by Zack Hunt
This is why when Revelation talks about salvation and works there is never a demand for perfection, just effort. Moral perfection is never even hinted at in John’s apocalypse. And in the epistle of James, which is so famously adamant about the role of works, perfection isn’t something we achieve; it’s a gift from God. Trying to love our neighbors is what matters, not doing it perfectly all the time. Being Christlike doesn’t mean being perfect. It means incarnating love as Jesus incarnated love for us, rather than keeping that love to ourselves. Revelation, James, and the Little Apocalypse of Matthew 25 are so emphatic about “works” because salvation is something God is doing in and through us—not just to save our souls but to redeem and restore the entire world. “Works” are critical in how Revelation, James, and Jesus teach salvation not because the work of loving and serving the least of these is what saves us. Rather, the work of loving and serving the least of these is what we’ve been saved to do.
Maybe we have been left behind
Many of us have been taught to understand salvation as the finish line of our faith and heaven as the reward for crossing over. But salvation isn’t a finish line. It’s just the beginning of our journey of faith. Jesus doesn’t tell his followers, “Okay, now you’re saved; go in peace.” He says, “Come and follow me.” Salvation is an invitation to participate in something much bigger and greater than ourselves. That’s what we see in the Gospels, and it’s also what we see in Revelation. Revelation is bringing to fruition the call Jesus left his disciples with when he went before them to prepare for the coming of the kingdom of God (see John 14:1-4). But Jesus didn’t leave them behind to sit around and wait for his return. Jesus told his disciples, “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37). They were to go and do as he had done, and Jesus promised to send his Holy Spirit to guide and empower them as they carried out the work of the gospel. Salvation was never meant to be an escape plan. Salvation is an invitation. We are saved to serve neighbor and enemy alike so that through that act of love, through incarnating God’s love to the world, we help bring heaven to earth.
So end-times theology does get one thing right. We have been left behind—just not in the way we have been led to believe.
We haven’t been left behind by Jesus as a punishment. We’ve been left behind with a calling: to bring the good news to the poor in every corner of creation, to care for the least of these wherever and whoever they may be, and to lay the groundwork for the kingdom of God coming down to earth as it is in heaven. This is why, when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, Jesus taught them how to live. That is, after all, what prayer is really all about: formation. When we pray, it’s not just idle talk or pleading. Prayer reminds us of what is important and what needs to be done. Prayer compels us to become God’s agents of grace in the world.
At the heart of the Lord’s Prayer is a cry and a calling that completely upends rapture theology: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10 NIV). The prayer functions as an extension, a reminder, of Jesus’ message. Jesus brought the kingdom of God with him, and it is the disciples’ job to spread that kingdom to the very ends of the earth after his resurrection.
Rapture theology does the opposite of the Lord’s Prayer. It’s not focused on bringing the kingdom of God to earth, because its primary concern is escaping the earth. If the earth will be destroyed and Jesus will do all the work of making things new, why bother worrying about it now? The Left Behind books make this rejection of the Lord’s Prayer in a subtle but powerful way: every member of the Tribulation Force carries a gun, but not once in the entire series do they ever say the Lord’s Prayer.4 The Lord’s Prayer is key to understanding both the gospel of Jesus and life in the last days because it’s a prayer of salvation both for the one saying the prayer and for the entire world. Revelation isn’t an afterword to the Bible. It’s the answer to the Lord’s Prayer. When the old order of things passes away and there is no more sorrow or mourning or hunger or death, and when the powerful have been made low, and when the last have become first—then God’s kingdom will have come down to earth as it is in heaven.
But praying for that day to come is not an idle calling. It is, like salvation itself, an invitation to participate in the process by living out what we pray. As a vision of the promise of God’s redemptive love fulfilled, Revelation serves as a guide for the present to help us live the kind of life that begins to bring that heavenly kingdom to earth. The firstfruits of that work began when Jesus walked out of the tomb on Easter morning. After his ascension, we were left behind to see that work through until his return, when Jesus will bring that work to completion. But as John and Paul saw, Jesus’ resurrection means our work and the promise of Revelation aren’t two separate events. Jesus’ resurrection means that the work of ushering in a new heaven and a new earth has already begun.
We really are living in the last days, as my professor tried to explain to me years ago—the days when God is at work in the world, healing and redeeming all creation. The last days don’t start after a fictional rapture, when God finally shows up so the process of reconciliation can begin and end at the same time. The last days started when Jesus was resurrected. They end when he returns.
As much as this sort of approach to the last days differs from end-times theology, it isn’t a radically new idea. It’s as old as the Christian faith itself, because it comes directly from the New Testament. By centering the Matthew 25 call to apocalyptic love, people like Tony Campolo aren’t doing something new. They’re just preaching the gospel.
Fundamentally, apocalyptic love is what the gospel is all about. This kind of incarnated love reveals the good news and resurrecting power of Jesus at work in the present, because it makes loving people rather than ideas the center of the Christian life.
