How Christians have struggled to avoid this obvious conclusion! Those who have been inclined to accept the textual integrity of the New Testament have become highly adept at the art of making Scripture say what it plainly does not say and inventing imaginative interpretations of it that, if nothing else, reveal how easy it is for the human mind to step over the line separating fantasy from reality. Others (I call them liberals.) have sought to escape the scriptural bonds by arguing that we really do not know precisely what Jesus said. After all, they argue, the Gospel accounts were all written after AD 70 by people who were not eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry. Moreover, many of them insist, the Gospel accounts that became canonical were chosen by the winners in the struggle for the establishment of Christian orthodoxy, and there were probably other early writings about the life and sayings of Jesus that differed substantially from the favored four and had just as much, or more, validity.

The impossibility of harmonizing the relevant scriptural passages with a future Second Coming that, after a gap of more than nineteen centuries, sweeps away the secular “kingdoms” of the earth and ushers in the long-promised rule of Christ explains, in part, why many religious authorities of the past and present have not wanted to see their followers become serious students of the Bible. “A little learning is a dangerous thing” wrote Alexander Pope, and a church whose members are dedicated students of Scripture is certain to be a strong intellectual challenge to anyone who would claim to be its final arbiter in matters of biblical interpretation. Small wonder, then, that some churches have adopted authoritarian organizational structures designed to minimize the danger of subversion from the laity. But what do you do when you belong to a church, you want with all your heart to believe in the authenticity of Scripture, you turn to the Bible for guidance and inspiration, and you find yourself scratching your head in a futile attempt to reconcile what you read there with what you are told by your teacher, pastor, or priest? How can you honestly say “Now I understand” when you are assured that when Christ said to Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, “you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Matt 26:64), His “you” did not mean those listening to Him and the “coming on the clouds of heaven” referred to an event that has yet to occur.

Based on my own experiences and my presumptions about people whose experiences bear some similarity to my own, I have to believe that many individuals have found themselves in the dilemma that I have just outlined, and I am sure that it is a dilemma with which visitors to this site are all too familiar. Numerous articles and comments posted on planetpreterist.com have convincingly demonstrated the fallacies in futurist interpretations of key passages in Scripture that deal with or touch on “the time of the end.” It seems to me, however, that those who have posted here and on the other preterist sites with which I am familiar have devoted somewhat less attention to analyzing how futurism prevailed over a sounder understanding of these passages and to working out an overall strategy for overcoming the obstacles confronting our movement. For this reason, I have decided to depart from the familiar confines of my specialization on the Book of Daniel in order to offer a few comments on how this exegetical wrong turn occurred and how we should go about correcting it. I realize only too well that I am heavily “outgunned” with regard to knowledge of Scripture by many, if not most, of the devotees of this site, and that I am a neophyte when it comes to the study of church history. I hope, nevertheless, that the approximately fifty years I spent wandering through the thoroughly secularized mazes of academia after I obtained my B.A. have allowed me to offer here a few insights of value to some of my preterist brethren.

A recurring objection to the idea that Scripture must be understood as stating that the Second Coming was to coincide with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple is the notion that God would never allow those who live their lives in obedience to the Word to deceive themselves about such a signal event as the Second Coming for even a short period of time, and certainly not for approximately nineteen hundred years. Considering the difficulty or impossibility of a mere human (the finite) understanding the mind of God (the infinite), I am reluctant to claim that I know what God would or would not do with regard to matters that Scripture does not specifically address; and as far as I am concerned, Scripture fails to provide much detail about the future of mankind after AD 70. Moreover, I can conceive of reasons that might logically explain why God would allow the correct understanding of parts of Scripture to be postponed until now, and I do not believe that fidelity to the Christian faith guarantees immunity against errors of biblical interpretation. Even the most holy among us are subject to extraneous influences upon our decision-making that can cloud our judgment and lead to grievous errors. Is not this reality a primary reason that we turn to the LORD in prayer?

With regard to mankind’s post-AD 70 destiny, there is, of course, Daniel 2, which gives us the prophecy of the rock that destroys the great statue and grows into an earth-filling mountain symbolizing a kingdom that is never to be destroyed (v.35, 44-45). It is my belief that the rock represents the arrival of Christianity in the first century AD and that the process of building the mountain is still ongoing. The symbolic triumph of Christianity is spiritual, of course, but it is also political. Daniel 2 portrays the four earthly kingdoms that preceded the rock’s arrival as secular political “kingdoms” that are swept into oblivion and replaced by an eternal kingdom symbolized by the mountain.

