Martyn Whittock - The End Times, Again?: 2000 Years of the Use & Misuse of Biblical Prophecy

I n June 2016 , as a preacher and church leader, I organized a meeting, under the banner of the local council of churches in a West Country town in the United Kingdom, to discuss issues relating to the forthcoming EU Referendum. The meeting was intended to provide an opportunity for airing Christian views on the subject. It was very well attended and drew in participants from across the wide denominational spectrum of churches.

The evening was lively. Many of my friends (regardless of whether they were Leave or Remain in the context of the EU Referendum) expressed astonishment afterwards at the way the discussion developed. They had expected the topics to include debates over things like: sovereignty and parliamentary accountability; jobs and economic prosperity; continent-wide cooperation in order to meet global challenges; peace and security in Europe.

What they got was: whether the EU parliament building in Strasburg was modelled on the Tower of Babel; the accusation that the statue of Europa and the Bull in the European district of Brussels reveals the pagan origins of the EU; the allegation that the seat is kept empty in the European Parliament chamber in both Brussels and Strasbourg (it isnt); discussion over whether the EU represents the final political structure arising from the four beasts/kingdoms prophesied in Daniel, whether it was a political tool of Antichrist in advance of the second coming of Christ.

My friends were astonished at this. I wasnt. That was because, for me, it was a return to what had once been familiar home ground. During the previous month I had contributed a guest blog for Premier Christianity online . It had been entitled: I Believe in Prophecy. But the EU Is Not Babylon the Great. During that month (it went live on May 2016 ) it had become, from my calculations, one of the most visited blogs on this website. It can still be read online but, unfortunately, the huge string of comments and conversations under it can no longer be accessed. That is a pity because they would have provided interesting source material for future students of theology and the sociology of religion. Like the meeting I organized later, in June of that year, the online discussion got lively. In fact, it got very lively indeed!

However, when it comes to end-time speculation I have a past, as they say. I was born in 1958 and, consequently, I was a child of the seventies, as these were my teenage years. While the swinging sixties may have been the decade for other young people to push the boundaries from fashion to pop music (and a lot in between), the seventies were a great decade to be a young millenarian. Millenarianism refers to the belief that the second coming of Christ will establish a literal kingdom on earth, leading to a millennium of peace, prior to the final judgement. There are different variations of this concept, as there are to all aspects of end-times belief.

Back to the future

Like many around me in the 1970 s, I looked back to the ancient biblical prophecies in an attempt to predict the future. I grew up in an evangelical Methodist household that had friendly connections with local members of the Church of England, Baptists, and (especially) Elim Pentecostals. I counted members of all these churches among my friends. But for all our differences in churchmanship (which was largely irrelevant to us) one thing that united many of us was our fascination with the second coming of Christ. At that time, over forty years ago, it influenced our whole approach to the news. For example, a friend of a friend thought that Henry Kissinger might be the Antichrist. I was never entirely sure why this identification was made but seem to recall it was in some way connected to a set of Bible verses,