by Zack Hunt
But love is the greatest in another way too.
Love is the greatest thing we lack today. We talk about love, we preach about love, we even feel love for one another, but there’s nothing particularly Christian about that kind of love. Christian love is defined by the love of Christ, and the love of Christ is defined by self-sacrifice, putting others before ourselves, transforming enemies into friends, and service to the least of these with no expectations or strings attached. But American Christianity is far too focused on the self, far too concerned with drawing lines in the sand between us and them, far too worried about being defiled by “sinners” to embody the radical, apocalyptic love of Jesus we’ve been left behind to share.
Jesus told his disciples to go and do likewise by loving and serving the least of these, but we’ve cuddled up to the empire, made an idol out of power, and gone out of our way to justify our allegiance to Rome. We’ve sold our sanctity for the illusion of power and privilege, comfort and safety. We’ve become the whore of Babylon that John tried to warn us about in his apocalypse, the one that sold its soul to the beast. We’re the Nicolaitans whom Jesus warned about in Revelation, who confessed Jesus as their Lord and Savior but spiritualized their faith to the point of irrelevance, stripping it of its subversive power in order to make the Christian faith compatible with the Roman Empire. But we do more than just make it compatible. American Christianity doesn’t just fit alongside the empire. In America, the empire is a Christian empire, a so-called “Christian nation.” We’ve taken the mark of the beast and sanctified it in the pursuit of comfort and privilege.
But Jesus stands at the door and knocks. It’s not too late to let him in and become the people he called us to be. It’s not too late to join the ongoing work of salvation. Not too late to love and serve the least of these in these last days before Jesus separates the sheep from the goats. Not too late to stop worrying about the future and start caring about the present and the people in it.
Here lies the ultimate problem with end-times theology: it values prophecy more than people. Fulfilling biblical prophecy is more important than the lives of Palestinians, more important than those crushed by a foreign policy that’s supposedly fulfilling prophecies, more important than those here at home who are forgotten and left to struggle because Jesus will make everything better one day.
Here, too, lies the fundamental problem facing the church today. We suffer from an idolatry of ideology and dogmatism. Even if we don’t believe in the rapture, we too often love orthodoxy more than people. Being theologically right and keeping up the pretense of being right is more important than the lives and well-being of our neighbors. They may suffer, be oppressed, and end up ostracized by the people who are supposed to love them, but if our theology is right, if we’re staying true to our ideology, we tell ourselves that none of that matters.
This is why, for all the distortions of dispensationalism, it’s critical that we rediscover the apocalypse. Apocalypse, in its truest sense of an unveiling of reality, is the opposite of ideology.6 Ideology is the tool the powerful use to control the powerless and to marginalize and silence dissent. Apocalypse reveals ideology for the empty power it really is. Apocalypse reveals the truth while empowering the poor and the powerless with a message of hope and the promise of divine action. That’s why it, and not ideology, is good news for the poor. Ideology controls the poor and the powerless. Apocalypse liberates the oppressed, embraces the marginalized, sets the captive free, and gives life to the lost, the least, and the dying.
We miss this truth because our privilege blinds us to the needs that apocalypse promises to heal. Apocalypse promises hope for the poor and oppressed by promising to destroy the structures of power—structures that give us our privilege, security, and comfort. If we find that to be a terrifying message, it is because it threatens our status quo, threatens our place of privilege, threatens to take away our power and turn those we’ve always ignored and trampled underfoot into kings and queens in the kingdom of God. Apocalypse is only scary when privilege and power are being threatened. But to those Jesus came to serve, the apocalypse is the culmination of the good news promised to the poor and the least of these in the Gospels.
For the rest of us, apocalypse is a call to repent and an invitation to participate in God’s liberating, justice-restoring work in the world. Apocalypse isn’t a call to figure out secret codes that will unlock a prophetic map to the future. Apocalypse calls us to be vigilant of the signs, but only so that we will be ready to stand up to the false prophets at work in the world, name them for what they are, and resist, not through acts of violence, but through Christlike love for our enemies and service to our neighbors.
This is how we work out our salvation in the last days.
Resisters and liberators
As a kid, I sometimes heard the Bible described as a training manual. The people who described it to me that way meant it in the sense of a book that would help me learn what sins not to commit. It sounds hokey to me now, but the training manual metaphor wasn’t completely wrong. The Bible does train us. It trains us to be apocalyptic, to be resisters of the beast, to prophetically speak the truth, and to join in the liberating, transforming, and healing work of the resurrection. It’s that resurrection power that is at the center of John’s apocalypse, setting the stage not for some distant future but for the transforming work of the resurrection in the present. That’s how the early church understood the resurrection, how Paul understood it, and how John understood it. Jesus had been raised from the dead, and because he had, the last days had begun. The salvation that began when he walked out of the tomb was being extended to every corner of creation. Not in some distant point in the future, but here and now.
