Theology gone bad
Clarence Larkin, Book of Revelation, 1919. Click on the image for a high-resolution (3 MB) version. Amazing, isn’t it? It’s a much nicer presentation that the one I was offered in Sunday school when I was 11, but it has a lot of the same general features. Although Rev. Larkin was by all accounts a good and humble man, and although his work undoubtedly expressed his great love for God and the Bible, I just can’t understand his theology. Image source: News from Sergey. See more of Larkin’s charts here
For some reason I’ve been thinking about the whole Harold Camping rapture fiasco. Wondering what he and his remaining followers will do on 21 October when God does not destroy the world, spiritually or otherwise.
It has put me in mind of a story.
When I was growing up, Dad took the family to church at least twice a week. One day a special visitor presented my fifth-grade Sunday school class with a timeline unlike any I had ever seen. It was on a large poster he had brought with him. Across the top in bold letters it read:
THE PLAN OF THE END.
It was a full-color flowchart of the future. Based upon the book of Revelation and extravagantly detailed, it was divided into three main sections: the Church Age (you are here), the Tribulation (seven years), and the Kingdom Age (one thousand years). The Rapture and Second Coming demarcated these segments. Featured prominently was the binding and loosing of Satan and something about judgment seats and bowls. Armageddon was in there somewhere and biblical citations were scattered throughout. The Old Testament Saints, New Testament Saints, the Unsaved of All the Ages, the Beast, and the False Prophet were all major players, as was (of course) the Lamb himself, Jesus Christ. There were arrows indicating who would go where and when. All the arrows, if faithfully traced, led to one of two terminal stations: The New Heaven and New Earth (in the upper right) or the Lake of Fire (in the lower right).
The only thing I recall about the visitor himself is that he seemed a bit zealous and unpleasant.
I was only moderately interested. I had no reason to disbelieve him, but there were incongruities. My dominant thought: Dad knew a lot but he had never once mentioned Judgment Day or the Rapture or the Lake of Fire. If something so terrible were true, surely he would have briefed us.
I asked him anyway. He was at his desk working. He looked up at me and said, “Son, that’s just not true.”
It was the first time — but not the last — that Christianity made no sense to me. In particular, there was a long march of years during which I considered religious thinking — theology — to be so much nonsense. During much of this time I possessed a genuine faith in God and was an active church member. But the Trinity? How could we ever know such a thing? The Resurrection? Were there video cameras present?
As a seminary student and ex-scientist I was struck time and time again with the sensation that theology is a frustratingly slippery enterprise. Good experiments and careful observations constrain scientific theories, giving them a kind of substance and texture and reality I have not encountered in the large majority of theology I’ve read. Often, when I would write theological papers I felt as if I was playing a kind of game and not talking about the world as it really is. Next to science, theology can seem weak and unconvincing, unrelated to the world of facts.
But I loved theology then and I love it today, just as I love science. I think about God and write about God all the time. How can this be, if theology is so unconvincing? If science is so real?
It’s because theology and science are just plain different. This difference has to do with their objects and their relationships to their objects. When theological concepts are disconnected from their source and object, which is God and the church, they spoil quickly. This is not so for science. Scientific concepts, once abstracted and placed on the shelf, can maintain their integrity and self-evident quality for decades, if not centuries. The end-times chart based on Revelation is an extreme but clear example of what can happen when theology is disconnected from its object. That vision has nothing to do with the world I live in.
When God-talk is disconnected from God, the Bible is reduced to an information clearinghouse and biblical theology to puzzle-solving. It comes to look a lot like science done badly: The empirical data are pre-selected biblical passages; abstractions are drawn therefrom, and a system is built around the “evidence.” The final result is fully abstracted from bits and pieces of reality, but has nothing whatever to do with reality.
Where did the disconnect come from? In the case of the flowchart of the future, it came from the mistake of treating the Bible as a book written by God’s very hand, and — even more fundamentally — from treating God like a mystery author with a cryptology fixation. That God is not only distant, but comical. That God asks nothing and gives nothing. That God is a concept and not a present reality. That God is dead.
