Eschatology, Luca, and What Hannah Dreier Did
I’ve been thinking a lot about eschatology lately. We had an earthquake in Middle Georgia overnight on Saturday. Geologists tell me we aren’t having more than normal. We just now have news cycles that tell us about the earthquakes more. Still, we are getting closer and closer to two thousand years since God last physically stepped on this planet and roughly every two thousand years He seems to remind us He’s still around.
I’m in the amillennial camp. There’s no need to argue over premillennialism unless you’re one of those weirdos who thinks we live in a postmillennial age (I kid because I love). We don’t know a date certain for a second coming, but I venture to say it is sooner rather than later. It may be a hundred years from now, but I bet it won’t be a thousand. In any event, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve been thinking about eschatology.
Eschatology
The word means, basically, our theory of the end times — where we wind up.
Progressive eschatology, even in the church, is really lame. Basically, we either create heaven on earth and it is all us or we all go to Heaven, pay no attention to all that talk about damnation and hellfire in the Bible — that thing Jesus talked about a lot. In fact, Jesus talked about damnation more than anyone else in the Bible.
Christian eschatology is simple: Accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior and you will have eternal life with him.
Secular eschatology is complex: Accept [idol du jour] as your lord and savior and you will be damned so long as those around you don’t accept it too.
Progressives like to say more people have been killed on the planet because of religion and I suppose if they count the battles between religions they might get close. But when you take the secular religions of communism, Nazism, socialism, etc. I’m pretty sure the body count is way higher — definitely so in the twentieth century and beyond.
With Christianity, it is just about you and your relationship with God. Certainly, there are corporate sins. The American church is squabbling right now over racial reconciliation and corporate sin and what to do about it. But, distinctly, in Christianity, your walk with Christ is the important thing and each of us individually can then corporately, working together, change things.
With secularism, it is pretty ugly. Take environmentalism as one example. When a secularist worships the earth, he believes global warming is going to destroy the planet. He therefore repents, gets a vasectomy, buys a Tesla, becomes a vegan, and poisons a Chinese child laborer through extracting the rare earth minerals needed to construct the solar panels he puts on his roof.
Unfortunately, for the environmentalist, his neighbor drives a suburban, grills out every day, and has five carbon-emitting children. The environmentalist is still damned because the fossil fuel mouth breather next door has not repented. The environmentalist must bully the neighbor, use the government to bully the neighbor, or eliminate the neighbor.
To repent of his hatred of his polluting neighbor, he will write a check to Planned Parenthood so the organization can convince a poor family to kill their children and save the planet.
Or take race. The secularist is the neo-racist who rejects Martin Luther King’s idea that we should judge people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin. The woke neo-racist will buy Ibrim Kendi’s book and Robin D’Angelo’s book. He will declare his allyship with other racists. He will then attempt to use the government and corporations to bully non-racists into seeing their race as defining them. And he and we are all damned until we do.
Secular eschatology never ends well.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a disturbing report about a white nationalist police officer in Georgia. He allegedly wanted to help others provoke a race war.
In his texts, Griggers boasted of using his law enforcement position to carry out attacks. In one exchange in August 2019, he described an alleged beating of a Black suspect as “sweet stress relief” and claimed he planned to charge other Black people with felonies to keep them from voting.
“It’s a sign of beautiful things to come,” he wrote, according court records. “Also I’m going to charge them with whatever felonies I can to take away their ability to vote.”
In a message in October 2019, he put it more succinctly: “Castrate, kill, remove voting rights,” Griggers wrote. “The only problem is you can’t expect to get them all that way.”
While the messages are disturbing, they also are most likely baseless bragging. According to his personnel file with the Wilkinson County Sheriff’s Office, Griggers wasn’t hired until November 2019 and spent months in training after that
This guy already identified himself as of the white race. Most white people don’t identify with their skin color. That’s the thing that gets progressives upset. They want white people to identify with their skin color and then, well, this tweet to me in response to the AJC piece is pretty instructive:
Let’s just take the lady at her word. Surely, you’ll get some white people to equalize their supposed power. But how many really will want to give up their power? You get a bunch of white people together, tell them they have to internalize their whiteness, then tell them to give up their power and understand they’re oppressors?
The Neo-racist secularists of the left are going to inspire a whole lot of white nationalists. The wokes are waking up some demons.
Maybe, instead, Martin Luther King and Jesus Christ had it right — as we head to the final days we should see each other’s character, not skin color, and commit to our own walk with the Lord.
Christian eschatology ends way better for way more people. Sure, there will always be those who are damned. But far fewer in Christendom than secularism.
Luca
My son insisted I watch the new Pixar movie. He is twelve and has seen it six times in a few days. It is his favorite.
The story is of two sea monsters who, when they step out of water, become boys. They strike up a friendship and decide to run away together to see the world. Without giving much away, one has been abandoned and no one knows. The other is running away from his family.
As one of the boys develops other friendships, his friend gets jealous and they must come to terms with each other in the world. It is a very sweet movie.
Gay rights activists see Alphabet Gang subtext in the movie. The sea monsters are vilified. They want acceptance. Etc. One really hot take is damning Disney for not taking the next step and explicitly making the boys gay and in a sexual relationship.
Good grief.
Disney’s response is that the movie is about pre-pubescent adolescent friendship (it is). It is a sad commentary that in our society more and more we presume that two people of the same sex who have a remarkably strong friendship must be gay. It has impacted a lot of progressive discourse about the story of David and Jonathan in scripture. The Old Testament story shows a strong friendship between the two men and modern progressives suggest, given that friendship, they must have been gay.
We’ve lost something good in society when people cannot be such strong friends without people thinking them gay. Personally, I envy my friends who have lifelong friendships. Having moved around the world, it is something I don’t have. It is deeply demented, I think, to look at same-sex friendships and conclude they must be having sex. Part of the mental health issues we are dealing with in society these days, particularly among men, is from a breakdown in strong friendships and community.
Luca is a good movie. A lot of terrible people have awful opinions about it.
Hannah Dreier
Hannah Dreier is a Washington Post reporter who is the latest to smear Gov. Ron DeSantis with a fable.
She has not, to my knowledge, retracted that tweet.
The record shows and the law demands that a local official request a state of emergency before a governor issue one, which must be done before FEMA gets involved.
The timeline shows:
In other words, Ron DeSantis acted the quickest of all the officials involved. It took the mayor until the afternoon to make the request. DeSantis had it turned around within an hour. Joe Biden took another day before authorizing FEMA.
Dreier is yet another reporter doing her best to lie in order to hurt DeSantis. It is shameful and the Washington Post has done nothing.
We watched a fair amount of Luca when the granddaughter was here last week. It's a sweet story. Why do people assume more than is there? Because people want the world to revolve around them. Entitlement complex is out of hand.
Excellent commentary today. Thank you!