Left Behind?

Coleman manages to take boring sounding technical words like "eschatology" and explain them in everyday language. In this essay he looks at modern and historical ideas about the end times and helps us understand how the New Church perspective may fit within the common categories of thought on the subject. And just how does Nicholas Cage feature? -Editor

Will you be left behind at the rapture? If you live in North America—and quite possibly further afield—chances are you have at least a vague idea of what that question means. It calls to mind visions of a literal apocalypse, with the “saved” being taken up into the sky while the world descends into 7-year tribulation, at the end of which 144,000 more are saved and the world is destroyed. This is perhaps the most influential view of “end times” in modern western culture, popularized especially by Hal Lindsey in the 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth and in more recent years by the “Left Behind” series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins—soon to be a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage! (No, really.)

But what many people do not realize is that this particular theology of the end times—or to put it more formally, this “eschatology”—is less than two hundred years old, and has been popular for significantly less time than that. The term “rapture” is not found in any English translation of the Bible (although the concept of being “caught up in the air” is found in 1 Thessalonians 4:16). The view of rapture, followed by tribulation, and then followed by the final judgment is called “pre-tribulation rapture”; it was not developed until the 1830’s and only became popular with the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible in the early twentieth century.

I bring this up to suggest that the concept of “the end times” is not as universally agreed upon in Christendom as it may seem from a casual acquaintance with American fundamentalist culture. There have been disagreements about the precise nature of the “eschaton” (end of the age) since the earliest days of Christianity. The Wikipedia article on Christian eschatology suggests four general categories of interpretation of the book of Revelation, the book of the Bible that seems to say the most about the eschaton. Futurists, as the name suggests, anticipate a future fulfillment of all the prophecies in Revelation. Historicists believe “that Biblical prophecies provide us with a broad view of history, as well as an explanation of the religious significance of historical events.” Idealists see the prophecies of Revelation as spiritually symbolic of “larger ideals and principles,” which will appear in individuals’ lives and in different ages. And preterists see the prophecies of Revelation as being either completely fulfilled (full preterism) or partially fulfilled (partial preterism) during the first century A.D., particularly at the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D.

Futurism is probably the most familiar of these approaches. When people hear about the “apocalypse” (a word that literally just means “Revelation”), they usually think of an event that will take place in the future, or at least, that would take place long after the writing of Revelation. Pre-tribulation rapture (the “left behind” eschatology) is probably the most prominent futurist reading of Revelation in North America, although there are many others, some dating back to the first few centuries A.D. But modern scholars (e.g. here and here) seem to take an increasingly preteristic approach to reading Revelation and other end-times prophecies, viewing most of the symbolism in Revelation as referring to first century events and people, while acknowledging that the book does also refer to future events at the end of the age. And while this approach is particularly notable among scholars of the recent decades, there were Christians even in the earliest days of Christianity (e.g. Eusebius and John Chrysostom, according to the Wikipedia article) who subscribed to this perspective.

With all these different approaches, where does the New Church interpretation fit? The preface of Apocalypse Revealed says,

“Many people have toiled at an explanation of the book of Revelation, but since the spiritual meaning of the Word has been previously unknown, they have been unable to see the arcana that lie hidden in it. For only the spiritual meaning discloses these. Expositors have therefore produced various conjectures, and most have applied the contents there to the circumstances of empires, mixing in as well some observations regarding matters affecting the church. In its spiritual meaning, however, the book of Revelation, like the rest of the Word, does not deal at all with worldly affairs, but with heavenly ones—dealing thus not with empires and kingdoms, but with heaven and the church.”

The dominant approach at Swedenborg’s time seems to have been the historic approach, viewing various events in Revelation as having occurred, and others still to come. But, as this passage says, that is taking Revelation too literally. In its internal sense, the prophecy is not about the history of the physical world, but about spiritual events. In some ways, then, the New Church reading of Revelation could be seen as “idealism.” As with the entirety of the Word, the book of Revelation has an internal sense that applies universally, because it describes the internal states of people and churches.

This isn’t the whole picture, though, because as Apocalypse Revealed explains, the book of Revelation also foretells a specific event in time: the last judgment in the spiritual world in 1757, and the reordering of heaven and the church that followed. The preface to Apocalypse Revealed, quoted above, continues: “It should be known that following the Last Judgment—which was completed in the spiritual world in 1757 (as described in a special small work published in London in 1758)—a new heaven was formed of Christians, but only of those who could accept that the Lord is the God of heaven and earth, according to His words in Matthew 28:18, and who at the same time repented of their evil deeds in the world. From this heaven has descended and will continue to descend a new church on earth, which is the New Jerusalem.” In this sense, the New Church interpretation of the Apocalypse is futurist—although we are in the somewhat unusual position among futurists of seeing these “future” events as now being in the past!

So, it would seem that New Church eschatology is a kind of combination of idealism and futurism. But in the past few years, I’ve started to wonder if there may be a place for a preterist reading as well—that is, seeing the prophecies in Revelation as having had a more literal application to the world of the first century, even though the spiritual meaning is a prophecy of the Last Judgment on the first Christian church and the establishment of a new one.