If Christ returned to earth in AD 70, it is logical to assume that He is with us today spiritually and is monitoring the process through which the rock is growing into the mountain. Given the geo-political troubles confronting those of us on the earth, it is an enormous comfort to believe that the fortunes of mankind have not been left to blind chance. It is also a comfort to understand that we are not condemned to pass through any of the incredibly destructive scenarios that some of our futurist Christian brothers have constructed. Not that the future promises to be easy! It is hard to look upon a world featuring such threats as Islamic terror cults, unchecked nuclear proliferation, the moral collapse of much of the “West,” the AIDS epidemic, the abundance of kleptocractic rulers and government officials, and the ambitions of China’s determinedly authoritarian rulers without becoming fearful of the future. At the same time, however, we need to keep in mind that the numbers of people around the world who are turning to Christ is rapidly increasing. This is a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked and dismissed by the jaded and secularized members of the mainstream media establishment, but it exists nevertheless. It is also a phenomenon that is creating great opportunities for breaking down longstanding barriers to a correct understanding of Scripture.

Although some of the early post-AD 70 church fathers had a better grasp of the nature of the Second Coming than many of our religious authorities of today, the scriptural interpretations of those early individuals were effectively suppressed after Christianity became the dominant faith. Those who were in positions of control endorsed the idea of a future Second Coming, and that was that. The emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312, and in the following year, the Edict of Milan granted Christianity the status of a legally protected religion. In 325, Constantine convoked the Council of Nicaea to unify Christian belief. Now favored by the powers that were, Christianity grew rapidly in numbers and influence, and it arguable that the doctrinal uniformity brought about by the centralization of church authority and the marriage of church and state was essential if it was to avoid being splintered into violently conflicting sects and factions. That Christ had come in AD 70 was, no doubt, an idea that was considered by various religious scholars over the course of the next thousand years, but this idea was not permitted to be openly debated before the public. When reformers such as John Wycliffe (1320-1384) began advancing such radical notions as the idea that people should be allowed to read and study the Bible in their own language, the Catholic Church vigorously opposed them; and when Martin Luther (1493-1546), John Calvin (1509-1564), and other leaders of the Reformation successfully opposed the efforts of the Church to continue to enforce doctrinal uniformity and to limit knowledge of the Bible’s actual content, they obtained the protection of powerful princes. Inevitably, perhaps, the conjoining of church and state continued as an operating principle, though less completely than before. Nevertheless, sola scriptura had now been put forth as the operational guide for the grounding of the Christian faith, and the potential for attaining popular understanding of the true nature of Christianity had been released.

With the union of church and state that occurred during the reign of Constantine came the transformation of Christianity from a religion that frowned on warfare and violence against heretics to one in which the use of force against the enemies of the state and/or the official church was likely to be condoned by church officials. A problem with such use of force, however, was the conflict between the martial conduct and venality of “Christian” rulers and many scriptural passages that continued to influence Christian teaching. That conflict not only constrained the behavior of rulers and their minions but also helped in many ways to provide the cultural underpinning for the enormous material progress that initially manifested itself in Europe by the seventeenth century and has continued into the present.

Not so constrained, however, was Islam, which used Judaism and Christianity as building blocks upon which to construct a religion whose scriptures explicitly embraced expansion through conquest and largely avoided the behavioral restraints on violence—particularly against infidels—imposed by the scriptures of its predecessors. Under the conditions that prevailed in medieval times, Islam proved to be a superbly efficient instrument for military conquest, and those parts of Christendom that survived its onslaught were fortunate to do so. Some of today’s Christians no doubt wonder why God permitted the Muslims to conquer huge chunks of previously Christianized territory lands in Asia and Africa and effect the conversion to Islam of most of their inhabitants. While I cannot claim to know the mind of God in this matter, I speculate that the practice of Christianity at the time of Islamic ascendancy was so much at odds with what Scripture commands that what was important for the future was the preservation of the potential for a Christian renaissance at the proper time. That renaissance, I believe, is now at hand, and I predict that the religion that was ingeniously designed by a false prophet and his followers to be in harmony with the cultural structure of the seventh century AD will disintegrate under the conditions that confront it in the twenty-first and that Christian influence in countries where Islam is dominant will greatly expand despite barbarous efforts to suppress it.

I fully realize that many who are considered to be expert commentators on the human condition view Christianity’s future with pessimism. This is particularly the case among those who are concerned about the future of Europe, where, it is commonly believed, the combination of a decline in Christian belief, social disintegration, the inability to cut back on welfare state dependency, low reproduction rates among the native population, and massive Islamic immigration combined with high immigrant birthrates will inevitably produce a culture that differs radically from what exists today. As a professional economist, however, I long ago learned about the dangers of forecasting by making simple projections from current trends, and I advise those who foresee little hope for Europe to avoid writing it off just yet as being hopelessly lost to the Christian faith.

