creeping over her, are thus pointed out as among the unmistakable tokens of her approaching dissolution.”141 In Tait’s account, humans had abused the Earth’s natural resources and were now even struggling to grow food.142 As a result, humanity would receive the punishment it deserved: “And our earth itself is groaning because of ‘the transgressions thereof’ that is ‘heavy upon it.’ The pollutions of mankind, their transgression of physical law, their failure to observe the most thoroughly demonstrated principles of sanitary science, creates a soil for the growth of the germs of decay and pestilence.”143 Much more than other premillennialists of his time, Tait was willing to echo the beliefs of scientific apocalypticists that it was possible humans might not merely commit spiritual transgressions but crimes against the physical world as well. In the future, however, dispensationalists would adopt positions similar to Tait, first by incorporating scientific apocalypticism and then by becoming more ambivalent toward the United States.
Other conservative evangelicals were no less friendly to science but used science in the older tradition of natural philosophy. Science could add to the understanding of the Bible, but its findings would never trump biblical scripture. The Methodist theologian Luther T. Townsend’s 1913 overview of the possible ends of the world exemplifies this disposition. He believed that science affirmed the biblical account of the End, saying “scientific specialists are no less pronounced in what they say of a destructive ending of physical things than are the utterances and warnings of Bible revelation.”144 Townsend concluded that between Peter’s and John’s prophecies (in 2 Peter and Revelation, respectively) the way the world will end, according to the Bible, is through fire: “the sun, moon, stars, the heavens and earth as now constituted shall be dissolved by some destructive agency and then vanish like smoke after a fire has done its work of devastation though the material may be transmuted into other forms.”145 In like manner, scientists not only predict that the natural world will come to an end at some point but also admit that the extinction of a species is final, Townsend asserted. On Townsend’s view, these were the various ways scientists had speculated the End might come: through drought; through freezing (because of the dying of the sun); through the Earth’s collision with a comet, another planet, or the sun; by passing through the tail of a comet (which could contaminate the Earth’s atmosphere); or through an explosion emanating from the interior of the Earth.146
When Townsend parsed through the various theories, he rejected all of the above except for the theories that contained an element of fire: “the coming deluge will be one of fire caused by cometic, planetic, or solar collisions, or by eruptions from the interior of the earth itself.”147 Science, used in that manner, strengthens biblical prophecy for Townsend: “prepare, for you are on the brink of a hell of fire, is the stern command that science is repeating.”148 Still, Townsend thought that God would use nature to bring about the End.149 Consistent with the attempt to reconcile the Bible with scientific conclusions, Townsend averred that “no scientist will question the statement that nature holds in reserve many intonings that could be heard world-wide among the unfoldings of the last things and that under the command of God could thrill into ecstasy, or into terror every human being on earth and even start into motion every particle of matter builded into the earth.”150
Townsend wrote as the Christian fundamentalist movement consolidated around a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915, with American and British ministers as contributors. Amid fears of modernism gone amuck in American churches, the authors sought to emphasize the one principle they believed fundamental to Protestant Christianity: a literal and infallible Bible, which included literal interpretations of miracles, a Virgin birth, Christ’s death as a sacrifice that could grant salvation to those who accepted it, and finally Christ’s resurrection. The original fundamentalist movement was broad in its denominational scope, but increasingly the label itself became associated with conservative Baptists and Presbyterians in the United States in particular, though Methodists, Anglicans, and Lutherans helped write the movement’s foundational essays. Fundamentalism remained a fringe movement in Britain, and many conservative heirs to the Wesleyan tradition became involved in the emerging Pentecostal movement.151 In the United States, however, all remained under the banner of conservative evangelicalism, which tended to include dispensational premillennial beliefs.
Cyrus Scofield helped unite these conservative evangelicals through his annotated version of the King James Bible, which was published in 1909 and revised in 1917. Scofield was a follower of James Brookes, whose St. Louis ministry inspired John Nelson Darby’s praise in 1872. The Scofield Bible’s annotations included commentary based on Darby’s system, and it was instrumental in spreading dispensationalist ideas. Most people who bought the Scofield Bible did so because of its reputation for instructing its readers in how to conduct their own textual analysis. The Scofield edition of the Bible likely helped spread dispensational premillennialism as well as the democratic approach toward analyzing biblical text.152
Scofield’s second edition in 1917 in particular stoked apocalyptic fervor in the United States. Events during the war dovetailed dispensationalist interpretations. The publication of the Balfour Declaration (1917), a letter written by Britain’s Foreign Secretary that said Britain wanted to see the formation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, excited dispensationalists who believed the Jewish people would reestablish Israel. The Russian Revolution prompted fears in the United States in general over the spread of radicalism, but for dispensationalists who identified Russia as Gog, the transition of Gog into a godless adversary merely energized apocalyptic expectation.
By the time of the war, the British largely associated dispensational premillennialism with the Plymouth Brethren, whose separatism doomed dispensationalism to a minority viewpoint in the isles. The project of exploring Bible prophecy along Darby’s lines was left to Americans. A strong tradition of revivalism in the United States may have made a difference in the fate of American dispensationalism, which offered the same binary outlook of good versus evil as popular revivalists did. An American Calvinist preoccupation with the classification and delineation of theological viewpoints also left its mark on dispensationalism, as fundamentalists embraced the doctrine.153
A 1918 book on dispensational premillennialism by the Baptist pastor Clarence Larkin, with its famous diagrams explaining dispensationalism, is an example of this desire to systematize and logically order prophetic ideas. A businessman, Larkin had no difficulty imagining that science and a rational thought process could support biblical accounts of creation and the End. Larkin told his readers that “the ‘Word of God’ and the ‘Works of God’ must harmonize. There can be no conflict between the Bible and Science.”154 In discussing the creation of the world, he analyzed the astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace’s 1796 “nebular hypothesis” that “the sun, planets and moons of our Solar System were once one vast spherical mass of nebulous of gaseous matter, out of which they have developed.”155 Though Laplace himself saw a creator deity as needless in the order of the universe, Larkin had no trouble marrying his Christianity and Laplace’s ideas and concluding that Laplace’s theory is likely and explains, for instance, the nearly circular