In an interesting piece of Calvin trivia, it turns out religion professor Thomas Thompson has a famous relative. His first cousin is Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the Left Behind books.

These novels about the Rapture have been flying off bookstore shelves and steam-rolling bestseller lists. Not that Thompson has seen a penny. He and Jenkins have long grown apart, as cousins sometimes do. The only time Thompson does bring up familial fortune is in a tongue-in-cheek remark about religion. Referring to the popular “dispensational premillennialist” view of the end of the world, on which the Left Behind books are based, and to his own less dramatic beliefs about the end times, Thompson remarks, “It just doesn’t pay to be an amillennialist.”

I chuckle with him, and then I stop and think. Why is that? Why is DP, as I’ll call dispensational premillennialism from here on out (since newsprint costs are ever rising), so fashionable in popular religion? Why does DP play the clean cut, square-jawed high school quarterback, over which popular culture swoons, to amillennialism’s lonely, zit-faced wallflower?

I’ll explain the terms in a minute, but first, before everyone snoozes, let me introduce my rallying cry: Amillennialism is cool. Not only is amillennialism cool, I think it is integral to Calvinism (whether or not Calvin actually thought so), and lies at the heart of the Reformed vision of environmental and social justice in the world. Amillennialism is, after all, a question of whether and how Christ’s kingdom has come, and what redemption really means. And I’ll be darned to let this batch of trite, panic-inducing altar call dime novels – the Left Behind books – carry the day without an impassioned response from this campus.

The Meaning Of A

Thousand Years

Ask a seminary prof what DP is, and he’ll go on for hours. (Come to think of it, don’t ask a seminary prof.) Let me try a Cliff’s Notes version.

People have always argued about what Revelation 20 means. When it says Christ will reign for 1,000 years before the final judgment, what is that all about?

The most popular interpretation is called premillennialism. This says that when Christ comes back, he will set up a temporary kingdom in the present world for literally a thousand years before drawing the curtain on eternity. Well, how else are you going to read Revelation 20? DP is just a recent twist on this view. It divides all of world history into sections, or dispensations. The last dispensation has all the fun stuff like the Rapture, the Anti-Christ, the millennium and so on until the final judgment.

The response from us Reformed folk has traditionally been “amillennialism.” Literally the word means “no millennium,” which shows we didn’t pick the term. We prefer “realized millennialism,” but it hasn’t caught on. The point is that the millennium has already been introduced. The “thousand years” is symbolic (as the number usually is in the Bible); it began when Christ first came, and will end when he comes back.

I think it’s a solid view. I’m sold on it. And frankly, I’m bothered that Calvinists just don’t seem to be that vocal, or even informed, about it. I think Neal Plantinga had it right in his advent sermon for LOFT: we button-down believers value restraint when it comes to the book of Revelation. We’re embarrassed by the wild-eyed prophecies of others, and so we scrap the whole deal. We practice, Plantinga said, “eschatological chastity,” an abstinence from study of the end times. Even John Calvin gave up when he got to Revelation, after writing commentaries on every other book in the New Testament.

The result, I’m afraid, is that we ignore Revelation altogether, waving a white flag of surrender, rather than imbibing its kingdom-shaping message and embracing our amillennialism. Even now, too many Calvinists are reading the Left Behind books and soaking them in. But what if we instead made our peace with our amillennialism, and maybe even became inspired by it?

Who’s Leaving Whom Behind?

Left Behind and its several sequels are clearly DP, clearly un-amillennialist. In the books, believers are snatched suddenly into heaven from their locations on earth in the Rapture, leaving driver-less cars to veer off the freeway and pilot-less planes to fall out of the sky. The wicked are left behind and must now repent before Judgment Day.

We can poke a few major holes in the DP view of the Rapture without that big of a stick, and some amillennialists do so for fun, at parties. To start with, look at the book’s title, which comes from Jesus’ apocalyptic monologue of Matthew 24. Jesus says that at the time of his return, “Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left [behind]. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left [behind].”

One needs only to summon the strength to look back four verses to see that Jesus is comparing Judgment Day to “the days of Noah,” when the wicked were so caught up in their godless reveling they didn’t know what hit them when the wrathful rains came. The thing is, amillennialists have pointed out, in this case it was actually the righteous who were left behind, safe and on dry ground. Jesus’ warning is for those who will be wiped out, not those who will be left behind.

Elsewhere, Jesus says some things about binding Satan, in the present tense, that sound an awful lot like the binding of Satan Revelation 20 is talking about, which is in line with the amillennialist view of the passage. The DP’s are waiting for a future binding.

We’re Outta Here

(Or Are We?)

The most important flaw in the Left Behind view of the Rapture starts to deal with the issue of worldview, and that’s where amillennialism’s rubber meets the road, as I see it.

