Talking Out Of Turn

Somewhere in this period, the teacher announced that he had had a vision.

He didn’t call them visions, though, because people who themselves were refugees from Charismatic excesses didn’t respond well to visions, and also, visions have the connotation of prophetic authority, something never directly claimed by the teacher. He called them “movies.” Yes, that’s right, he would announce that the Lord had given him a “movie,” and in fact we were all excited to hear about it. Sometimes they were about personal things, and he had had one that showed him a prophetic panorama, with the rapture and the tribulation and all that sort of thing. Often they were just personal gifts from God to him, perhaps to encourage him.

This movie was a little different from others he had had, though. This one was very personal. He saw faces. He saw faces of many people he knew, throughout the ministry. And he saw them in the aftermath of the rapture, trying to find the others… but the others were gone. As he explained it, we realized what he was claiming: that the Lord had given him a snapshot of who was in, and who was out. The vision (sorry, “movie”) was with a view to scaring the people who were “out” into getting right with God, which generally meant getting serious about attending the ministry’s meetings and supporting them, and not flirting with other teaching.

This spawned a lot of “is it I, Lord?” questioning, a la the questions asked of Christ when He announced that somebody within the circle of disciples would betray Him. The teacher did not announce (at least not to my knowledge) a complete list of the faces seen, but if you went to him he would tell you if you were in or not, and often he would tell you who else was in or out if it was interesting to you. One mother was told that her daughter was out. I know for a fact that a couple of people who were friends of mine were listed as “out.”

For those of us who didn’t live in California, the big question was, do we ask, or not? I was torn on this point. For one thing, I thought it best to live as if your salvation were in question, because being consistent Arminians, we believed that we could lose our salvation, so in fact none of us were safe. So for myself, I assumed that I might be in the movie (although deep down I was pretty sure I wasn’t—I mean, I was the hand-picked successor after all, and my theology and devotion to God were only improving as far as I could tell), and I would never think that Tracey could be in the movie either. But then there was the pastoral problem: if the Lord gave us a hint about who “needed some work” and who didn’t, shouldn’t I rejoice to have such clear direction?

But I was vaguely aware of a deeper problem with this. Things that we taught that were allegedly Scriptural could be checked out; one could research any fact we threw out, or series of facts, and if syllogisms were the order of the day, our logic could be double-checked. But how do you test a “movie?” Was there an objective test to determine whether a list of people who supposedly aren’t, at the moment, part of the Bride of Christ, was accurate? And the answer is, of course not. So, for this moment, I would have to trust a man—the cardinal sin, the way we taught. (In reality the cardinal sin of our group is “trusting men other than the teacher.”)

I made the decision never to ask. Occasionally, in conversation about other things, the teacher would let a name slip, which is how I learned some of them, and others told me of the results of their asking (or when the teacher would volunteer information). I don’t believe I ever found out the status of any of the local group. I am sure that I don’t have to tell you how manipulative and controlling this sort of thing is, so I won’t belabor the point. This post is not about that movie. It’s about the massive eschatological changes that came hard on the heels of that movie, and then about a movie which followed it.

Up to this point, the teacher had been fairly traditional as far as his dispensational end-times views went. He believed in a coming rapture of the Church (which he went to huge lengths to tie to what he called the “Jewish wedding picture,” in which the Bride is taken to meet the Bridegroom, they stay for a feast in the Bridegroom’s house for seven days, and then they move into their own house amid joy and more feasting and start their new life together in earnest), a seven-year tribulation in which Israel would rise to power and then nearly fall to an Antichrist figure who had already deceived the world and killed many who came to faith after the rapture, and then the Second Coming, followed by a literal thousand-year millennial reign of Christ on the earth. After that came another apostasy, the Great White Throne judgment, and then the beginning of eternity in a new heavens and new earth. He modified it in a couple of places; for example, he taught that those who came to faith after the Rapture were not members of the Bride. That’s right; technically the teacher did not teach the usual second-chance-ism that comes with a pre-tribulation rapture. Those who believed after the rapture were the Martyrs, and they had a special place in heaven, but they were not first-class citizens like the Bride would be. The other thing (which disturbed some of us who had done reading in cult literature) was that he conjectured that in the new heavens and new earth, there would be procreation, and generation after generation of sinless children; gradually the earth would fill and we would have to find other worlds to inhabit, and we would fill the universe and transform it. He admitted that this was conjecture but it still bothered some of us.

