Keeping Our Feet On the Ground

The Dangerous Folly of "Newspaper Exegesis"

We read once about a (fabled) US Naval Captain who enjoyed a stellar career.  In order to keep himself on track professionally, as it were, he used to keep a piece of paper in his cabin safe.  Every day he would get the paper out, read it, then return it.  It was later found out that upon the paper was written a simple message: "Right=Starboard; Left=Port"

Many of us have out grown the foolishness of what is known as "Dispensationalism", but in our late teenage years it was all the rage amongst "Bible-believing" Christians--ourselves included.  Once a year, lest we be tempted again, we get out a piece of paper recounting the number of times Dispensationalism had (wrongly) predicted the end of the world.  Then we replace it in the office safe for another 12 months--lest we forget. 

Historian Dwight Wilson summarized the never-ending litany of exploded claims concerning the "End times".
 

The current crisis [there is a perpetual current crisis] was always identified as a sign of the end, whether it was the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Palestine War, the Suez Crisis, the June War, or the Yom Kippur War.

The revival of the Roman Empire has been identified variously as Mussolini's empire, the League of Nations, the United Nations, the European Defense Community, the Common Market, and NATO.  Speculation on the Antichrist has included Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, and Henry Kissinger. 

The northern confederation was supposedly formed by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Rapallo Treaty, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and then the Soviet Bloc.  The "kings of the east" have been variously the Turks, the lost tribes of Israel, Japan, India, and China.  The supposed restoration of Israel has confused the problem of whether the Jews are to be restored before or after the coming of the Messiah.  The restoration of the latter rain has been pinpointed to have begun in 1897, 1917, and 1948.  The end of the "times of the Gentiles" has been placed in 1895, 1917, 1948, and 1967. "Gog" has been an impending threat since the Crimean War, both under the Czars and the Communists.  [David Davis, cited in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark A. Noll (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), p. 173f.]

So bereft of credibility is the dispensationalist system of biblical interpretation (and of modern history) that it has become the butt of a witticism known as "Murphy's Armageddon Observation": 
"Those who don't learn from the past are condemned to write end-time "prophecy" books."

Just like the fabled naval captain, it is worthwhile getting Dwight Wilson's summary of the litany of exploded myths out of the safe and reading it every now and again.  We thank God we have escaped from the influence of such folly and are no longer at risk of confusing "port" and "starboard".