As the disciples stood gazing upward, two angels asked: "Men of Galilee ... why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven" (verse 11).

Jesus' return was sure. The disciples didn't need to worry about when it would occur. God wanted them to stop gazing into the sky and get on with preaching the truth.

The disciples' early epistles show the belief most of them apparently carried to their graves: that Jesus' return was imminent. For instance, Paul wrote of how "we who are still alive" would be caught up together with the resurrected saints at Jesus' coming (1 Thessalonians 4:15-17).

Paul later had to soften this view of when the second coming would occur and correct Christians who, thinking time was short, had become idle busybodies (2 Thessalonians 2:1-2; 3:11).

The book of Revelation laid out a grand drama stretching till the end of time. This book included the thought that Jesus' return might be more remote than previously thought. The saints were to live and rule with Christ for 1,000 years (Revelation 20:4). Grasping the Bible's statement that a day is as 1,000 years (2 Peter 3:8), some saw an analogy between history and the seven days of creation. They concluded that the present age would run 6,000 years before a 1,000-year rest under Christ.

"Prompted as well by Zoroastrian (Mandean) cosmology and the emphasis on the Psalmist's thousand-year days in 2 Peter 3:8, Christian theologians of the 2nd century A.D. transformed world history into a world week, and the seventh day thereof into the world sabbath, a jubilee of sweetness, peace, and earthly delight after six thousand-year days of human labor" (Century's End, by Hillel Schwartz, New York: Doubleday, 1990, page 10).

Christians came to believe that Jesus would return in the distant future.

For some time, Christians, including Irenaeus (circa 115-200) and Justin Martyr (circa 100-165), continued to look for Christ to set up a literal kingdom of God on earth. In the third century, Origen (185-254) asserted that the kingdom existed not in time or space but in believers' souls. "For a collective, millennarian eschatology Origen substituted an eschatology of the individual soul" (The Pursuit of the Millennium, by Norman Cohn, New York: Oxford University Press, page 29).

By the fifth century, Christianity was the Roman Empire's official religion, and the church could no longer be seen as a "little flock" at odds with the world. Now Augustine (354-430) wrote The City of God, treating the book of Revelation as a spiritual allegory and saying the Millennium was realized in the church.

The church officially rejected the doctrine of a literal Millennium. But believers went on embracing ideas like the "last days," the Antichrist and the warrior Christ who would physically return to conquer the world.

Believers fearfully watched for the evil Antichrist, with whom the returning Christ would war.

"People were always on the watch for the 'signs' which, according to the prophetic tradition, were to herald and accompany the final 'time of troubles'; and since the 'signs' included bad rulers, civil discord, war, drought, famine, plague, comets, sudden deaths of prominent persons and an increase in general sinfulness, there was never any difficulty about finding them. Invasion or the threat of invasion by Huns, Magyars, Mongols, Saracens or Turks always stirred memories of those hordes of Antichrist.... Above all, any ruler who could be regarded as a tyrant was apt to take on the features of Antichrist" (Cohn, page 35).

Popes were often associated with the Antichrist. So were the Muslims, who controlled the Holy Land and upon whom Europe's Crusaders descended in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. So were the Jews.

As A.D. 1000 approached, fearful teachers predicted that the world was about to end and that Jesus Christ would appear. An army of pilgrims sold their belongings and trekked to Jerusalem to await Christ. Terror filled them at every storm, comet and other event of nature. They fell to their knees at every crack of thunder, expecting the earth to open and give up its dead. Every meteor over Jerusalem brought Christians into the streets to cry and pray.

More concerned with the date of Jesus' return than with how Jesus commanded his followers to live until he came, prognosticators went on misreading prophecy:

• During the great plague of Europe (1348-1352), prophets said the end was at hand and that Christ would appear within 10 years.
• The Roman Catholic Church has often figured in end-time scenarios. For example, John Wycliffe, a 14th-century reformer, said the Catholic mass was Daniel's abomination of desolation.
• Martin Luther (1483-1546) believed the church's final conflict with evil would pit it against the Turks and the pope. John Knox, in 1547, saw the pope in Daniel 7:24-25.
• In 1806, at Leeds, a hen laid eggs bearing the words, "Christ is coming." Many visited the spot and "got religion." Then someone discovered that the ink-inscribed eggs had been forced up into the chicken's body.
• John Wesley said the end would come in 1836. Others suggested 1830 and 1847.
• Based on the text of Daniel 8:14, a New England farmer named William Miller expected the world to end in 1843 or 1844. His followers pinpointed Oct. 22, 1844.
• Unwilling to accept the Great Disappointment that resulted when Oct. 22 passed without Christ's return, some explained that Christ began to cleanse the "heavenly sanctuary" on that date. They thus gave birth to the modern Adventist movement.
• Charles Taze Russell, whose public Bible studies formed the foundation of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, said Christ had returned to earth in 1874 and would begin his visible reign in 1914. Jehovah's Witness literature later spoke of "the Creator's promise of a peaceful and secure new world before the generation that saw the events of 1914 passes away."
• Contemporary failed speculations include those of Edgar C. Whisenant, who in 1988 listed 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988 (when Christ failed to return, he predicted the rapture for 1989); a book produced in Georgia that placed the rapture on Oct. 8, 1992, at 12:55 p.m. Eastern Daylight time; and a Korean prophet's assertion that the rapture was set for midnight, Oct. 20 or 28, 1992. (In South Korea, 20,000 Christians left school or quit jobs to await the end.)

