The Eschatological Explosion

This week, I was visiting with a friend and his wife, who told me about how their church Bible study recently looked at the topic of Dispensationalism and Covenant Theology. I must confess, I had to ask what they meant by those things. They gave me a handout that talked through some of the theories of Dispensationalism including Ultra-dispensationalism. This view suggests that the entire history of the world can be broken up into seven distinct sections of time, or dispensations. We are currently living in the sixth one, the era of the church or the era of grace. After this will come the thousand year reign of Christ as indicated in Revelation 20. And after this millennium will come the end of time, God’s final, eternal kingdom. You might wonder why a fourth year seminarian needed to ask about these theories. Shouldn’t I have learned about these views on eschatology—the study of the end times—in seminary at some point? The answer is, “No, I haven’t.” But why? Why is there so much theological work around the end of the world that Lutherans don’t touch in seminary?

While eschatology is an important word in Lutheran theology now, according to the online etymological dictionary, it wasn’t coined until the 1930s, four hundred years after the Reformation began. Similarly, the categories of the study that you may be passingly familiar with: Dispensationalism, Premillennialism, Postmillennialism, the Rapture, etc. weren’t developed until the 1800s and 1900s. Luther and hundreds of years of theologians after him, never said anything about the Rapture, because the concept hadn’t been developed yet.

While many of these ideas about the end of the world are so common in American society today that many people believe the Rapture is agreed upon church doctrine, when you look at them carefully, you see that these ideas are startlingly recent and also surprisingly American. The church has a relatively short and localized history of working with these topics. They are popular, but not necessarily tried and true in the same way that the Creeds and Sacraments are. Lutheran theologians don’t spend a lot of time with these ideas because they aren’t really a part of our tradition.

This doesn’t necessarily make them bad theological ideas. Every idea was new at some point. Being young doesn't make a theology false. There may be other reasons to suggest that these eschatological ideas are bad theology, but for now, it is more interesting to consider why the last two centuries saw such an explosion in eschatology. Why did the church suddenly become interested in parsing out exactly what the end times would look like?

A number of factors could be at play. The church had already had a history of scholastic theology. It wasn’t enough to simply have theology that spoke to us personally and as communities, we needed to rationalize the whole thing together. We needed to unlock wisdom with the keys of Scripture. We needed consistent, rational schema for exploring God’s word. With a history of scholastic theology and the philosophies of the Enlightenment driving the church to make everything make sense, the church arrived at the peak challenge of this quest: the book of Revelation. If the entire Bible could be rationalized, then interpreting Revelation would be the make or break moment. Revelation is filled with dream-like images of symbolically heavy numbers and sights. To rationalize the Bible, the church needed to make sense of this daunting book. Either it could refer to past events, or it referred to the end of time, and if the latter were true, then we still had time to put the pieces together and prepare ourselves for what would come next.

During this perio, the church was also engaging in worldwide ecumenical work, as the global mission field brought Christians of different denominations together for mutual support. Seeing the advancement of the Gospel around the world may have caused some theologians to believe that the end of history was upon them. Now, at long last, the good news of Jesus Christ had gone out to every part of the world. Surely the mission of the church was coming to its triumphant conclusion. Furthermore, it may have been helpful in the work of bringing the Gospel to all people to have a clear vision of what the end of time would look like. Seeing the suffering of impoverished people around the globe, missionaries could have pulled from the vivid language of Revelation for both images of hope and of wrath against the corrupt and non-believers. Missionaries could have simultaneously frightened people into joining while also inspiring them with the glory of God’s eternal kingdom. Perhaps it was fitting to pair together the eschatological end of the world, with the marginalized, geographic ends of the world.

Another probable reason is that American Christians believed that America was the vessel of the end times. These eschatological views had been very fringe in Europe but quickly became popular in America. People connected the American Republic with the coming reign of Christ, so moved were they by patriotic hope about the new government established in the country. And as America grew more powerful and industrious, they continued to believe that America would be God’s chosen instrument in bringing the world to its final chapter.

Cynically, I can’t help but wonder if these ideas didn’t come from theologians with too much time on their hands. Not forged in the fires of crisis and despair like other theologians had been, American theologians living comfortably in the late 1800s and early 1900s may have needed something to add to the collection of theological knowledge. And perhaps a time of relative prosperity and security would be perfect for theologians to do the work of making sense of complicated works like Revelation.

There may be additional reasons behind the sudden interest in decoding Revelation. It may be one or a combination of the reasons listed above. Whatever the case, our current eschatological landscape arose from passionate interest in the topic in the last two hundred years. While this may give us some interesting ideas to talk and theorize about, there are good reasons why Lutherans often don’t engage in this. Revelation is a hard book to take literally. As mentioned before, it is full of rich symbolism that many think point to events that have already happened, or perhaps point to general ideas more so than historical realities. The book is written in a way that destabilizes theories about it. It is written to resist being reduced to a single coherent interpretation.

Though we cannot crack the code of Revelation and make sense of the end of the world, Lutherans still spend time thinking about eschatology, but it is much simpler for us. Our eschatology is summarized at the end of the second article of the Creed. “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.” More important than what dispensation we are living in or what the precise order of events will be as predicted by Revelation is the assurance that Christ will come again. This world belongs to God, and God will not abandon it to sin and evil and the futile empires of death. It is enough for us to hope that Christ will return. When that happens or how that looks are questions beyond our grasp, but we can be certain that Christ will return.