That’s why Revelation isn’t a secret road map to the future. It’s a guide for how to live in the present. As Paul puts it in Philippians 2, we work out our salvation by having the same mind as Christ, the same apocalyptic imagination that sees the world as it is and imagines what it can become through the power of the resurrection. Revelation is the culminating book of the Bible because it captures the biblical call to justice and imagines what the world will look like when that call is fulfilled. The new heaven and new earth promised at the end of Revelation is certainly a transcendent utopia, but that beautiful image is revealed to inspire us to live differently in the ugliness of now. Revelation isn’t a chronology of what’s to come; it’s a way of thinking about the transforming power of the resurrection and how it can be lived now.
But as we begin to develop our apocalyptic imaginations, we must not forget the communal nature of that call or else we’ll stay mired in the individualism and overspiritualization that has plagued American Christianity for so long. We are saved together, and we are invited to usher in the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven together. Salvation is communal and so is the apocalypse. It’s something that happens to and through all of us. We live out the future in the present together. We incarnate the vision of Revelation the way we practice the sacraments. We do it together as a present act that professes and incarnates a future hope already beginning to be realized in the here and now.
One of the things readers say they love most about the Left Behind series is the way it brings the Bible to life. Of course, it brought LaHaye and Jenkins’s dispensational fantasies, not the Bible, to life. But there is a call or complaint there that we shouldn’t miss. We should be bringing the Bible to life! If the flawed theology of dispensationalism has been able to do that, it’s only because we’ve failed to bring the real promise of Revelation to life. As the prophet John put it, we’ve taken away words from his prophecy (Revelation 22:19). Not in the literal sense of editing them out, but in the deeper, spiritual sense of ignoring our calling and failing to live out the good news of the gospel. We’ve been merely hearers of the word and not doers (James 1:22).
If the church is going to have any relevance in an increasingly post-Christian world, it won’t be through more programming or better w
orship-entertainment, and it certainly won’t be through cozying up to the empire. It will be by rediscovering our apocalyptic imagination and learning to love the lost, the least, and the dying. But what does that look like in a tangible, practical way? What does apocalyptic love look like when put into practice?
The answer is found in Revelation and its call to resistance—a call to resist the temptation of the beast, the lies of the false prophet, and the seduction of Babylon’s power. It’s not the violent resistance of taking up arms so graphically represented in the Left Behind series. It’s the subversive, nonviolent resistance of Christlike discipleship that’s shaped and defined by love. Not just any love, but the kind of enemy-loving, other-welcoming, justice-giving apocalyptic love described by Paul and lived out by Jesus. This kind of love conquers the beast not as a roaring lion, but as a slaughtered lamb. This kind of love has power found not in oppression and conquest but in humility, servitude, and death to self.
It’s the kind of love found in the apocalypse of Matthew 25 that loves and cares for the least of these.
It’s the kind of love that drives out fear to welcome refugees from war-torn lands. It’s the kind of love that mourns for the plight of desperate immigrants fleeing poverty and violence by making them our neighbors instead of criminals. It’s the kind of love that doesn’t blame the poor for being poor but instead makes their welfare our burden to carry. It’s the kind of love that cares for the sick regardless of their ability to pay, the kind of love that feeds the hungry and quenches the thirst of the thirsty regardless of who they are, where they come from, what they’ve done, why they hunger or thirst, or what they’ll do afterward. It’s the kind of love that clothes the naked just as God clothed us in the garden. It’s the kind of love that sees prisoners as people in need of redemption instead of villains without hope. It’s the kind of love that welcomes the Other, whether they be people of other faiths, other genders, other sexualities, other countries, other languages, or other races, and welcomes them with open arms, making a space for them at the table and treating them as equal bearers of the image of God.
It’s the kind of love that declares the truth of Revelation by living it out in the present.
The kind of love that inspires a faith worth believing in.
The kind of love that builds a church worth belonging to.
The kind of love that reveals a Jesus worth following.
Acknowledgments
I don’t know how you go about saying thank you to everyone who has had an impact on a book that has been a lifetime in the making. I do know that I will forget people I should not have forgotten, so before I thank anyone, I want to first offer my apologies to anyone I unintentionally leave out.
Now, on with the show.
To Kim: you never cease to amaze me each and every day. Seriously, I will never get over the fact that you cut people open for a living. You’re an amazing doctor and an even more incredible mother. Thank you for being my sounding board, my muse, my rock, my fellow traveler, my wife, and most of all, thank you for finally developing a taste for Chick-fil-A.
To Ainsley and Eleanor: before you were born I didn’t think I could ever love someone as much as I love the two of you. Thank you for the gift of being your father. I can’t wait to see the women you will grow up to be. Until then, please don’t add this book to the collection of books you’ve taken off my bookshelves and torn to pieces. If you read it when you’re older and decide to tear it up then, fair enough.
To my family, who taught me what it means to love, to learn, to believe, and to belong. And especially to my mom and my grandmother, whose faith showed me why women should never stay silent in the church.
To the Steves: my uncle Steve Pennington, who stepped in when my father stepped out and who helped ignite my creative imagination; and my mentor Steve Hoskins, for sticking with me even when my only goal in life was to see every movie ever made.
To Pete and Chad and Brian and Daren and Marvin and Nathan: thanks for putting up with an apocalyptic nut like me for so many years and allowing me the honor to count such incredible people as my lifelong friends.
