According to what I was taught when I was a kid at multiple churches, Jesus Christ is eighteen years late in rapturing the Church! It was all supposed to happen within 40 years of Israel becoming a nation again, according to Hal Lyndsey and all of the pastors I ever heard from childhood until only about 7 years ago.

Were it not for a little bit of education in the years since, I would have continued in the assumption that all Christians believed the same thing about the "last days."

I wonder how many thousands of people who grew up hearing and accepting all that "Late Great Planet Earth" stuff have forsaken Christianity altogether now, since all those predictions proved to be false. It's been eighteen years since the budding of the fig tree. The Russians were supposed to have invaded by now and all that stuff.

I'm really suprised that I never heard any alternative eschatology ever presented to me at evangelistic meetings, Bible studies (including a conservative Presbyterian one), friends' conversations, church, or even college classes (at a Baptist college). It's astonishing - not only how the popular "Christian" science fiction has so quickly become the majority report, but also how the historical eschatology of the Church for most of her 2,000 year history has become virtually unknown to the majority of Protestants.

Still learning,
Robin