“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

John 8:32

Becoming a Christian in the early ‘90s was an incredible amount of fun in an age of innocence. I became a Christian in 1993. Michael W. Smith was on the radio, youth groups got together at arcades and roller rinks, big concerts like the Creation festival got us camping out in the woods – church was fresh, hip, and relevant. This is the culture that introduced me to a God who’d interacted with humanity throughout history to provide redemption and a life greater than one’s self. This made a lot of sense to 17-year old me, and it still does.

Christianity came with a lot of baggage, though. Along with the powerful message of the gospel also came a lot of strange ideas that never quite sat well with me. Concepts of a literal seven-day creation, a perfect and immortal body in Adam and Eve, and especially that of a violent and demonic end-of-the-world scenario that would make any Hollywood producer look like an amateur. In hindsight, Christianity had seemed to conflate faith with magic, and offset the foundation of a redemptive God with violence, judgment and death. How odd.

This was a package deal, though, for many young Christians in the 90’s. To not have faith in a literal creation and a violent end times meant that you didn’t have faith at all. This left many Christians to either go along with the weirdness, and just ignore the obvious oddities of the Christian faith, or to fully embrace them and make your identity as a Christian based on your willingness to blindly accept even the most outrageous claims of a Bible interpreted literally.

There are many Christians still stuck here, because it is quite literally the only thing many churches teach today. As proof in fact, during the past few months many Christians have interrupted my peaceful schadenfreude to bother me with the most outrageous conspiracy theories. I have been told the COVID vaccine is the mark of the beast, that Joe Biden is the Antichrist, that the National Guard is the new world order, among other delusions. The world has gone full sandwich board.

A lot of people have dismissed these people as cornflakes, although in today’s world, these have proven to be some quite violent cornflakes. But you would be wrong to dismiss Christianity as a whole based on these conspiracy-loving bunch of crazies, and in fact it would benefit many of these otherwise intelligent people to know that their nutty beliefs are not representative of their faith, and can be in fact divorced from Christianity altogether. Without someone to explain this to them, many will deny COVID vaccines, riot on the Capitol, and literally die on the basis of the theological system under which they were taught. It is a flawed and unfalsifiable system – not Christianity itself – that is to blame.

As a youngster, I swallowed much of the oddness that came along with Christianity because it came along with the belief system. It wasn’t until much later on past the 90’s that I came to study something churches also had a disdain for: theology. As part of my studies, it became apparent to me for the first time that what I was taught as a young Christian was referred to as dispensationalism (specifically, all of the churches around me had taught dispensational premillennialism). Dispensational hermeneutics is built upon two key pillars: 1. All scripture, especially prophecy, is to be interpreted literally and 2. There is a distinction between Israel and the church. These two pillars gave birth to most of the construct around the creation and destruction of the world. In fact, only seeing through the lens of literal interpretation does one get such a markedly stark image of Christianity. To help prop up these beliefs – which take an incredible amount of faith on their own – concepts such as progressive revelation were incorporated; this is the idea that the Old Testament texts are a key to understanding the deeper revelations provided in New Testament texts, and ultimately affects (rather dramatically) how end times prophecy (eschatology) is interpreted. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how the only Christian views many know is seen through the lens of a literal interpretation of the Bible. It has defined a Christian’s entire world view.

But dispensational hermeneutics have only been around since the 1800s. They were conceived by a Bible teacher named John Darby in the 1800s, and popularized by a theologian named Scofield. The popularity of dispensationalism took giant leaps in the early 1900s, as society became more pessimistic through WWI, the Great Depression, and other events. Its appeal was obvious: it offered comfort that the suffering the world was seeing would soon be avenged, and provided a number of parallels that could be made with the current events of such a troubling time. No one could rightly lay blame on society in the 1900s being tempted to parallel the Antichrist to Hitler, or the sufferings of the Great Tribulation to the horrible sufferings of the Holocaust, especially with a relatively new form of theology circulating to “explain it all”.

The church hasn’t always interpreted scripture this way, though, and it’s important to point out that dispensational premillennialism is fundamentally in conflict with historic protestant hermeneutics, which have been in play since the early church. The historic pillars surrounding interpretation of scripture are: 1. The New Testament should explain the Old Testament (not the other way around), 2. Old Testament concepts are reinterpreted in the New Testament, and 3. Scripture (and especially prophecy) is interpreted analogia fidei (analogy of faith), by interpreting the complicated biblical passages in the context of the more simplified and clear passages about the same topic. In other words, scripture is interpreted without the prerequisite that they must be taken literally, but may be symbolic or thematic, and should be supported by other, clearer verses about the same topic in prior works.

This more established form of hermeneutics renders an entirely different perspective on Christianity than one that is drawn from a literal interpretation of the Bible, yet still maintains Christ as the central figure of redemption under a new covenant. Applying this set of rules gives license to be a Christian without having to accept a literal 7-day (or even 7,000 year) creation, license to be a Christian without believing that Adam and Eve didn’t poop and had immortal, perfect bodies, and license to be a Christian without accepting the idea of an all loving God who violently rage-quits civilization. Concepts of a rapture, the tribulation, and the Antichrist look vastly different, or even nonexistent, under the more well-established interpretations. Why? Because these are devices created by progressive revelation, treating scripture as if it is some fortune cookie to unlock the future. The stark difference here is that dispensationalists will use books like Daniel to “unlock” and interpret Revelation’s ideas about the future, but the more established form of hermeneutics instead uses Revelation to interpret Daniel (and other parts of the Old Testament) to unlock God’s redemptive work throughout history.

Many scholars have argued that departing from a literal interpretation of scripture lends itself to all forms of speculation, but just look at what literal interpretation has done for speculators in the past 100 years. People thought Hitler was the Antichrist. People thought Obama was the Antichrist. People thought Y2K was the end of the millennium. The rapture has been scheduled and rescheduled repeatedly. People are now not going to take a COVID vaccine because they believe it’s the mark of the beast. If historic Protestantism is guilty of speculation, dispensationalism has been sensationally guilty of it. 

There are many stable and respectable people who believe dispensational premillennialism. At the very least, dispensationalism has literalism going for it, which historically would offer some guard rails to prevent speculation from running wild. Today, however, many Christians being ignorant of the two mutually exclusive schools of theology have now blended the two together. For example, literal interpretation would otherwise dismiss symbolic ideas such as a vaccine or a tracking chip being the mark of the beast; if you held to strict dispensationalism, you’d believe such a mark would be a physically visible marking needed to buy or sell. Today, many have adopted the construct afforded them by dispensational hermeneutics, but also simultaneously abandoned the very pillars that it relies on, allowing for wild symbolic conspiracy theories to run rampant in an end-times scenario that only exists if you take everything literally. Never mix liquor and dispensational premillennialism! You will end up with a Frankenstein of Christianity by enjoining two mutually exclusive forms of theology (or you’ll end up conceiving Tim LaHaye, and the world does not need another Left Behind series).

What you’re seeing coming out of the American Evangelical church is not the product of Christianity; even an atheist can see that the actions of many Christians today are not aligned with the teachings of Jesus. What you’re seeing is the product of a century of quite terrible theology that gained a cult following due to the pessimism of the early 1900s. This followed us into the 90’s and beyond, where the church clung to all other forms of cult phenomenon (see https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=7766), and the fruit of that are severely misled Christians who have conflated faith with literalism.