“The End is near!”
I am studying Millenarianism. Millenarianism is “a religious movements that expect imminent, total, ultimate, this-worldly, collective salvation” according to Malcolm B. Hamilton in Christian Millenarianism. My main topic of study is not Marxism, but I thought I’d throw down here the secularized aspect of millennium thinking.
When most Christians think of “end times” movements, rapture, one thousand year reigns of Christ on earth (the millennium) – all those highly suspect extrapolations of John’s Revelation 20:7, we are not aware that our current secular moralism became secularized because of a wellspring of thinking going back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Engels in particular castigated early Christianity as a millennial end times movement. A few decades later (around 1900) Albert Schweitzer popularized Engels view of New Testament kingdom as a eschatological end times movement. The common view of these sociologists, economists, political theoreticians was Christianity was born out of Roman oppression. And people who are oppressed resort to escapism, which is what Millenarianism is.
Of course Schweitzer believed Jesus was a failed messiah who was “crushed on the wheel of time” (The Quest for the Historical Jesus) – meaning Jesus did not resurrect. Now add in “cognitive dissonance” which was popularized in the 1950s with sociologists studying flying saucer cults in the middle of nowhere, and sociologist Leon Festinger’s leap to connect UFO cults to early Christianity and you have escapist Christianity. BTW, Festinger’s work with UFO cults is highly criticized for its abominable science. Sometimes there were more infiltrating sociologists than UFO cult members!
Marx and Engels liked the revolutionary thinking of the first followers of Jesus because they talked about restructuring wealth, leveling the poor and rich, peace, and so forth – all Sermon on the Mount sort of stuff, you know, the Beatitudes. Anyway, Engels and Schweitzer and it appears to me much of the German critical scholarship of the 19th and early 20th centuries was hellbent on throwing out any conventional historical treatment of the kingdom of God in favor of their “demythologized” (Bultmann) Jesus and his gospel.
A new secular child of the Christian faith was conceived out of this critical thinking. Remove Jesus, remove all the church trappings, all the metaphysical, all the transcendent, all the faith – all the miraculous stuff of the Gospel and you end up with – communism and socialism. I mean starting with Marx and running right up to the neo-Nietzschean modernism we have today. Marx said “mutatis muntandis” change the world, and don’t worry about understanding it or explaining the world the way Christianity or for that matter any transcendent faith must do.
Weird thing is, Communism went just the way all the Millenarian cults went. A messianic figure (like Stalin or Mao or Castro…) casts a big vision of the world as a perfect world someday soon. Society is corrupt and we special prophetic insider few must announce the end is near – for the rich – and everyone must immediately reject their previous tainted way of life (feel guilty, become watchdogs of “the truth”) go militant, and now violent, introduce the TRUE WAY to only those who truly believe, and punish all others. At the end of the 20th century about 145 million people are killed (leave out the Nazi’s – they were not Communists; but add in another 25M for the cause of the Third Reich).
What Marx, Engels, Schweitzer, and Festinger refused to pay attention to in the New Testament community was how mundane the gospel was. People worked (despite the Thessalonians being told “get back to work! 2 Th 3:10). Read Paul’s Thessalonian correspondence and you will read Paul exhorting the new believers to “behave” and lead quiet lives, work with their hands, stop busy bodying, don’t fornicate, be likable, be sober – care about each other. And Thessalonians is the THE text for the crappy doctrine of the rapture!!! (1 Th 4 and 5). If the Paul was really suggesting there is a rapture the way some Christians talk about it then there is no way he’d describe how life should be lived the way he does. But those who believe in the non-biblical rapture will just blindly keep believing in it despite the overwhelming lack of evidence.
Christians shared their food. They did not desire to escape the world. They followed Jesus well within the normal world. Engels thought the first church was missionary-driven because they were end-times fanatics. But the first believers were not escapists. Paul describes the return of Jesus (not our escape), the nature of the resurrection, and why the churches must take care of each other in the daily here and now. Christianity was a movement to a new way of living – not a new way of escaping.
The jury of time is in. Communism failed. Christianity is still and always has been the most powerful force for good on the planet… food for the poor, voice the voiceless, stand up for women and children, medicine, healthcare, public education, universities, end slavery, honor all people – even those who disagree with us…
But end timers – they tend to disregard others. They only care about gaining adherents to their cult or sect or narrowed understanding of the Bible. In my opinion, there is a certain emotional predilection or emotional profile toward millenarian, end times, rapture-ers, escapers type of Christianity. It is called “compensatory,” and it functions like an Internal Working Model (IWM). And it is not caring or very present to others. It is not Christianity.
