The Wandering Heretic

Those who have read and used my Context Group Version translation of the Bible may have noticed I have not updated it recently. Indeed, I have not updated anything much on this website for over a year. Much of it has to do with events in my life that have taken up almost all of my available time, both professional and personal. To start, My no-longer-very-new job that I started in December of 2008 still manages to take up a lot of learning time due to my no-longer-very young brain.

In addition, last year I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, stage 2C3. That stage basically means it is about to, or at a small level already has spread outside the prostate. So last year was taken up with tests, more tests, biopsies, and six months of daily radiation treatments. However, as John Piper, another fellow prostate cancer survivor always says, “Now I feel fine and the doctors are happy.” Not much more to say. As cancer survivors know, tomorrow can bring a change; but for today…

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I made a tribute post to the author/priest/sociologist Andrew M. Greeley almost two years ago now after his accident. Greeley was a huge influence in my life and remains so through his books and articles.

Well, for some time after that, people wrote comments asking for updates on Fr. Greeley’s condition. I have had no personal contact with Fr. Greeley for almost 10 years, but I do keep dibs on the internet traffic. So I guessed his condition was not good, and that his Christmas novel issued last year was going to be his last. But it was a guess.

I am very mortified to find out that I was probably correct. Phil Potempa, a gentleman who writes an Entertainment column has been in contact with Fr. Greeley’s assistant. I reproduce his article on that conversation here:
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I used to have a porn problem. No, not the kind of problem you are thinking of right now. Instead, I had a porn spam problem. Hundreds, indeed thousands, of comments with links to pornography sites were attaching themselves to this blogsite.

Nor was I alone in this attack. Apparently Real Live Preacher had much the same problem. His site was so infiltrated with comments generated by porn sites that he just about permanently shut down his archives. You see, the porn spammers don’t attack recent posts. They go for the older posts that you are less likely to notice and maintain.

I don’t know exactly how it works, but such sites have programmatic worms that travel through the internet. These “worms” then find websites (using a means I cannot say—perhaps a stray comment or word on your site attracts them) and then create comments on blog posts. These comments contain links back to their sites.
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Warning: Don’t use this series of posts on the Millennium and Preterism as ammunition against the Preterist (or “Full Preterist”) eschatology. As I noted previously, Rev. 20:1-10 presents problems in almost every theology. We even define the main eschatological theories by these chapters (Pre-Millennial, A-Millennial, and Post-Millennial). Only Preterism does not have “Millennial” in its name! No, I write this series not to demean Preterism by any means, but ultimately to strengthen it.

In fact, I regard this series of posts as taking on the best. The only major chink in the Preterist’s armor is, in my opinion, their exegesis of these few verses. As I noted previously, they “discount” the millennium of these verses into a less than 40 year span of time between AD 30 and 67. In short (pun intended), they are mistaken as to the duration of the Millennium. In this post I hope to prove they are also mistaken as to the timing the Millennium as well.

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Two more to go, and then I will have my surprise. A 25 year old surprise. but a surprise none-the-less!

My last post discussed problems with the current (and historic for that matter) expositions of Revelation Chapter 20. I noted how the fact that there remains nations in need of, and receiving, healing from the New Jerusalem in Revelation Chapter 21 places that city outside the confines of eternity (which by definition is past the point of healing). So the various premillennial schemes, including the rather recent newcomer—Dispensationalism, fall by the wayside. At best they could only posit that the Millennium would be only stage one in a two stage earthly existence where mortals remain on the earth. I have heard no leader in that faction declare such a eschatological sequence.

Though in the varieties of theologies out there, perhaps someone has. If readers are aware of such a proposed premillennial process please let me know and send me the references, links, or literary sources.

However, my concentration is going to be on what is, in my opinion, the strongest contender in the prophecetic boxing ring today: Full Preterism. However, as I noted before, their interpretation of the Millennium is their soft underbelly that invites a one-two punch attack. In their schema, the Millennial rule of Christ supposedly starts at the ascension and ends just prior to the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 67 or before. As a result, their 1,000 year reign gets discounted to less than 37. That calculates to a discount of over 96%. You couldn’t get a deal like that on eBay!

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Last Lectures are the in thing right now. A book entitled The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch was a runaway hit on Amazon. At my old college, some brave professors participated in a program called “The Last Lecture Series.” In this series, they were to give a lecture to those attending as if it were their last. The goal was to have the teachers give information to their students that they always wanted to say, but were too afraid of the consequences to utter.

In his book, Naked Before God: The Return of the Broken Disciple, Bill Williams give his equivalent of “the last lecture.” Williams, a CF patient, died soon after the book was published in 1988. In the book, he merges past and present as his counterpart—Nathaniel the disciple, also dying of CF—interacts with Jesus and the other apostles. Since neither Nathaniel nor Williams has much to lose, they ask the hard questions and make the even harder observations.

One of them was something that has also bothered me for quiet some time: Rev. 20-21, the relationship between the Millennium and the New Jerusalem that come after. As Williams notes (pgs 57-8), if the New Jerusalem represents Heaven or Eternity, why is there healing still going on?

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Alan Bondar’s first book is a good primer volume that presents the full Preterist interpretation of New Testament prophecy. For those not familiar with the position, it asserts that all of the prophecies of the New Testament (and a good portion of those in the Old) were fulfilled in the first century (preterist, basically being the Latin term for “past”). For the full preterist, these prophecies include what is commonly called the Second Coming of Christ, which they claim was fulfilled “invisibly” or “symbolically” in the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple in A.D. 70. For them, there is no more “second coming” in our future. We are in the full Messianic Era, the New Heavens and Earth, now!

Bondar did not come to this position easily. In fact, according to his acknowledgements, he was converted to this position during the course of writing this book.

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Now I have nothing much against Atheists as a rule. In the final analysis, they have enough trouble justifying much of anything they say. After all, if God or an ultimate reason does not exist behind the physical world, then all we have left is personal opinion, theirs and ours. And who cares what your opinion is anyway? Atheism, in order to justify any action, has to resort to force in order to make their personal opinion worth anything beyond themselves. After all, it is “just their opinion.”

Or as the ultimate Atheist, Chairman Mao said, “Morality comes at the barrel of a gun.” Yep, that’s all that is left for atheism.

Yet the new atheists write books, do lectures and debates in order to convince the world to drop God from their vocabulary and their lives. I don’t read or listen much. “It’s just their opinion.” I also take N.T. Wright’s word on the matter, that the books are just incredibly boring.

Still, life takes some interesting turns. Now the prominent atheist, Richard Dawkins is having second thoughts; maybe not about God, but about the desirability of a culture without God: or at least a certain God among the mix. Says Dawkins, regarding the decreasing influence of Christianity in Europe, and Britain in particular:

There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.

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