Monday, February 14, 2011
Monday, Feb 14.
According to our guest lecturer Amy Frykholm, the Evangelicals believe that the true believers will, at some point, be raptured in heaven. For those we are left behind have to fight between good and evil. It really surprise me that people, from the story of William Miller, were anxious and excited to see the failure of the world. I think one of the reasons why people like to predict the end of the world, and talk about 2012 constantly and search for evidence that an apocalypse, a disclosure, a revelation will be reveal is that the having a set date for a tragic event like this fill in the space for uncertainty. We don't know when the rapture will come, and no one likes to work and live an purposeless and unprepared life. I agree with the postmilleanialist view that the kingdom of God can be achieve by our work (at least the optimistic idea since I do not believe in God). In class we also talked about whether America nowadays are leaning towards premillieanialist more or postmilleanialist. I just think it is very interesting how these two endtime theologies still applies to today's religious view, especially right now we are paying much more attention to the world, the environment, revelation, and beliefs.
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Athena,
ReplyDeleteYou are quite right to see that from the specifics of actual movements we can extract general tendency. So, as Amy pointed out, post-millennialists are more likely to be more optimistic about human capacity to move toward a better world. Even if one does not understand that better world to be the reign of God and the return of Jesus, one can have a similar optimism about human agency. My own view is that, in general, Americans tend toward that sort of optimism and that they continue to have it even about a world after a catastrophic event. In a different setting I might have pushed our discussion in that direction.
As for why pre-millennialists are "hopeful" about the end of the world, well that is worth pondering, especially if they seem to observers to be having a pretty good life.
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