Unlike scientific claims, which seem to have a practically infinite shelf life, theology must be vine-ripened and vine-ripe to make any sense at all. It must be read and written and spoken when the reader and writer and speaker are themselves placed in the context of the divine. I don’t think our statements about God can be removed from God and the church and stand alone as self-evident or even falsifiable claims about the world. So long as theology is taken as an abstract system of statements, meant to make sense to any rational person who knows their way around the Bible and has an interest, it is utter nonsense.
This seems true and right to me. There are many more questions here, of course: How to remain connected? How to do theology — which can be plenty abstract — and not lose sight of God? What is the role of the church? What are some less extreme examples of theology gone bad? Interesting questions, no doubt; but that’s all I have tonight.
Here’s to a fine week for all Alert Readers.
There are 8 Comments to "Theology gone bad"
So … should we be concerned by the fact that the Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet all look pretty content, chilling down there in the Lake of Fire? (OK, the Dragon looks pissed off, but that’s just the nature of Dragons…) I mean, shouldn’t they be writhing in agony or something?
Paul, I agree completely with what you say. There is so much bad theology out there that seems to take a particular piece of Scripture and set it up as its own little intellectual system, closed off from (what seems to me to be) the whole POINT of the Scriptures as a whole. There is so much of it out there that it becomes very easy to want to just throw out the bathwater without first checking to see if there might be a baby inside. I have finally come to realize that there is some genuinely non-ridiculous theology – but for most of my life it was hidden from me under a big pile of garbage theology.
I also agree that the same thing can happen (and has happened) in science. One can take some particular set of phenomena and build an intellectual system around it, divorced from the rest of science (and the rest of the world). Fortunately science has a strong insistence on unity – scientists continue struggling until the parts fit together. I think this push for coherence is, along with the insistence that we take empirical data seriously, the greatest strength of science. I’m starting to come around to the idea that there might be such a thing as a coherent theology (or at least one that continues to strive for coherence), but it sure didn’t seem that way when I was growing up.
Yes, I think that Larkin’s Sheol and Hades are not nearly spooky enough and his Hell and Tartarus is not nearly anguished enough. I was looking for some real torture and Bosch-style insanity, but no soap. Look here for a more detailed look at Larkin’s underworlds.
This is a thohgutful post, Joel, and thohgut-provoking. It made me think about my central issue with religion—Christianity and every other. I think it boils down to the fact that the very nature of religion is against mystery, against negative capability —at least as I understand it. Religions assert an absolute truth and claim to have and provide exclusive access to it. Within the bounds of that absolutism there is a often a submission to mystery, which as a practical idea amounts to an avoidance of questioning.Here’s an example. A couple of years ago there was a news report about a family that was driving down an interstate, in Florida as I recall, when a truck swerved and sideswiped the family’s van, causing the side door to spring open and the child in the back seat to be thrown from the vehicle. Amazingly enough, the child flew over the guardrail on the elevated highway and landed in a thicket of some kind, which broke his fall; he not only survived, but as I remember was virtually unhurt. Now, the family praised God for saving their son but did not blame God for tossing the boy out of the van in the first place. This kind of reaching after reason is about as far from negative capability as one can get, since surely the mystery includes the sudden eruption of chaos as well as the unexpected restoration of the normal order of things.The history of religions is a chastening thing to contemplate if one cares at all about the difference between rhetoric and behavior. I imagine someone at some point has bother to add up the number of people slaughtered by the religious since the collapse of paganism (the pagans of classical Greece and Rome cooked up many reasons for killing other people, but they didn’t have enough bad faith to pretend that their local god had to kill the adherents of somebody else’s local god because their own god was the only true god. (I suggest you read Gore Vidal’s novel Julian for the viewpoint of intelligent pagans at that point in history when Christianity was about to take over the machine of empire.) Scientists, of course, have sometimes conducted inhumane experiments and facilitated mass murder—so I don’t want to be seen as exempting the zealots of rationality from our bloody history on this planet.What I do want to suggest is that negative capability, as a habit of mind, makes it very difficult to kill for a belief—because every belief includes a yes, but I prefer that kind of humility before mystery to the aggressive, absolutist use of mystery to excuse the heinous behavior of one’s particular group.Get stuff! Keep it comin’ !