While there may seem to be opportunities for the expansion of Christianity, will that expansion occur if the predominant Christian theology continues to be one that depends on a future Second Coming—perhaps in the immediate future—to save mankind from itself? Perhaps so, but I am inclined to doubt it. Given the lack of solid scriptural support for futurist theology and the likelihood that “the end is near” approach for inspiring belief has been employed so often during the last nineteen hundred years that it is encountering diminishing spiritual returns, I cannot believe that futurism has a promising future. Even if I am wrong, however, that does not preclude the emergence of preterism as a far more popular contender for supremacy than it is today. Neither does it preclude preterists from joining forces with futurists on matters where their interests coincide.

In my judgment, it is not futurism that offers the biggest challenge for preterism, but liberalism. When we look at the professions that exercise the greatest influence over the shaping of public opinion in the United States other than the clergy—the news media, academia, public education, the entertainment community, the judiciary—we find that secular liberals (nowadays often called “progressives”) and Christians with liberal theological views far outnumber religious conservative. Furthermore, most of the clergy of several leading Protestant denominations and, I suspect, the Catholic Church as well fall into the liberal category, at least with regard to their approach to the Bible. I maintain, therefore, that preterists must not allow their battles with futurists to obscure the greater challenge posed by liberalism, by which I mean not just liberal views about the Bible, but liberal mindsets and worldviews. No matter how frustrated we may become with dispensationalists, other premillennialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter Day Saints, etc., we must remember that many of the people with whom we dispute issues of biblical exegesis share our conviction that the Bible is a divinely inspired work whose text is trustworthy and has been preserved for our guidance. Although the struggle may be drawn out, the superiority of our understanding of Scripture will eventually give us victory over our biblically conservative rivals; but unless we overcome liberalism, our struggles with other conservative Christians will be akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Fortunately, there are numerous indications that liberal influence in this country has crested and is on the wane. The bad news is that it is so deeply embedded into the fiber of our culture that the prospects for rendering it harmless are not promising. We can, however, reduce its cultural impact.

For many liberals, the Bible’s claim to being a divinely inspired work is highly dubious, which means that, for them, it is only a book. Of course, there are other liberals who believe that the Bible was divinely inspired to some degree—or may have been—but such individuals harbor doubts about the historical accuracy and authenticity of the Gospels and other parts of Scripture. This directly conflicts with the preterist approach, which invokes sola scriptura as its fundamental exegetical principle and applies it to the entire New Testament and much (or even all) of the Old Testament. Unless the Bible is what it claims to be, however, how can we possibly justify invoking that principle as our guide? We must, therefore, do our utmost to demonstrate that the Bible contains a great deal of authentic prophecy and to make the case for the authenticity and reliability of as much of it as possible. To the extent that we can make the case for pre-AD 70 authorship of the entire New Testament, our position is immeasurably strengthened.

During my fifty years of working in academia, I was a direct observer of the expansion of liberal influence within that vital part of our culture. More than that, in the early years of my career, I was a modest promoter of that influence. My worldview epiphany occurred when, on a bright fall day in 1967, from my office in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin overlooking the entrance to the business school building, I directly observed the riot that occurred when student radicals attempted to prevent fellow students from interviewing for employment with the Dow Chemical Company. No one had a better view of that scene than I did. When I found myself cheering for the greatly outnumbered officers of the law (“fascists”), I knew that something in me had changed fundamentally. It changed even more when most of the news accounts I saw, heard, or read described a riot other than the one I had witnessed. Of course the academic community already leaned well to the left before the events of the late 1960s, but the leftward list has subsequently become so pronounced that I fear that the good ship “Academia” has capsized. It has not yet sunk, however, and perhaps it can be righted to its former leftward tilt or even to a vertical plane, but the righting process will require time and patience.

While academics tend to think of themselves, with some justification, I suppose, as an intellectually superior group, I have witnessed numerous astonishing demonstrations of collective stupidity among them that have helped convince me that humanity must be dependent on a Higher Power to have gotten as far materially as it has. Examples abound, but I shall use only one (of many) from my own profession to illustrate. Right up to 1989, many economists with a liberal worldview took the position that the Soviet Union had a higher rate of economic growth and a lower unemployment rate than the United States. They did so despite the existence of strong evidence that the Soviet Union’s growth rate was greatly overstated and its use of labor was so wasteful that to say full employment existed in the Soviet Union was to destroy the usefulness of that term. Some of us conservatives wondered about the wisdom of calling people employed when their jobs consisted of producing consumer goods that few people wanted to buy or guarding political prisoners in the Gulag, and we perceived that the huge size of the KGB and the government bureaucracies concerned with overseeing the economy raised serious questions about the efficacy of the command economy approach. Moreover, some of us perceived that seventy years of communism had greatly undermined the Soviet Union’s moral fiber, with devastating economic effects. Such considerations seemed, however, to make little impression on people who were determined to focus upon the shortcomings of capitalism. To all this I add that one of the reasons that Soviet economic growth was overstated was that the colossal destruction of the environment that went on behind the Iron Curtain was largely ignored.