#other fun philosopher facts: john stuart mill was a wife guy

[huntunderironskies]

Can I ask what 'premillenial dispensationalism' is ?

oh no i have to explain the scofield bible

Side note, I picked a bad time to finish this, I meant to have it done earlier but I've been super busy. Everything here is dead serious, sadly. If I get another follow-up to this, as a warning I will take forever to respond because I try to make these as informative and respectful as possible.

I'm going to put this below a cut. As a content warning, this talks about end-of-the-world stuff and touches on conspiracy theories and antisemitism, so take care if that's a touchy subject for you. It's impossible to talk about this in any depth without it leading into these topics. I'm going to try and keep to the things I know about so I don't make any missteps which is why I'm focusing more on the academic/scholarly aspects.

Alright, so. The idea of the apocalypse most people in America are familiar with is the one that starts with the Rapture. Unless you've been raised in certain groups or God zaps up all the good people to the sky and then there's a bunch of bad stuff that happens and then Jesus shows up to establish a Kingdom of God and after a thousand years of perfect rule and then there's one final battle against Satan and then the world gets destroyed, and everyone either goes to Hell forever or goes to Heaven.

Anyways, that's all about like, three hundred years old, tops AFAIK? More specifically just regarding the Rapture and what comes after it, the eternal misery thing is way older. To be clear, no serious religious scholar would think that this was what anyone who scribed early transcripts that would be compiled into the Bible saw as true, and most serious religious scholars aka people who didn't go to Liberty University or its copycats OHHHHHHHHHHH BURN sorry i'm bitter don't even think that this is close to what apocalypticism was preached by Jesus and those who came soon after him.

Now, I am not stupid enough to argue that apocalypticism isn't a core part of Christian texts (again, Jesus was definitively an apocalyptic preacher, there is zero doubt about that in any serious academic environment) but Revelations was a book added in by the Nicene Council three hundred years after the death of Jesus, and it was one of many apocalyptic texts. It just happens to be the one that made the cut, and it's one of the most metaphorical ones that has lent itself to people making some....very odd interpretations. Its writer also may have been tripping on cave shrooms but, while that does make a very fun story to tell at dinner to make religious studies sound less dry as a field, much like Satre and the mescaline crabs with philosophy, it's not a generally accepted theory.

But Satre really did take a bad hit of mescaline that made him hallucinate crabs for months, that actually happened.

Anyways. Highly metaphorical text. There's a case to be made that this was deliberate, because yelling "I HOPE GOD HITS NERO WITH A LIGHTNING BOLT" in a crowded forum will not end well. For example, you may or may not be familiar with the scholarly theory that the Number of the Beast is supposed to be a numerical cipher for Nero, and a lot of apocalyptic texts were just people saying "no guys, really, everyone who fucked us over is absolutely going to get smoted by God, because God told me so" as a morale boosting exercise. It's just that the Roman Empire happened to be most of the known world at the time, and it's not like even modern people have the best conceptualization of what a global society looks like anyway because our brains are mostly incapable of doing so. This isn't far off flood myths being based on catastrophic river flooding and then things getting embellished over time. Again, that little geographic reason was their world.

Though, I mean, if they were trying to say the fall of Rome would happen, they were right, it's just that the oppressive march of time would've ensured that happened eventually.

The problem is that you end up with morons a thousand and some spare change years down the line who decide to impose entirely different geopolitical standards onto it and that's where the Scofield Reference Bible comes in.

So the Scofield Reference Bible traces its origins to just before World War I, and the sharp among you in the crowd may begin to see where this is going. World War I was a brutal, horrific experience, and it was (probably, I've only taken 200 level history courses) the first global experience. And the Book of Revelation describes plagues (Spanish Flu), horrible afflictions (side effects of chemical warfare), and...well, yeah, war. While the Scofield Bible predates the war, it exploded in popularity because at the time it felt real.

Mister Scofield Reference Bible (Cyrus Scofield) was inspired by the preacher John Nelson Darby, with whom he was roughly contemporaneous with, and don't worry, you will never need to remember those names again because that's the only real contribution they've ever made to theology. Darby wouldn't have called himself a dispensationalist, the term was coined post-publication against his will after he died by someone who didn't like him, but that's the term we landed on.