Didn’t a Plymouth Brethren evangelist, Rev. John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), play an instrumental role in the current fascination w/ End Times and the Rapture?
David: Yes, indeed. Thanks for the heads-up.
Paul, I too am appalled at all the “end times” speculation. But I am not sure that takes a huge chunk of scripture out of the “factual” realm. My rough estimate would be that the Bible is probably around half historical narrative, and makes “truth claims” about itself; i.e., is “falsifiable.” “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.” Also, I don’t think the problem with undue fascination regarding the “rapture” and the like is due to “the mistake of treating the Bible as a book written by God’s very hand,” as you put it. I don’t think that because the Bible may be hard to understand or subject to misinterpretation means it did not come from God. In fact, I might rather conclude that if none of scripture was “over my head,” it very well might not have originated from the God who is very much “over my head.” Though we are “made in the image of God,” he is still yet far “above us.” “‘For as the heavens are high above the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts,’ says the Lord.”
So what about Camping, Larkin, Darby, Scofield, LeHaye, et al.? Well, when you have as huge a conglomerate as the Church constitutes, you are bound to find some “lunnies.” And, in fact, it is pretty exciting to consider such scenarios, which explains why they have such a large following. But there is certainly a large body of believers who give little or no credence to such hypotheses. And, as Todd points out, we should be careful about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As to what in my own view constitutes the “mainstream” body of “conservative” believers (or, at least, myself in particular), we (I) believe that certainly there will be “a time of the end,” which will culminate in a Final Judgment by God of all men, with an ultimate disposition to Heaven or Hell depending on, primarily, what we have done with the divinity claims of Jesus, a belief in the resurrection, and how we have followed Christ’s example and teachings (including loving one’s neighbor as oneself, etc.). And there are some differences of opinion as to the specifics of those. Personally, I reject Camping, et al.’s interpretations of Revelation, considering that text to contain highly figurative language (as with most biblical eschatology). Which does not mean I have no specific expectations of what circumstances might accompany history’s “drawing to a close,” but I don’t intend to publish books or gather large followings about them, which I consider to be a huge mistake. I think Jesus emphasized doing the Christ-like things he taught us to be about so that we might be ready to meet him whenever and however he might return.
The study of the Book of Revelation requires an intimate knowledge and understanding of the Jewish culture, teachings and the Old Testament. That is the primary mistake I see in most “interpretations” of Biblical Prophecy. In fact there are only two interpretations, (1) GOD’s interpretation and (2) all the others. People who have claimed the Book of Revelation is allegory and only a man-made fantasy to scare people into the Christian church are the same that have never seriously studied the Old Testament. The complexity of scripture, culminating in the Book of Revelation is far to complex to have been crafted as a falsehood by men (there were no computers or any fast means of communication for that matter). Revelation is intertwined with the whole of scripture and is fully revealed when cross referenced throughout the Bible.
The “rejection” of the clear statements in Revelation that reveal the things to come in the times of the end, are ALWAYS based upon the “teachings of men” (AKA: Theology). So one simply has to make a simple choice, do I believe GOD or do I believe MAN?
Read the Bible, then Read the Bible and then Read it again. That will help you in the understanding of Biblical Prophecy. The Bible was given to us to read, understand and apply. God has never told us to read, understand and apply COMMENTARIES!
I grew up in a home where Revelation was considered real. My dad has a sort of fixation for this stuff, and it took me a while to get to a point where I could see that his interpretation was questionable at best. I stepped back when I realized that it caused deep fear and confusion amongst people. I am not afraid to talk of Revelation, but I fear when people are adamant or really passionate about the topic. Such talk takes our eyes off God’s message of love and compassion, which is more important IMHO.