To my in-laws: as I said in the book, you opened up my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about the faith, and that’s great and all, but thank you most of all for just being normal. It’s a really underappreciated quality in in-laws, and I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am for in-laws as kind and supportive as you.
To Matthew Paul Turner: I can’t thank you enough for all of your kind words, support, encouragement, and advice over the years. This book wouldn’t exist without your help.
To SFB: you’ve been there for me through thick and thin. Literally, I was a lot thinner before cancer and now I’m not so thin, but I’ll never forget the love, kindness, and support you all have shown me over the years.
To Tony Sparrow: thank you for believing in me and showing me why youth ministry matters.
To the Calvos: I bet you didn’t expect to see your names in here, did you? Thank you for being Jesus to me and my family when we were far from home and needed taking care of, even though you’re both godless atheists.
To Rick Moore: thank you for teaching me that ministry is first and foremost about loving people. And just as importantly, thank you for teaching me how to find and appreciate good barbecue.
To Michael Pence: thank you for taking a chance on me and giving me my first full-time job in ministry.
To my friends, youth workers, and students at Covenant United Methodist Church: thanks for growing with me and teaching me more than I could ever teach you.
To Johnny Jeffords and Lora Jean Gowen: thank you for showing me the importance of justice and inclusion.
To Valerie Weaver-Zercher: thank you for believing in me. I hope I didn’t let you down.
To my blog readers: I can’t thank you enough. I know this is cliché to say, but this book really and truly would not exist without your support over the years, and for that I am eternally grateful.
And last, but not least, thank you to Dr. Pepper, for without the constant flow of your fine beverage into my veins, this book would never have been completed.
Notes
Chapter 1
1 Ann Byle, “LaHaye, Co-Author of Left Behind Series, Leaves a Lasting Impact,” Publishers Weekly, July 27, 2016, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/71026-lahaye-co-author-of-left-behind-seriesleaves-a-lasting-impact.html.
2 See, for example, the website aftertherapturepetcare.com.
Chapter 2
1 Timothy L. Smith, Called unto Holiness, vol. 1 (Kansas City, MO: Nazarene Publishing House, 1962), 114.
2 “Billy Graham’s Life and Ministry By the Numbers,” Facts and Trends, Lifeway, February 22, 2018, factsandtrends .net/2018/02/21/billy-grahams-life-ministry-by-the-numbers/.
Chapter 3
1 “About,” Jack Van Impe Ministries, accessed October 10, 2018, www.jvim.com/about/.
2 Ibid.
3 I should add that although they are technically not always the same thing (since you can study or be interested in the theology of the end times without also subscribing to dispensationalism), colloquially, end-times theology and dispensationalism are often used interchangeably, and as such I will be using them interchangeably throughout the book.
Chapter 4
1 See Richard Kenneth Emmerson and E. Ann Matter, “The Apocalypse in Early Medieval Exegesis,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 43.
2 Barbara Rossing, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 22.
3 Jason Boyett, Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse: The Official Field Manual for the End of the World (Orlando: Relevant Books, 2005), 35.
4 Ibid., 39.
5 Ibid., 40.
6 Ibid., 41.
7 Ibid., 55.
8 Ibid., 67.
9 See Zack Hunt, “May 21st—An Interview with the People behi
nd the Campaign!!!” Zack Hunt, May 10, 2011, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/zackhunt/2011/05/may-21st-aninterview-with-the-people-behind-the-campaign/.
Chapter 5
1 See Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).
2 Bob Allen, “Southern Baptists Have Lost a Million Members in 10 Years,” Baptist News Global, June 9, 2017, https://baptistnews.com/article/southern-baptists-lost-millionmembers-10-years/.
3 Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006), 256–57.
Chapter 6
1 Barbara Rossing, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 176.
2 Ibid., 178.
3 Chris Mitchell, “‘I See Us in the Middle of Prophecy!’ Mike Evans Has 30M Evangelicals Praying for Jerusalem,” Christian Broadcasting Network, December 10, 2017, www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/israel/2017/december/mike-evans-we-rsquo-re-in-the-middle-of-prophecy.
4 Rossing, The Rapture Exposed, 45.
5 David M. Halbfinger, Isabel Kershner, and Declan Walsh, “Israel Kills Dozens at Gaza Border as U.S. Embassy Opens in Jerusalem,” New York Times, May 14, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/world/middleeast/gazaprotests-palestinians-us-embassy.html.
6 Robert P. Jones, “White Evangelical Support for Donald Trump at All-Time High,” PRRI, April 18, 2018, https://www.prri.org/spotlight/white-evangelical-support-fordonald-trump-at-all-time-high/.
7 Tara Isabella Burton, “The Biblical Story the Christian Right Uses to Defend Trump,” Vox, March 5, 2018, www.vox.com/identities/2018/3/5/16796892/trump-cyrus-christian-rightbible-cbn-evangelical-propaganda.
8 See, for example, “Climate Change: How Do We Know?” NASA, last modified October 3, 2018, https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/.
Chapter 7
1 In an ironic or perhaps inevitable twist of fate (since the Christian writing world is relatively small), Jason and I met years later and have since become friends.