To break down the name: dispensationalism refers to the idea that you can neatly divide up the history of the world into what amounts to theological epochs defined by a cycle of divine test > failure > judgement ending with the final dispensation, which will be Judgement Day itself. The "millennial" bit does not refer to an actual millennium but rather the Millennial Kingdom, which will be the actual-factual physical Kingdom of God.

This is the one thing that's probably kind of accurate to what pre-Nicene Christians would have believed, most people assumed that the Kingdom of God was just a restored version of Israel before all the invasions happened ruled by a divinely appointed prophet. No heavenly firmament or fluffy clouds or whatever.

The part where it's not accurate is the fluffy clouds Kingdom exists and that's where all the believers go to chill while the apocalypse is happening, though. That's a core concept of things, and that's the Rapture that pretty much any American would be familiar with

The modern version of this also includes some weirdly specific things like? For some reason it's generally accepted that people will go to Heaven naked and leave their clothes behind. I don't think this is in the Scofield Reference Bible, and I honestly don't know where this originated from. Could be as recent as Hal Lindsay for all I know. It was definitely in Left Behind, which was the other thing that caused a massive resurgence despite being probably one of the worst pieces of fiction ever published, theologian/blogger/fellow Gemini (<- most important quality) Slacktivist took like eight years to get through covering the first two books both in terms of how bad the theology is, the characters not acting like actual people, the plot not making sense, and how much the books reveal about the neuroses of both writers.

While that's fairly harmless, it's had some pretty sinister effects. Aside from the obvious, if you keep up with global politics at all, you're aware of the fact that America is extremely interested in keeping Israel in power as a state. I am very stupid except on very specific topics that are not this (and there is so much going on with colonialist interference in the Middle East to cover), not Palestinian or Israeli, and too tired to deal with attracting the bad kind of weirdoes to my blog so I'm going to put it this way. One, apartheid is bad, free Palestine. Two, and more within my wheelhouse so I can speak more in detail about this, the only reason that this is happening is because premillennial dispensationalist Christians think that Israel needs to exist as a geographical and political concept because the battle of Judgment Day is supposed to happen there, at which point the armies of God will defeat Satan and the world ends.

Not before all the surviving Jewish people convert to Christianity, the ~*~true religion~*~, though.

If it wasn't clear, the tildes and asterixes were a sarcasm tag, I just realized if you didn't spend an unfortunate amount of your life on Livejournal that might not be clear.

So, to be blunt, these people do not give a shit about actual Jewish people. Do not mistake this for anything other than a means to an end and they'll let anything happen to make sure that end comes about. Or actively help, for that matter. I said that I would get into conspiracy theories, the bit about needing Israel so the end of the world can happen is not a conspiracy theory. The saturation rate of evangelical dispensationalists in US government is incredibly high. Evangelicals actively drive public policy. When you know what to look for it's blatantly obvious I can get together a reading list at some point or another but it might take a while and this post is already very very long and meandering and sometimes barely on topic.

Anyways. The short of it is: From a sociology of religion perspective, it's accepted that Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic preacher. Apocalypticism was very in vogue at the time and we can say with reasonable certainty (note: when a religious studies scholar uses the term, they mean "this definitely happened, it's just we can't perform necromancy to 100% confirm it") he was not the only one running around. He's addressed as "rabbi" by his disciples if that wasn't immediately clear. A refusal to acknowledge the realities of the world circa Jesus's life and treating the Bible as an unerring word of God (except when it's convenient to ignore certain bits) instead of a historical source, and all the issues that comes with it, has led to some extremely bad things. Ammon Hennacy was right, we are in Hell.

#thanks for the ask! #sorry this took forever i was trying to not write an entire academic paper on the subject #other fun philosopher facts: john stuart mill was a wife guy #rene descartes died of not enough naps #none of these are april fools day jokes #i mean the dying of not enough naps thing is reductive b/c it was more lack of sleep killed his immune system #still technically true #wish the history of the scofield bible were a joke it wouldn't be funny but at least it wouldn't be real