I have to confess that Tribulation, Rapture, Left Behind, PreMillenianism, etc. etc. are so far off my radar screen that I have no sense of there being a substantial following for this nonsense at all. (Who's naive? Me!?!)
OTOH I realize that the book series is selling well. My best friend's wife belongs to an evangelical church, and she mentioned the book series in a conversation a couple of years ago. I think my "sensitivity to other people's feelings" meter was on the fritz and I said something dismissive, and she couldn't understand how I could consider myself Christian and not believe in Rapture. My response (sensitivity meter still somehow reading "0") was that I couldn't understand how someone could reconcile their life in the real world with such an irrational concept. Needless to say in the 15 or so times we've seen each other since, the topic has somehow never came up again.
But in truth I do not understand how people with any kind of modern world view could hold such ideas as being true. But again I don't understand how people can believe that Satan is any kind of real being either. I know that lots and lots of people do, including some in my church community.
I think that the huge gap between progressive Xtians and conservative evangelicals is an understanding of God as a Being that intervenes in the experienced world. I think the differing understandings of God make conversation difficult if not impossible.
Lou
That's pretty smug. I wouldn't mistake it for intelligence as is the vogue with even with liberal and 'progressive' theology which ambiguates so much there's nothing literal to behold.
Preterism & Futurism
in Progressive Christianity
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