Lutherans and the End Times: Dare to Be Boring

by Aaron Wolf

In my day, as we over-the-hill thirty-somethings like to say, video games were simple. As a kid, I loved to shoot those chugging, descending rows of square aliens in Space Invaders in the big stand-up machine next to Pac-Man and Donkey Kong at the laundromat. Today, there’s splattering blood, death, and mayhem on your computer or TV at home. The deep darkness that brooded inside the Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris was at least amplified, if not inspired, by DOOM, the first first-person shooter game.

The good news about Left Behind: Eternal Forces, released a few months ago, is that killing (one of the objectives of the game along with converting) is not without cost. Every time you, a member of the Tribulation Force, blast a member of the Antichrist’s evil minions (the Global Community Peacekeepers), you lose Spirit Points. So, you have to maintain a balance of converting (through streetcorner preaching) and killing. Thankfully, the Spirit Warriors (Christian rock singers) are around, and one dose of praise and worship will boost your Spirit Points.

The media thinks that this “Christian” game promotes intolerance, bigotry, and a “Crusader mentality.” Newspapers from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times have blasted the game for teaching kids that Christianity means “Convert, or else!” rather than the love-and-snuggles message of the Unitarian “Jesus.”

What’s really wrong with this game, other than the fact that the game itself is just plain lame, is what’s really wrong with the entire Left Behind series, which includes several best-selling books, a handful of movies, and a host of knickknacks: they promote a view of the End Times that is contrary to Scripture—disguised as a “literal” interpretation of Scripture. And this false and misleading view of the end times takes such great pains to notice every detail of the Book of Revelation that, well, you can make a video game out of it. You may find it difficult to take some of these overly silly manifestations of premillennial dispensationalism (the theology behind Left Behind) seriously. On the other hand, it can be equally difficult to deal with questions raised by our evangelical friends when they quote chapter and verse and then accuse us of not taking the Bible seriously.

Lutherans, you may have noticed, are very narrow-minded, but sometimes this is a good thing, as in the way we look at the Bible. For when we open up its pages, the first thing we look for is Christ.

“Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ beside me,” as St. Patrick liked to say, or “Christ on every page,” as Martin Luther liked to say. When Jesus met those bewildered disciples on the Road to Emmaus (Luke 24), He began with Moses (as in Genesis) and showed them all “the things concerning Himself.” Then, they looked at the prophets and the psalms and found Jesus there too.

In John 5, our Lord tells the Jews that the Scriptures “testify of me,” and in Luke 4:21, He says, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” This seems kind of simple and obvious—that Christians should see Christ as the center of everything, including God’s Word (He is the Word made flesh, after all), but in practice, it isn’t. In order to do this, we have to come to the Bible with a certain understanding of who Jesus is (not just God but specifically Jesus) and what He did.

Our Catholic and Orthodox friends would sum it up in the word incarnate—Christ in the flesh. And truly, that God became man is a great mystery to ponder. But we Lutherans don’t stop there. We know with St. Paul that it is the Christ incarnate and crucified who is on every page of Scripture, even those tedious genealogies and rules about sacrificing animals, the blood-and-guts battle stories of the Jews, and the poetic prophecies about a Lamb brought to slaughter.

That’s where we start with when we approach the Bible: the Gospel, from the first promise of Christ in Eden to the Last Day, when Jesus raises us from the dead. We read through the creed. We know that Jesus is the subject of all prophecy, Old Testament or New. And when we say “Jesus,” we mean “Christ crucified.” All roads lead to the Gospel.

Our left behind friends may not realize it, but their approach to the Bible is very different.

For them, Christ incarnate and crucified is not the focus of all Scripture.

Before me is a musty-smelling copy of Dispensational Truth by Clarence Larkin (1918), one of the foundational books that established the left behind mentality among evangelicals in America. On page 13, we find, with lots of capital letters, that “The Second and Premillennial Coming of Christ is the ‘Key’ to the Scriptures.” And a few lines later, Larkin continues, “The moment we grasp this idea of prophecy...the Bible becomes a new book, and doctrinal and prophetical truths at once fall into their proper place, and our theological system is no longer a chaos but an orderly plan.” So, according to Larkin, the main message of the Bible is to prophesy the second coming of Christ.

For the Dispensationalists, Christ incarnate and crucified for sinners is not the center of the Bible, so they are able to chop up the Bible into different parts aimed at different audiences.

Are you studying the Sermon on the Mount? Stop! That was written for the Jews in the thousand-year Kingdom, not for Christians! And the Book of Revelation? Hey, addressed to seven first-century churches in Asia Minor (modern

Turkey) doesn’t mean that all of those details were really meant for them. No, it is a manual for those who become Christians after the rapture, during the just because it was seven-year tribulation, so they can fight the Global Community Peacekeepers (or whatever their actual name will be).

What’s deceptive about the left behind mentality is that it claims to be a very literal approach to Scripture—taking the Bible very seriously. But because this literal approach does not start with the Gospel, it looks at all of the promises God made to Israel and concludes that those promises can only be fulfilled in the ethnic Jewish people—specifically in the modern state of Israel. And since for them the Church is absolutely distinct from the modern state of Israel, they have concluded that the Church will be raptured away before the events of Revelation take place. Why, then, was this book written for seven churches?

Lutherans know the answer to that question. All Scripture is for God’s people, whether they are called the Church or Israel. And because we know that the Gospel is the center of Scripture (not the premillennial second coming), we know that the promises God made in the Old Testament were not to those who were racially or ethnically Jewish, but to those who looked forward to the coming of their Passover Lamb, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the (whole) world. The Revelation of Jesus Christ (the book’s full title) was written to comfort churches who were actually experiencing tribulation or persecution and who looked forward to “living and reigning with Christ for a thousand years” (millennium) in heaven when they faced the martyr’s death. (What could be more relevant for us today as Christians?) Each vision in Revelation is a literal picture of that reality, not a sequential series of future events that have no bearing on our lives today and only serve as fodder for sci-fi novels or video games.

For Lutherans and other traditional Christians, the Bible’s teaching on the end times might look boring. We don’t need to read the day’s headlines with Pat Robertson and try to figure out which Middle Eastern or E.U. politician lines up with which horseman or horn or golden bowl and predict how soon the rapture will come. We can sum it all up with the words of the old liturgy, which proclaims the mystery of faith: “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.” Actually, that’s not so boring after all.

Aaron D. Wolf, a Lutheran layman, is the associate editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and the author of a chapter in the book Peace in the Promised Land: A Realist Scenario that deals with dispensationalism and the end times.