That was before. At some point, though, this teaching ran hard into a couple other things that were central to his doctrine:

1. The church had turned pagan, and much of the blame was to be laid at the step when they rejected the feasts that God instituted in the Torah and replaced them with Christmas and Easter, but the ultimate time-changer was supposed to be Antichrist: “As for the ten horns, out of this kingdom ten kings will arise; and another will arise after them, and he will be different from the previous ones and will subdue three kings. He will speak out against the Most High and wear down the saints of the Highest One, and he will intend to make alterations in times and in law; and they will be given into his hand for a time, times, and half a time.” (Dan. 7:24,25) This passage was always taken to mean that the Antichrist would be the one to turn people completely away from the Jewish calendar. But that had already happened.
2. It was hard to pinpoint when the church had “gone bad”—it was my special area of interest, but every time I thought I had figured it out, I found that it was either before that point or after it. I would trace tradition back to the fourth century, then find it had come from the third. From the third I would chase it to the second. From the second I would chase it to the very men who were placed in charge of their churches by the Apostles (if we had any useful historical data at all). But a key point in claiming that you know that the organized church is corrupt is being able to say when it happened.
3. I don’t know that this third point was a problem, but I suspect that it was. Left Behind was huge at this point, and the unwritten rule of this ministry went something like this: “If most of the church believes it, then it is probably wrong.” It’s hard to get people excited about your prophetic insights when in reality they aren’t that much different from the LaHayes and Lindsays of the world.

So, the emphasis was taken away from the eschatological timeline for a while, and focused on current events and taking down Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. We were regaled with more secret information about the backroom goings-on between Edom and Dan (decoder-ring says “between the Arab world and Europe”) while the teacher and his wife did a great deal of reading in fourth-century church history, particularly the histories that included information about Jewish dealings with Rome and the church.

And then, one day, I received a CD in the mail. It came from the teacher, and it was his request for me to listen to the material and determine what I thought of it. It came to me just after the local church in California had heard it, but six weeks or more before tape subscribers would be getting it. It was big news:

1. The Antichrist was revealed: it was Constantine.
2. Therefore the Antichrist had already come in the past, and a new timetable was needed for practically everything.
3. The teacher had been reading Halley’s Bible Handbook and had decided that Revelation was to be read mostly symbolically, since he had to move the Beast back at least 1700 years anyway, so he announced that he was now a historicist.
4. Being a historicist, he was rejecting dispensationalism.
5. There was still a “catching-up” of the Bride in the future, followed by a time of trouble with Israel in the ascendancy, followed by a Second Coming and a Millennial reign. But they aren’t to be called the “Rapture” and “Tribulation” anymore. Because that, you see, would be dispensationalism.

The teacher produced a lot of tapes and a booklet or two detailing how Constantine, who presided over the Council of Nicaea and saw to it that Easter wasn’t near Passover, was the Antichrist—a Jew-hating Danite who worshipped Mithras and actually was promoting emperor worship along with Mithraism. The seals, trumpets, and bowls were things that had mostly already happened in history (he wasn’t a traditional historicist like the Magisterial Reformers were). There were still things to come, but they were to be found, not in clear texts (except for the exceptional Ezekiel 38ff.), but in the broad view of prophecy that he now had. You have to see… the picture. (We heard that a lot.)

It wasn’t an immediate change; it took a while to shake the obvious bugs out. He revised his view of “the Martyrs” as a result of this. He never did understand, to my knowledge, that he was still a dispensationalist, since that is a theological position, not an eschatological one. The people who listened to his teaching locally grumbled a bit and fought it (we could hear it on the tapes), but eventually they decided that he was probably right, and got excited about knowing yet another thing that nobody else knows. The tape subscribers, including most of the people in our group, weren’t as easily swayed. The Reality Distortion Field doesn’t usually stretch across half the country, unless you call him on the phone a lot. We didn’t jump right into this ourselves, because to be honest, it wasn’t any more self-consistent than the old position. I was wondering whether there even would be a rapture separate from the Second Coming at this point, and publicly I was cautiously mid-trib (with varying degrees of acceptance on this from the local group), but still I never went on record as saying what I believed about eschatology, since I really didn’t know. How could I? I never “got movies.”

The teacher got another one, though, right about this time. He saw the unfolding of the historicist view throughout Revelation. He saw Constantine as the Antichrist. He got direct confirmation from God that his current view of the end-times was the correct one. Sounds like a glorious vision, doesn’t it?

Think again about the beginning of this post, and consider:

1. God had given the teacher movies in the past with the traditional pre-trib end-times picture.
2. God told the teacher that certain people were not going to be in the rapture.
3. The teacher decided that he was all wrong about the end-times and there wouldn’t be a “rapture” per se.
4. God told the teacher that he was now right about the end-times.

Clearly God was as confused about the eschaton as our teacher was—either that, or at some point our teacher had claimed to hear from the Lord, when he actually had not. It was a point of debate and discussion in my local group for weeks and months: when does somebody officially become a false prophet? Does God actually contradict Himself this substantially, or should we just assume that when God tells us something, we can never be sure what it means? For the teacher’s part, he maintained over and over that he had never said “thus saith the Lord,” and therefore his words could not be held to any prophetic standard.

Which makes me wonder, now, why we followed him. If a man isn’t speaking the word of the Lord, then why do we bother listening?