Yes, the temple would be built first. But assuming that the pretrib rapture people are correct, once the rapture happens the clock starts ticking; the world will have 7 years before the SC. The Bible says the AC will act sweet for half of that time, and in the other half starts killing everyone. The temple would be built in that first 3.5 years.
So it’s not like people would be going “ooooooooh, the sooner we build the temple the sooner Jesus comes back!” In those days, those who believe in Jesus (as in, those who got a clue once a billion people disappeared on the same day) will be in hiding. The rest of the world won’t want Jesus to return because they’ll be too busy mooning over the AC, won’t have a clue as to what’s really going on and will see the building of the temple as a good thing, the AC making nice with the Jews. Unity and all that, breaking down of barriers.
As I said in my original post, I don’t think it’s a mainstream belief. Still, there are enough adherents that, despite my having very little contact with evangelical christians, I’ve heard at least a few reports over the years of people with various schemes to rebuild the temple in one form or another, so my impression that it’s at least talked about by enough people to make waves big enough so that someone who doesn’t really pay attention to such things (me) is aware of it.
As for your arguement that the antichrist is supposed to build the second temple, well Revelations is nothing if not open to interpretation, so I don’t think its such a streach to belive that some groups think it can be built by non-demonic folks. Some quick googling reveals several folks who belive that the anti-christ is supposed to desecrate the temple, presumably after the jews rebuild it.
I’m on a slow internet connection, so my googling skills are handicapped right now, but I’ll see if I can dig up some details of such projects tomorrow morning for you.
While it would be interesting to see a fully-functioning Temple-Priesthood-Sacrificial system in action to get better perspective on the Hebrew Scriptures, I am distressed by those fringe Fund’ist C’tians who actively support its restoration as it is essentially a repudiation of the Letter to the Hebrews, that all these things led up to & were made obsolete by Christ.
Now, if circumstances did result in Israel rebuilding the Temple. I don’t think Christians should oppose it either. I actually think we should regard it as a non-issue. It may become “the Tribulation Temple”. it may be just another religious building. Heck, as far as I know, the Tribulation may have been fulfilled in 70 AD, and it may actually become the HQ of the future Messianic Jewish Church (with the sacrifices either being totally ended or just done as ritual slaughter for festivals).
I will be kinda cautious though if the rebuilding is done under terms of a seven-year peace treaty done by a charismatic world leader, even tho I don’t hold to that view of Daniel 9:27 (I believe the Prince & his Covenant is Jesus & the New Covenant, not AntiChrist & a peace treaty).
Besides, Revelations, as has been pointed out here time and again, was a message to the early Christians that things would get better. That the Romans who were persecuting them* would one day get their come uppance. That’s what it was, not some stupid prophecy or fortune telling book.
*Which is why I get kind of steamed when I hear some Christians in the US today claim persecution because they can’t force their beliefs on everyone else. The first Christians were fed to lions, tortured, hunted down like animals. It’s disgusting to compare yourself to them because you can’t spend my tax dollars on your beliefs.
There is a conflation of three groups going on here:
Evangelicals, the largest segment of American Christianity, and who tend to honor Israel for essentially the reasons Abbie and Friar Ted have listed. Please note that Tony Campolo (spiritual advisor to Clinton and a Democratic activist) is listed on wikipedia’s page as a very prominent contemporary evangelical: it does not equate to “religious right” (though there is overlap).
Fundamentalists (e.g. Pat Robertson), a smaller subgroup which is strictly committed to a pretribulational eschatology, rapture and all that and might actually worry about temples and whatnot.
Extremist nutcase Fundamentalists who might actually feel they have some role to play in bringing about the second coming. I’m not aware of even someone as nutty as Jack Chick actually saying this. They are fringe, fringe groups, who are all talk and no action: My cite being that the fact that AFAIK no fundamentalist Christian group has ever – in the last several centuries, at least --actually made any sort of effort to blow up the Dome of the Rock.
It’s both. The nature of prophetic literature in the judeo-christian tradition has always been that there is an immediate application as well as a prophetic one: the OT books that are listed as “prophecy” do not consist of people simply saying out of the blue that “in 500 years X will happen.” Rather, the prophets were simultaneously addressing events in their own times and speaking of events to come (e.g. the Messiah or whatever). There is no inherent contradiction in saying that the author of Revelations was writing about contemporary events *and * writing prophesy, just as there is no conflict between a novelist writing a story and simultaneously writing a social commentary.
Actually prophets both warn and predict the future, today and in Biblical times. It just depends on what God is saying.
Some prophecies are the kind where God is saying through the prophet “this is gonna happen, here’s your Official Warning, do what’s necessary to save your own life/prepare.” These aren’t necessarily prophecies about something bad happening, either (they can be, but sometimes it’s a prophecy about a good thing): it’s just that God is making it clear that whatever is going to happen WILL happen and it’s set in stone, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. A good example of this in the Bible would be the scriptures that said that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem, called out of Egypt and would be called a Nazarene. Those prophecies weren’t saying that maaayabe He’d be born in a certain city, etc., if X, Y, and Z events took place, it was written specifically. Bethlehem. Egypt. Nazareth. No room for confusion.
And then some prophecies are of the “if you don’t repent and behave, I’m going to send (fill in disaster here).” The onus is then on the people; God has given them a chance to get out of it. An example of this would be Jonah’s trip to Nineveh to warn them that if they didn’t straighten up, they were all gonna die. They repented and lived.
So in short, the prophets of the Bible both warned and foretold events. Sometimes they did both at the same time, sometimes it was one or the other.
This depends entirely, of course, on the belief that the Gospels weren’t “cut to fit”, so to speak. Nobody seems to be able to pinpoint an actual Augustan census that would have taken place in the period of time when Jesus would have been born. Nobody has ever quite explained why, even if an Augustan census could be confirmed for that time period, why in Og’s name everyone would be required to go to the city their ancestors came from (can you imagine the kind of chaos that would cause?). Nobody can seem to find documentary evidence of a slaughter of the innocents (though it’s hardly uncommon or unexpected for a despot in that era to have something like this done, and it’s most unlikely that it actually happened, if it happened at all, on the kind of scale most people imagine when they think of it).
There is only no room for confusion if one has ensconced one’s faith in a very small chamber…