At the heart of the gospel is the incarnation of divine apocalyptic love. The incarnation proclaims the good news that God didn’t stay disconnected and disinterested, far away in heaven. God put on flesh and dwelled among us, became one of us to know us better. Through that incarnated grace, God redeems all creation. Rapture theology is the opposite of incarnation. It’s all about escape. It’s about getting away from here and over to there. It’s about leaving behind the earth and everyone in it for heaven.
The incarnation is about bringing heaven to earth. It’s about God coming down to where the trials and tribulations are, not leaving God’s people behind to suffer alone. That’s where salvation is found: in the reconciling of all things back to their Creator, in the making new of all things, in love putting on flesh. It’s a process that began with the resurrection of Jesus and which we are invited to participate in by taking up our own crosses, dying to self, and following him.
This is why salvation requires work—not the kinds of rituals and sacrifices spelled out in the law, but the harder work of loving our neighbors and enemies alike. This is also why salvation is based on love alone: the love of God that saves us, and our love for God, which responds to that first act of love by loving our neighbor. That kind of love takes work. Not perfect work, just work. It’s about doing the work of Matthew 25, work as it’s understood in the greatest commandment—the kind of works James said are required to keep faith alive. It’s the work of love, of incarnating the love of Christ to the least of these wherever they are, whomever they are, and in whatever way they may need the love of Christ.
Apocalyptic love isn’t a warm fuzzy kind of love that makes us feel good about ourselves or affectionate toward others. Nor is it the kind of love that stays hidden in our hearts like faith stuck in our heads. It’s the kind of love that boy in Nicaragua showed to his family, the kind of love his entire community needs us to show to them—love in the form of bread and shelter, clothing and medicine. It’s the transcendent love of God made present in the here and now. It’s the kind of love that reveals the truth of Revelation, because in those acts of love, the former things begin to pass away, as through us God continues to make all things
new.
It’s the kind of love the prophet Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed in the final sermon he gave before he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet.
It’s all right to talk about long white robes over yonder, in all its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It’s all right to talk about streets flowing with milk and honey, but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day. It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.5
10
The Last Days
It had been a long time since I watched an episode of Jack Van Impe Presents. But as I finished writing this book, I decided to pay Jack and Rexella a virtual visit to see what they were up to these days. What I found was sad. A quick Google search led me to the online home of Jack Van Impe Ministries. Featured prominently at the center of the homepage is a picture of Jack and Rexella looking no older than they were when I watched them twenty years ago. But now they were sitting in front of a nice professional-looking faux news set.
I didn’t have to search hard to find an episode to watch. A video player stands ready for visitors just under the featured image of Jack and Rexella. The date, July 28, 2018, let me know immediately they were still broadcasting their show. But when I clicked play, what I saw was incredibly jarring. For one, the set was different yet again. Gone was the polished, professional news set from the homepage. In its place was a simple television screen bearing the Jack Van Impe Ministries logo and hung on a wall that, though tasteful, would not have been out of place on a late-night cable access television show. Seated in front of the modest wall were the stalwarts of the program, Jack and Rexella. Rexella, always the ageless wonder, looked the same as she always has, much younger than her eighty-five years. Jack, however, was almost unrecognizable. If the name on the screen underneath the figure looking back at me didn’t say “Jack Van Impe,” I wouldn’t have recognized him. His face was gaunt, clearly showing the wear of some terrible health battle that had taken whatever youthful vitality he had left. His eyes were sunken, framed by lines and bags that somehow made him look even older than eighty-eight. His glorious pompadour was gone, reduced to obviously thinning hair, slicked back in an effort to keep up the illusion of beauty.1
Listening to him talk was painful. Watching him in high school, I marveled at how prophetic rants and biblical quotes rolled off his tongue with ease and surgical precision. Now he struggles to speak. Flashes of the old prophetic fire are still there, but they struggle to stay alight. A great part of the appeal of end-times theology is the veneer of strength and precision to its arguments, the almost scientific approach that makes it seem every bit as valid as the law of gravity. With that veneer gone, the apocalyptic magic has disappeared, revealing nothing more than an embittered and broken man rambling on about incoherent conspiracy theories.
I couldn’t watch for long. As much as I now disagree with Jack, he still seems like an old friend. Seeing him like that is just too painful, too destructive to my illusions of a more innocent time. So instead of watching an episode, I decided to try to find out what happened to Jack, his show, and the apocalyptic world I used to love so much.
Where is Jack Van Impe now?
