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4.0 out of 5 stars
Alternatives to "Left Behind" series, August 4, 2004
This review is from: Armageddon Now!: The Premillenarian Response to Russia and Israel Since 1917 (Paperback)
Written by Assemblies of God pastor Dwight Wilson, I first came across "Armageddon Now" in the 1980s when some evangelicals were predicting nuclear war with the Soviet Union and the imminent end of the age. Now the Soviet Union is mouldering in the ash heap of history, the predicted nuclear war never came to past, but dispensationalist eschatology continues to march on (thanks in good measure to the sensational success of Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind" series which, he fervently believes, is just a fictionalized account of biblical prophecy).
But there is a lively debate in evangelical churches about whether this blood-and-gore reading of the Bible is the right one. Wilson's church, the Assemblies of God, officially affirms the style of biblical interpretation that lies behind LaHaye's books, but Wilson asks a lot of thoughtful questions in this easy-to-read introduction to the subject.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A PREMILLENARIAN WARNS AGAINST FORECASTS OF "END TIMES" DATES, September 29, 2010
Dwight Wilson is an Assemblies of God pastor (and a Premillennialist), as well as a professor of history at Bethany College.
This book was first published in 1977. In his Foreword to the 1991 reprinting, Wilson writes, "It has been my practice over the years when asked what 'Armageddon Now!' was all about, to point out, first, the glaring tension between the premillennialists' historical response to Russia (the Soviet Union) on the one hand, and their response to the state of Israel on the other. While madly cheering the restoration and expansion of the state of Israel at the expense of her neighbors, premils have bewailed the expected aggression of Russia toward her neighbors. Both of these phenomena are predestined, prophetic situations, according to most premils' scheme of events. Therefore, it is apparent to me that they should be handled consistently. As my presentation in the book showed, they have not."
Here are some representative quotations from the book:
"The beginning of a political movement in 1897 to restore the Jews to Palestine appeared to be the fruition of premillenarian as well as Jewish dreams." (Pg. 33)
"This blatant anti-Mosque attitude was just one example of a generally anti-Arab disposition held by most premillenarians." (Pg. 71)
"The record has amply demonstrated the premillenarian philosophy of history to be deterministic. Mechanistic figures of speech were used, such as cogs in a machine or stars in their courses... Although it is difficult to prove from direct statements, when one analyzes the premillenarians' response to Israel, the inescapable conclusion is that their philosophy of history in many cases is equivalent to the antinomian heresy." (Pg. 143)
"The premillenarians' credibility is at a low ebb because they succumbed to the temptation to exploit every conceivably possible prophetic fulfillment for the sake of their prime objective: evangelism... Although within the movement there are many moderate voices that will continue to speak out against this irresponsibility, these voices will go unheeded since they do not offer any hope of greater success in the primary goal of evangelism... The premillenarians see evangelism as the means to save the world and will continue to use this means as a justification to misuse the end." (Pg. 218)
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