Unraptured, but Untaught

Saturday afternoon outside of Fenway Park, many vendors were utilizing the same sales strategy: “Don’t get raptured without an official Red Sox program!” “T-shirts! Wear a Sox t-shirt at the end of the world!”

Clever marketing, I suppose. However, May 21^st came and went, and those who shelled out five bucks for a program just got the line up and a souvenir – nothing else.

A lot has been made over the anti-Biblical nature of Harold Camping’s judgment day predictions. Surely, verses like Matthew 24:36 and 2^nd Peter 3:10 give Christians enough support to refute and ignore any attempts to reveal what the Lord has hidden. Yet there is another, much more dangerous aspect to what men like Harold Camping base their claims upon.

Biblical interpretation has gone through as many phases as the church has, and one consistent point of concern is what meaning lies within any passage. Within a century of Christ’s death and the establishment of the early church, we have a record of Christians assuming an allegorical nature of scripture. Some of the most significant church fathers claimed that there were multiple meanings to each verse of the Bible, such as Clement (5), Origen (3), and Augustine (2). For many, this meant adding a mystical element to the Bible – something the Roman Catholic Church embraced. It wasn’t until the reformation that a proper, large-scale understanding of the Bible was reclaimed.

Harold Camping, along with all of the other numerologists and doomsday prognosticators, base their formulas on a “deeper” or “hidden” meaning in the Bible – one that simply isn’t there. The word of God is powerful enough on its own, interpreted properly within a sound historical, cultural, and linguistic framework; it doesn’t require any secrets or codes.

The morning after we weren’t raptured, many lambasted Harold Camping for being wrong about his sum – but not too many focused on the fuzzy math behind it (and I don’t mean basing it on a date for the flood or the crucifixion). Evangelical, protestant Christians engage in spiritualizing passages every day: taking verses out of context, reading into the Bible as opposed to reading out of it, and focusing on what suits an agenda. Peter follows his words on the end times in 2^nd Peter 3:16, where he chastises those who are “untaught and unstable” that distort the Bible “to their own destruction.”

Are you spending time in the Bible and trying to glean from it truths that can change your life? Do you feel equipped to do so, or potentially “untaught?” Seek out guidance from a pastor or brother in Christ that you respect and who is grounded in the word. Having the right tools will allow the Holy Spirit to illuminate the truth of the Bible in amazing ways.