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How Not to "Leave Behind" What We've Learned
-Gordon Fee, Daniel Block, Gregory Beale, David Holwerda, Mary Hulst
(moderated by Jeffrey Weima)
Jeffrey Weima began by identifying some of the common themes of the conference so far:
- Read the whole book, rather than take certain verses out of context.
- The importance of symbolic rather than overly literal interpretation, given the nature of apocalyptic genre.
- Study the relationships of motifs and images in apocalyptic texts to the rest of Scripture.
- Admit the limits of your knowledge; acknowledge the difficulties of these texts.
- The purpose of apocalyptic texts is to comfort the church rather than calcuate the future.
With that, he opened the floor opened to questions.
Since pastors should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, how should we preach to comfortable congregations-people who are already so comfortable that they don't need to hear apocalyptic texts' words of comfort?
Gordon Fee noted that the sword coming out of the mouth of Christ in Revelation is two-edged. "Every word that brings comfort to the afflicted can also penetrate strongly and powerfully to afflict the comfortable," he said. "My instinct is that the churches to which we would be preaching would need the latter."
Gordon Beale reiterated what he said in his plenary address: that "symbols even for believers are meant to shock them back into reality. Laodicea is a pretty comparable church to ours today-a lot of [Western] churches are not suffering overt persecution."
David Holwerda noted the similarities-arrogance of power and excess of wealth-between Babylon and Western states, and said that similar characteristics between the two should be observed by pastors preaching to citizens of an empire. He added that preachers in the West should preach about martyrdom, noting that, by some estimates, more Christians were martyred in the 20th Century than in the previous 19 combined. "It's hard to preach to a church that's not suffering. It may make them uncomfortable. It can also make them share in the stories of those who have been suffering."
Mary Hulst pointed out that suffering exists even in congregations that live in material comfort and are not persecuted. "Be sure not to minimize the suffering of your congregations," she said, adding that when she was in parish ministry, "I was very aware of the sufferings of my people. I was also very aware of where they were comfortable."
Since many of the apocalyptic texts examined at this conference-Daniel 7, 2 Thessalonians 2, Revelation 11, and others-have proven complex and widely misinterpreted and misapplied, should they be recommended for daily devotional use by parishioners, or restricted to treatment by a pastor?
Daniel Block said that "with the technical way we use these texts, we discourage common people from reading them. By all means, have conversations [about them] around the dinner table. ... These discussions need to happen when you rise up and when you lie down."
Gordon Fee said that despite his strong feelings that "people don't read the Revelation well, I think they can learn to read it well." His books, he said, provide "just the minimal kind of stuff to guide them into [the book]. As I suggested yesterday afternoon, a lot of preachers preach from a 26-book New Testament canon, and they need to have a 27-book New Testament canon. People in the church need these documents desperately. They can learn to read them. They may not understand everything, but they can see where things are going and how they work.
Gregory Beale pointed to verse three of the opening chapter of Revelation, which blesses all believers who read and hear the book's words. "God has written his word. We're not going to perfectly or exhaustively understand it, but every believer can sufficiently understand it, including Revelation, to be saved, to be sanctified, and to glorify God."
Mary Hulst noted that understanding apocalyptic texts, as with all Scripture, is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
How can preachers, who have 25-30 minutes per week to talk to their congregations, compete with the popular media, which speaks to congregations six days out of seven? How can preachers encourage members to stay away from false teachings or intepret them more critically?
Gordon Fee noted that the majority of the audience at this conference come from the Reformed tradition, in which pastors addressing the Left Behind series "can just call it for what it is: false." In his own tradition, Fee noted, it is he who is seen as the false teacher for rejecting dispensationalism. "In my tradition, we've got to find a way of helping, easing, encouraging, and turning off the TV," he said. But Reformed preachers can play to the strenghts of their confessional tradition.
Mary Hulst advised that pastors expand the reach of their message beyond the sermon by holding additional Bible studies, making copies of the manuscripts of their sermons, and suggesting additional resources, in order to "encourage further study at home," and have listeners "take your sermon home ... take it out from the pew, into the world."
Gregory Beale emphasized that eschatology should be preached as underlying the gospel message, rather than restricted to apocalyptic books. "The New Testament is filled in every text, is saturated with inaugurated eschatology." He cited 2 Corinthians 6, where Paul quotes Old Testament eschatological prophecy to tell his readers to be the temple of God.
"We are the beginning of the end-time temple," Beale said. "The temple-builder in the Bible is the Messiah-Zechariah 6, 2 Samuel 7." So preachers should tie their teaching of Jesus' resurrection to inaugurated eschatology.
(The next questioner asked the panel's opinion of Eugene Peterson's Reversed Thunder, and Gordon Fee said he recommended it highly.)
Shouldn't we use the popular media to combat the false end-times teachings so prevalent in the popular media?
Fee said he wasn't "optimistic," since "people will go for the simplistic over against something that seems difficult. ... The bestsellers are junk. It will take some kind of divine intervention for that tide to be turned."
Jeffrey Weima pointed out that the academy is growing more willing to writing for a popular audience and "writing things that are more helpful for the church."
Daniel Block noted that Ancient Israel was often led astray by a "very physical, emotional and seductive alternative" to God's truth. "That's what we're dealing with here," he said. "The Left Behind approach to these texts is a seductive approach. The alternative we're presenting here is much more abstract."
Mary Hulst praised a recent satire of Left Behind on The Simpsons, recommending the episode to pastors and adult education sessions. She wondered why Christians hadn't produced such a satire. "Why aren't we doing this? ... How can we engage the media?" She also said she was "cautious" about Left Behind opponents' "language of 'resisting' and 'standing against.' I prefer 'redeeming, engaging with, and transforming.'"
Should dispensational premillenialist Christians who teach false teachings be considered evil?
"I hope I haven't described them as evil," Gordon Fee said. "The teaching is wrong, desperately wrong. It's about truth and falsehood, not evil. In my tradition everyone around me teaches this falsehood. What they believe needs correction in terms of what Scripture is teaching.
Gregory Beale pointed out that when Paul tells Timothy (in 2 Timothy 2) to weed out heresy in his church, he adds, "almost immediately, to refuse foolish and igorant speculation, and to be kind to all, to be able to teach with gentleness."
-Nathan Bierma