That possibility was sparked in my mind by some things that are said in the Doctrines of the New Church about the meaning of Matthew 24. This chapter is one of the key passages for end-times prophecies, containing prophecies from the Lord’s own lips. But what was the Lord actually prophesying about? The chapter begins with these words:

And Jesus coming out, went from the temple; and His disciples came to Him to show Him the buildings of the temple. And Jesus said to them, ‘Do you not see all these things? Amen I say to you, there shall not be left here a stone upon a stone, which shall not be undone.’ And as He sat on the Mount of Olives, His disciples came to Him apart, saying, ‘Say to us, when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of Thine advent, and of the consummation of the age?’ (Matthew 24:1-3)

The words that follow contain imagery usually associated with the “apocalypse” predicted in Revelation: the sun would be darkened, the moon would not give its light, stars would fall from the sky. But in context, the Lord seemed to have been predicting that these things would occur when the temple fell, and not at some date in the distant future. The full preterist would say everything in this chapter is about the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D.; the partial preterist would say much of it is, but that the second advent of the Lord is still to come. What do the Doctrines of the New Church say?

Arcana Coelestia 3652 explains the meaning of Matthew 24:16, “Then let them that are in Judea flee into the mountains”:

This signifies that they who are of the church will not look elsewhere than to the Lord, thus to love to Him, and to charity toward the neighbor...According to the sense of the letter the meaning would be that when Jerusalem was besieged, as it came to be by the Romans, then they should not betake themselves thither, but to the mountains....Hence it is that by "Jerusalem" in the internal sense is nowhere meant Jerusalem, nor by "Judea," Judea. But these matters were of such a nature as to be capable of representing the celestial and spiritual things of the Lord's kingdom, and the events took place for the sake of the representation. (Emphasis added).

My reading of this passage is that while the internal sense of the Lord’s words applied to spiritual things, there was a more “literal” sense in which they applied to historical events—and the historical events themselves (e.g. the actual destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.) represented those same spiritual realities.

Now, I’m not entirely sure how broadly we can apply this idea to the prophecies of Revelation, since it is mentioned in particular only in reference to the passage from Matthew and others like it from the gospels. It’s possible that most of the prophecies in Revelation only have a spiritual significance, rather than a natural one. But there’s definitely precedent for seeing literal prophecies as containing deeper spiritual prophecies. In fact, many of the most well known prophecies of the Lord’s first advent in their context seem to refer to earlier events in Israel or Judah’s history. For example, Matthew 2:17-18 presents Herod’s slaughter of the innocents as the fulfillment of a prophecy from Jeremiah 31:15:

Then was fulfilled what was declared by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, ‘A voice was heard in Rama, lamentation, and weeping, and much howling, Rachel weeping for her children; and she would not be comforted, because they are not.’

In context, though, that prophecy in Jeremiah clearly refers to mourning in Jeremiah’s own time over the people’s captivity and defeat by their enemies. But that contemporary meaning does not take away from the fact that it had a truer meaning that would only be revealed centuries later.

There’s a passage from Apocalypse Revealed that suggests there might be a more literal meaning to the symbolism in Revelation. In Revelation 17:9-10, an angel explains to John some of the symbolism of the seven-headed beast and the woman riding on its back:

Here is the mind that has wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, where the woman sits upon them. And they are seven kings; five have fallen, and one is, and the other has not yet come; and when he has come, he must remain a little time.

The interpretation given by the angel refers to something natural: to hills, and to kings. Apocalypse Revealed points this out, and explains that the interpretation itself has a deeper symbolism, because it is a natural interpretation rather than a spiritual one:

The interpretation given by the angel was put in terms of the natural sense and not the spiritual meaning because the natural sense is the foundation, containing vessel, and buttress of its spiritual and celestial senses...Therefore interpretations elsewhere in the Word are given also in terms of the natural sense, which still cannot be understood without the spiritual meaning, as may be seen in many places in the Prophets and also in the Gospels. (736)

It is clear that the more important, truer meaning here is the spiritual meaning; but what I have begun to wonder is whether there could also have been a literal meaning wherein in his literal interpretation the angel could have been referring to actual hills and actual kings, for example the seven hills of Rome and to the succession of emperors there.

Beyond the passages I’ve quoted above, I haven’t found much in the Doctrines of the New Church to suggest a more literal contemporary meaning to the book of Revelation, so I’m by no means sure of myself in suggesting that kind of reading. Still, I see value in considering it as a possibility. If we acknowledge that there could be a more literal, first-century meaning within the prophecies of Revelation, it means we do not have to argue against all the current scholarship as to what the first Christians would have understood when they read that book. And in fact, we can turn to that scholarship as an ally when fundamentalists attack New Church eschatology as “non-Biblical,” pointing out the variety of interpretations that has always existed within Christianity. The Doctrines of the New Church do not deny the literal sense—instead, they show how much richer it can be when seen in the light of the infinite depth it contains in its internal sense.

Coleman Glenn

Rev. Coleman Glenn is a pastor in the General Church of the New Jerusalem, currently in transition from Dawson Creek, BC, Canada, to Westville, South Africa—about as far apart as two places on the globe can be. He maintains a blog (when he manages to find time for it) at www.patheos.com/blogs/goodandtruth.