Until fairly recently, Jack and Rexella were doing okay. He had some health issues throughout the years, as anyone of his age would, but as of 2016 Jack and Rexella were still running a multimillion-dollar ministry.2 But his fortunes had started to turn several years before that. In 2011, Jack and Rexella ended their years-long relationship with the Christian network TBN after a falling out between Jack and the network when Jack railed against Rick Warren and Robert Schuller on his show. He accused them of promoting “Chrislam,” a fictional religion that was all the rage in right-wing media in the years following 9/11.3 Driven by Islamophobia and a disdain for inclusivity, those who harangued this supposed religion believed that Christianity and Islam were being combined into one monolithic religion that would take over the world, usher in the end times, and . . . well, you can figure out the rest of the story. It’s hard to say whether Chrislam was an invention of outlets like Fox News or folks like Jack Van Impe who are always in need of a prophetic foil. Either way, TBN wasn’t on board with Jack calling Warren and Schuller out by name, and the two parted ways.
That wasn’t the end of Jack Van Impe Presents, however. Jack and Rexella continued to independently broadcast their show for several more years, until a series of serious health problems forced Jack to take a leave of absence. The show continued for a while without him, as various guest hosts took turns stepping in for the prophetic stalwart. Eventually, Jack’s doctors told him he had to stop broadcasting because of his health. His absence from the show resulted in what he claims was the loss of fifty thousand donors.4 Without the revenue coming in from those donors, Jack says, he was forced off the air. But despite the budget loss and the warnings from his doctor, he was determined to continue his show, professing he was God’s final prophet who had to preach the truth before the end, which is now very, very nigh.5
Without the financial support, Jack was left to broadcast his slimmed-down program on YouTube. The basic format is still the same. Rexella reads several handpicked, context-free headlines she finds terrifying and then turns to Jack to have him explain their prophetic significance. But the surgical precision of the old Jack Van Impe has given way to the sort of ranting you would expect of someone who watches too much Fox News. I’m sure the xenophobia and bigotry were alive and well when I watched him regularly. I was just on board with all of it, so I didn’t notice it—or worse, if I did, I thought it the gospel. Either way, they are on full display now. Jack Van Impe Presents has become something of a cheap InfoWars knockoff, wrapped up in the language of biblical prophecy.
A once proud, articulate, vibrant preacher has been reduced to a broken, bitter, and angry curmudgeon who spends his days ranting about Muslims, Catholics, and anyone who isn’t a straight white conservative fundamentalist, as well as about his health. Jack Van Impe Presents is a shell of its former self, and so is its host. It’s a sad scene, but more sad is the type of person Jack Van Impe has become, and the way he uses the Bible to demonize and condemn anyone and everyone who doesn’t look, think, talk, act, or believe exactly like him. Or maybe that’s who he was all along and I was too blind to see it. In either case, it’s painful to watch, not just because the luster is gone, but because I see so much of myself in Jack. Staring at my computer screen was like looking in a mirror. Staring back at me was not only the person I once was, but also the person I would have become if I had stayed on that path.
For all the superficial differences on screen and in his physical appearance, the Jack Van Impe I see on YouTube now is the same Jack Van Impe I watched so long ago. He is the living symbol of all the problems that end-times theology creates. He passionately believes he has been called by God to preach the truth to the world, but the “truth” he preaches is antichrist in countless ways—ways he simply can’t see. His world is divided into the saved and the damned. As a result, all sorts of heinous attacks, language, and even violence become justified in the name of God and fulfilling biblical prophecy.
Watching Jack rant now, I thank God that I lost my faith in the rapture. End-times theology and its lust for vengeance, its celebration of wrath, and its burning desire to escape the world leads its followers to bitter and broken endings. If I had stayed on that path, I too may have become an angry old man who sees conspiracies around every corner, is consumed with a lust for vengeance, and is so obsessed with eternity he forgets how to live, love, and enjoy life in the here and now.
Down to the roots of American Christianity
But that’s not just where end-times theology leads; it’s where so much of American Christianity finds
itself today. It is defined by what it opposes, by its hypocritical and Machiavellian support for antichrist leaders and policies, and by its baptism of hatefulness, ignorance, and xenophobia as “sincerely held religious belief.” American Christianity doesn’t just suffer from bad theology. It’s lacking in love.
Now, you and I may reject those criticisms and say that we aren’t like that, or the church we attend isn’t like that. But frankly, our opinion is irrelevant. If that’s what the world outside the church sees, that’s the reality we have to address: the perception that the kingdom of God is the realm of bigots, homophobes, hypocrites, and the willfully ignorant.
If we’re going to change that perception (and the reality behind it) and be able to do the kingdom work we’ve been called to do, we have to first address the mentality and ideology that gave birth to the very real words and actions that fuel those criticisms. Rejecting the false teaching of the rapture and end-times theology is a start, but we have to go deeper. We have to go down deep to the roots of American Christianity, where an overly spiritualized, individualistic, self-centered understanding of salvation, heaven, and the Christian life dwells.
End-times theology didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t created ex nihilo, nor did it spread like wildfire without fuel. It grew out of a version of Christianity that was radically focused on the individual, on how I can get saved, how I can escape this world, and how I can get to heaven. End-times theology is nothing more than the natural evolution of a form of Christianity that had already lost its moorings.