For nearly two centuries, many fundamentalist and evangelical Christians have embraced a school of prophetic interpretation known as premillennial dispensationalism, or simply dispensationalism. Adherents of dispensationalism teach that Bible prophecy, rightly read, pinpoints the route world events will march toward the return of Christ. His imminent return will inaugurate his millennial rule on earth. Thus believers mine the apocalyptic significance of Daniel, Revelation and other Bible prophecies.

Early Christians were premillennialists. But by the time of Augustine (354-430), the church concluded that the millennial period (which may or may not equal exactly 1,000 years) was not totally in the future. Jesus had already bound Satan, said the new orthodoxy, and the church already existed in an age of grace. Most Christians held this view, known as amillennialism, until after the Reformation.

During the 17th century, the Puritans asserted that the New Testament church fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies about Israel. The promises of Israelite (church) prosperity were realized in the Reformation. They looked for a worldwide revival of faith before Jesus returned. Many Protestants held to this postmillennialism for two more centuries.

Around the turn of the 19th century, some Christians saw the political and social chaos of the period as a signal that Christ would return soon. The Old Testament prophecies, many decided, literally referred to Israel and not the church. Thus some began to expect the Jews to return to Palestine before Jesus' second coming.

Onto the scene stepped one of the most important propagators of dispensationalism: John Nelson Darby. Darby was born in London in 1800. Darby, an Anglican clergyman, became disturbed with apathy among Christians. Scholarship had begun to question the Bible and Christian beliefs. By 1828, Darby came to believe that the whole church was apostate.

Darby believed that God has dealt with humanity through a series of different dispensations, or ages. He read Revelation not as an overview of church history, but as a prediction of events to occur at the end time.

Rejecting the optimism of both amillennialism and postmillennialism, he taught that the final cycle of prophetic events would begin with a secret, pretribulation rapture of believers. After this, the world would experience the Great Tribulation for seven years, culminating in the return of Christ.

In reckoning prophecy, Darby rejected the day-for-a-year idea. He taught that when the Bible said a day, it meant a day. So when Daniel wrote of the beast's 1,260-day rule, he meant a literal three and a half years. Only after Christ's return would the Millennium unfold. Satan's final rebellion, the resurrection of the dead and the final judgment would follow.

William Miller's work sank because he set dates and belabored one or two scriptures to the exclusion of others. Darby avoided these traps. Instead, he appealed to "the signs of the times" to insist that the end was near, without setting dates. And he incorporated all the Bible prophecies into a large, complex system, reinforced with scores of proof-texts. Then he unflaggingly promoted his teachings through preaching and writing.

Darby's teachings attracted thousands of British and U.S. Bible students who feared theological "liberalism" and who took special interest in Bible prophecy, particularly end-time scenarios.

The 20th century's towering figure in premillennialism was Cyrus Scofield. Convinced of Darby's dispensational scheme, Scofield in 1909 published his Scofield Reference Bible in 1909. It combined the biblical text with detailed notes that clearly and forcefully explained the dispensational view. Printing the notes on the same page with the biblical text made the notes seem to take on the same authority as the biblical text.

Scofield's teachings included a "gap" between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, the identification of the "Gog" of Ezekiel 38 with Russia, predictions about the Jews' return to Palestine and the teaching that true Christians would vanish at the rapture while deceived, "professed Christians" would follow the Antichrist into the Great Tribulation.

Scofield's Bible was first revised in 1917, just when the British mandate of Palestine fueled the premillennialist belief that the Jews would return to their promised land. The Scofield Reference Bible went on to sell millions of copies throughout the world.

Dispensationalism, with its emphasis on "literal" Bible interpretation and detailed end-time prophetic scenarios, remains the focus of millions of Christian evangelicals to this day.

Today's chaotic world almost begs us to look for cosmic significance in its machinations. We yearn for Jesus to come and straighten out the mess. But prophetic speculation is still ill-advised in any year.

Prophetic misfires destroy faith. Timothy P. Weber wrote: "Many loyalists will be bothered to see how many times their teachers' minds have changed and how easily they have substituted one sure fulfillment for another... Many of the popular Bible teachers have missed the mark on numerous predictions, especially on the date for Christ's return. Yet they rarely explain or apologize; they just move along with newer, updated editions or different projections" ("If the Rapture Occurs, This Magazine Will Be Blank," Christianity Today, Jan. 11, 1993, pages 60ff.).

Copyright 1994

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