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As Hal explained matters, Jesus could come at any time for his church. Indeed, Hal argued, the signs indicating the imminent arrival of the last times had been fulfilled when Israel regained its status as a nation in 1948. The retaking of Jerusalem in the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab enemies only further confirmed God's timetable. And this had just occurred! Soon, according to Hal's timetable, the Rapture would occur, the Antichrist would be revealed, the Great Tribulation would break out, and finally, Christ would return to establish his millennial kingdom for a thousand years.

The ideas we first heard from Hal on Wednesday nights at the Light and Power House soon made their way into print in The Late Great Planet Earth, which now has more than 35 million copies in print (The New Millennium Manual, Baker). Only the Bible itself has outsold Hal's simple, dispensational, premillennial explanation of the church's hope for Christ's return. Hal had unexpectedly uncovered a deep vein of eschatological and apocalyptic longing in the fundamentalist/evangelical subculture and in American culture at large. More important, perhaps, he knew how to package the dispensational eschatology he had learned at Dallas Theological Seminary in a fashion that Americans, many of them young, countercultural types emerging from the turbulent sixties, could understand and embrace.

What the Fathers taught me
What I didn't realize was that elements of Hal's premillennial perspective minus dispensational emphases—such as the distinct separation of Israel from the church in God's economy and a pretribulational Rapture—represented a distinguished though minority perspective in the history of Christian exegesis. Justin Martyr, an early Christian apologist and martyr writing in the midsecond century A.D., was convinced that Christ was soon to return in triumph. This "great and terrible day" would include Christ's judgment of the entire world, his appearance in Jerusalem, and the destruction of "the man of sin." Why the delay in the return of Christ? Justin argued that "the number of the just" to be included in the kingdom was yet to be completed.

Christ's return, as understood by Justin, would result in great blessing for the saved, a beatitude to be enjoyed successively in two stages. First, believers in Jesus would possess and inhabit the land of Canaan, reigning there for one thousand years. Second, upon the completion of the thousand years, "the general, and, to put it briefly, eternal resurrection and judgment of all will … take place." Other passages in Justin seem to indicate that after this second resurrection the saints would eternally possess the Holy Land.

Significantly, Justin was convinced that the reality of Christ's coming and its attendant, severe judgments should be a spur to faithful, sober Christian living as the church waited for its Lord. Brian Daley, author of The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology, comments that he was convinced that Christians should be "marked out from the rest of pleasure-loving human society … by their conviction that the wicked will be punished in eternal fire, and the Christ-like just united with God, free from suffering. This is the reason Christians are truthful in affirming their faith, as well as the ground of their good citizenship and their ultimate fearlessness before the threat of persecution."

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October 25 1999, Vol. 43, No. 12