1 Thessalonians 4: 17 is often called “the Rapture verse.” Paul says that when Christ comes back and the dead are raised, living believers “will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” The key phrase is “caught up,” which was translated in Latin as raptum for “snatched” or “caught.”

The key word here, amillennialists rush to point out, is not “caught,” but the one later in the verse: “meet.” The original Greek form of “meet” here refers to a specific sort of meeting that occurs with the visit of dignitaries. Important people do not knock on their host’s door when they visit; instead they are met as they approach and greeted. They do not then turn around, but are escorted the rest of the way to their destination.

This is the kind of “meet” Paul uses when he talks about Christ’s return. Christ will not start to descend, stop in mid-air, collect all Christians, and then shift into reverse, as Left Behind suggests. He’s making a complete trip, and on the way we will, in some way, be “caught up in the air” to welcome and escort him. It’s the difference between picking your brother up from the airport and flying out with him.

And here we get to the moral of the story. Now we see what a difference this all makes in our daily lives. Now the DP vs. amillennialism debate, usually just a seminary hobby, takes on a larger importance, cutting to a crucial question, the kind mission statements are made of: Are we fleeing from this world or are we engaging it? Are we living in anticipation of escaping the planet, or doing our best to get it ready for Christ’s return?

And all of a sudden, this is more than small theological potatoes. Amillennialism affects getting up in the morning and going to work. It affects how we view environmental issues and how we spend our money. Will our daily decisions be based on the Left Behind outlook that this world is going to hell in a handbasket anyway, so who cares if you drive an atmosphere-choking SUV? Or will we instead have the worldview that Christ’s cross was to redeem the entire creation (as Romans 8:21 and Colossians 1:20 say), not just human souls, and that as Christians we must make our own meager attempts to be agents of this redemption?

Down To Earth

Let’s cheat and see how the story ends. Revelation 21, coming after the millennium talk of Revelation 20, is accepted by people of all views as the end of the road, the eternal picture. The first verse announces the coming of a “new earth.” The Greek word the apostle John uses here for “new” – kainos – does not mean “different” or “other,” but rather “renewed” or “restored.” The “passing away” of the first earth in Revelation 21 is referred to elsewhere in the Bible, such as 2 Peter, as purification and transformation, not destruction. Sin will be bleached out of the original creation once and for all. And God’s dwelling, as verse 3 says, will again be with us, on this renewed earth, as shalom is forever restored.

This information should lead us to lose our stereotypes of eternal life as having to do with clouds, harps and robes, and instead picture the afterlife as a fully redeemed, sin-free, yet recognizable version of this very planet. That seems to be the biblical message. God’s stubborn love and plan for restoration after the Fall, which ultimately led Christ to the cross, will be complete with the full redemption of everything he made.

Now that’s a picture of heaven we can translate into a worldview. Being agents of renewal in creation and culture, in the image of a redemptive God – that’s a “big picture” that lends meaning to our current lives. We are to live in active anticipation of God making everything right in creation, culture, and humanity. To be sure, our measly redemptive efforts will in no way bring about Christ’s return, and they won’t get very far, since it’s still a broken world. But they’re the best response I can think of – a better response than seeing the Second Coming as a Get-Out-Of-Earth-Free card, as DP and the Left Behind books seem to do.

The DP-vs.-amillennialism rift, in some ways, boils down to a question of what kind of God we serve. Do we serve a God who gives up – who, when sin comes in, says “Screw it” and yanks humans into never-never land, literally out of this world, as DP has it? Or a God who loves his creation with a tough love, who stubbornly refuses to throw in the towel on fallen creation and go back to the drawing board?

In the view of DP and Left Behind, the primary meaning of earthly existence is to save souls and increase the Rapture population before we’re all whisked away to the skies. You might even cheer on floods and earthquakes in the world, because they must mean the proverbial fat lady is about to sing and we’re outta here. Other than that, it’s just an idle waiting game. Not necessarily a transforming game.

Amillennialism says that Christ’s earthly kingdom has come. The full redemptive mission is underway. It’s not on hold. Frustrated by sin, it is nonetheless moving forward. It’s a call to arms in every area of human life, not just evangelism.

So you see, we needn’t be so shy of the book of Revelation. We shouldn’t give up so easily and let the DP of the Left Behind books control our thinking about the afterlife. We should cozy up to amillennialism, the view of a world destined not for annihilation, but for the perfect redemptive action of Christ and the imperfect redemptive action of Christians.

But while we shouldn’t have outright eschatological chastity, maybe we shouldn’t get too caught up in the details of Revelation, either, treating the book as a decoder puzzle, as the Left Behind books do. Maybe we need only to settle for the big picture, the ultimate message, that “every square inch” of God’s creation will be redeemed and transformed for eternity, and take that to heart in our vocation and our daily activities. No matter what you read in Left Behind, the kingdom has come, and redemption of the universe is well underway. God isn’t giving up on the planet. Neither should we.