It’s ~20 years since I last spent much time hanging around evangelicals. So what I can’t get my head around is this: how do you get to be an *old *Christian and still keep believing the End Times might be around the corner?
I mean, I’ve known the Lord for 48 years, and been hearing about the End Times for 47 of those years. How do believers not get to a point of, “yeah, I’ve been hearing for decades now that the world was about to end, and it’s still here - why should I believe it’s gonna happen in the next ten or twenty years, when it hasn’t happened in the past forty years that I’ve been hearing it was gonna happen?”
It would be interesting to interview some evangelicals who are in their 50s and 60s about this, just to try to get a handle on the psychology of it.
Happily, the Bible assures us that Jehovah God will not allow our earth to be destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. As Creator, he has limitless “dynamic energy,” so he can sustain the universe indefinitely. (Isaiah 40:26) Thus, you can put faith in these words: “[God] has founded the earth upon its established places; it will not be made to totter to time indefinite, or forever.” “Praise him, you sun and moon. Praise him, all you stars of light. . . . For he himself commanded, and they were created. And he keeps them standing forever.”—Psalm 104:5; 148:3-6.
I may be misremembering, but I seem to recall being taught something similar by my southern baptist family.
The real answer is they don’t. This is just a canard liberals tell themselves so they don’t have to come up with counters to the actual arguments. This is why the OP contained no cites, no polls, no facts of any kind.
Evangelicals believe that God made man stewards of the Earth and as such we have a responsibility to take care of it. As the much slandered James Watt said “That is the delicate balance the Secretary of the Interior must have, to be steward for the natural resources for this generation as well as future generations. I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.”
So yeah, anybody who insists that this kind of anti-environmentalism doesn’t really exist among evangelical/fundamentalist Christians is kidding themselves. (And what are “the actual arguments” on the subject that you claim liberals need “counters” to? ISTM that both Christian and non-Christian environmentalists are pretty much in agreement on the importance of environmental policy for solid empirical reasons. There are no valid “arguments” against it that they need to refute.)
No matter how many minutes have passed during which the earth hasn’t burst into flame (or whatever), none of those disprove the idea that the earth will burst into flame one minute from now. In fact the more minutes pass that without the world ending the more likely the next minute will be the last, because you’re that much closer to the end time!
The article has an anecdote about a guy they met at a picnic. I don’t remember voting in any election to appoint that guy spokesman for all evangelicals. I could show the petition to address climate change signed by 220 evangelical leaders, but those people don’t speak for us either, evangelicals are split about environmentalism.
The real reason is that environmentalism has obvious benefits, but just as obvious costs and everyone has to decide for himself where the line is where those costs outweigh the benefits.
I’m not quite that old, but I think that most people eventually realize that “End Times” does not automatically equal “the world is going to end any day now.” Yes, it theoretically could–but it probably won’t.
Strictly speaking, the End Times began on the Day of Pentecost – see Peter’s quotation from Joel. The “end of the End Times” began when modern-day Israel became a nation.
In addition, when God says that something is going to happen “soon” – that’s soon from God’s point of view, not necessarily from man’s point of view. It’s basically the same type of thing as the difference between “time” as we normally think of it, and “geologic time.”
Allow me to step forward as the officially acknowledged speaker for all non-evangelicals and say something.
This thread is not saying that that all evangelicals believe the end is near and thus the world can burn. It is not telling you what you believe. It is merely saying that the idea is common - certainly more common than it is among non-evangelicals. And it has indeed been my personal experience that certain stripes of religious people are of the opinion that their religion has told them that they don’t have to worry about the environment.
As well as descriptions of anti-environmentalist attitudes based on religious arguments that the author says their Christian-environmentalism foundation has encountered from many evangelicals across the country.
:dubious: So are you claiming that anti-environmentalism among evangelical Christians is completely separate from theological beliefs? That any evangelicals who are against environmentalism hold that position on purely pragmatic grounds, independent of what they think Scripture says about the subject?
If the phrase holds no meaning to us, if we are not supposed to be able to interpret the phrase because we are not God…then why would he bother to say it to us in the first place? Is your god incapable of communicating comprehensively with beings lesser than himself?
Coming from a JW background, I can tell you that the JW opinion is that the Bible says,“God will bring to ruin those ruining the Earth.” So no need to fret. Just wait for God’s vengeance like we’ve always done.
As for myself, I must admit that I don’t concern myself with climate change, because I know I will be long dead without descendants when the worst of it hits. Sorry to sound so shallow, but I just find all the gloom and doom speculation pointless and boring, if you want to know the truth. I personally can do nothing to change what’s happening to the planet, save voting for progressives, but I was already doing that. So to hell with it.
Ooh, look what I found in another corner of the internet: actual statistics. Left over from March 2016, but probably still good.
However, it is very interesting if a subset of conservative and/or evangelical Christianity is now adopting a more bellicose attitude of repudiating this theological anti-environmentalism. “Of course Christians don’t think the environment doesn’t matter because the end of the world is nigh, that’s just an anti-Christian canard!”
Is he a Jehovah’s Witness? They have predicted this many times, with exact dates even though the Bible has some very strong words to say about people who attempt to do this.
There are two theoretically distinct but practically simpatico beliefs:
“The Earth is too big (or God is too great) for anything man does to have an effect, so don’t worry.”
“Why are you worried about the future? Jesus is coming back in the next twenty years!” (Why twenty? I don’t really know. Maybe they were thinking A.D. 2000 was it when I was a kid.)
And of course, they have the big lie: “This entire physical universe is a passing vapor[sup]TM[/sup], unworthy of your loyalty. The only things that matter in all of creation are human souls. And your personal eternity, occupying an infinite amount of untime, is more important than the entire sweep of ecological or geological history in any case; so get your soul safe in heaven, and let all else fall away.”
11% of Americans think that global warming does not matter because the end times are coming. This is less than the percentage of people who believein bigfoot 15%, the number who believe that the government adds mind control messages to tv signals 15%, who believe the pharmaceutical industry is in league with the medical industry to invent new diseases 15%, that a UFO crashed at Roswell and was covered up 21%, and who believe that Barak Obama is the anti-Christ 13%. It is the same percentage who believe or are not sure if shape shifting reptilian aliens control the world. In 2011 22.6% of Democrats thought it was highly likely that government officials either helped or purposely let 9-11 happen and 28.2% thought is was somewhat likely. Because of this should we attribute the reason Democrats opposed Bush to trutherism?
The point is not that there are no evangelicals that believe it, but that it is a fringe belief and nobody with actual power believes it. Thus it is a convenient strawman to use so the actual arguments don’t have to be dealt with.