- A New Look at an Old Question

THE PROPENSITY TO ACCEPT ANY CURRENT religious emphasis as the correct and only scriptural view runs deep in our nature, for it is simply the old love for status quo common to all peoples in every field of human thought. An idea is handed to us by those we respect; we check the references, accept the idea, find the whole thing mentally comfortable and proceed at once to identify it with orthodoxy. After that we judge people by the test of whether or not they subscribe to it. Naturally we resist any suggestion that perhaps the idea may need a bit of editing to bring it into line with the Scriptures and the historic faith of Christians.
The assertion that the eschatology of the past hundred years (held now by most fundamentalists) does not agree in every detail with the beliefs of the church fathers will be condemned as rank heresy by many present-day Christians. But the facts are easy to check—those who will take the trouble to read and study for themselves can do it.
The usual way of explaining the discrepancy, where such a discrepancy is known, is to assert sweepingly that those great Christians of the past who did not hold our views on prophecy were simply unenlightened. They were good Christians, to be sure, but they just never managed to rise to our height of prophetic vision. The Wesleys, for instance, and such men as Edwards, Knox and Rutherford, were fine as far as they went, but they were sadly lacking in the knowledge of end-time truth.
Apart from the fact that the same argument is advanced by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh-day Adventists to justify their views, there is at least one other reason for rejecting this too-neat way of explaining things—it puts us in the painful position of having to claim superiority over persons whom all the world knows were infinitely beyond us in every quality that goes to make spiritual greatness. Without wanting to be thought flippant, we might say that if Augustine and Bernard and Watts and Andrewes (English theologian, 1555-1626) became such flaming saints while yet blind to the truth of prophecy, and if modern fundamentalists are the kind of Christians they are while at the same time blessed with all prophetic knowledge, then sure it pays to be ignorant!
Christ will return to earth to wake the sleeping saints and glorify His faithful ones who are alive at His coming. We believe that His return is the hope of the church, hope that alone makes life on earth tolerable for us. But is it incompatible with that belief to desire to know what God has revealed about the future rather than to accept blindly what some school of prophetic thought would force upon us? Is it unspiritual to long for truth rather than to follow without examination eschatological teachings that were unknown to the saints of past times? We believe it is neither incompatible nor unspiritual.
The time has come for the ministry of teachers who will re-examine the whole prophetic question in the light of the Scriptures, who will not be awed by the big names of the last half century, but who will check the teachings of recent times against the beliefs of the great Christians of the past and allow those beliefs at least as much weight as the beliefs of modern teachers. We need some courageous people who can speak with spiritual authority, not those who are content merely to parrot the views of a few prophecy experts who have arrived at their present convictions by reading each other’s books.
Perhaps, after all, the greatest prophetic problem facing us is one of readiness rather than one of knowledge. We may not always be sure we have every detail right, but we need never be uncertain about our moral and spiritual preparation for the great day of our Lord’s coming. “You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord’s coming is near.