Word: christe
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This, the alarmists insist, is in fulfillment of the New Testament prophecy of the troubles that will precede Christ's Second Coming. In the Gospel of Luke, Christ warns that "nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and great earthquakes shall be in diverse places, and famines, and pestilences, and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven." In Matthew, Jesus says that when the time for his return is near, the signs will be unmistakable and the faithful will be alerted by the trumpet call of angels...
...coming year, as Y2K becomes a more familiar problem, the ranks of secular Y2K survivalists may grow. But most early "roosters"--people who see apocalypse on the millennial horizon--came to their conclusions through a prism of religious belief. Though millennialism hinges upon the notion of Christ's return, there are pockets of religious Year 2000 cultism even in nations that are mostly non-Christian. Chen Tao, for instance, is a Taiwan-based group of cultists whose beliefs combine ufo lore with rough-and-ready bits of Christianity. In 1997 a group of them settled in Garland, Texas, to await...
History, of course, is littered with premature prophets of doom. One of America's largest millennial movements was led by William Miller, a 19th century farmer. On Oct. 22, 1844, many of his 50,000 followers took to the hilltops, waiting in vain for the appearance of Christ and an army of angels. By the latter half of that century, two end-time views had become dominant among Protestant groups. "Pre-millennialism" imagined Christ appearing on earth during the reign of the Antichrist. "Post-millennialism" taught that Christ would return only after Christians had first established their own thousand-year...
...proliferation of millennial doomsayers leaves mainstream denominations uneasy. The expectation of Christ's return is a fundamental tenet of Christian faith, so Pope John Paul II has been talking up the millennium for years--but as an opportunity for spiritual renewal, not as the estimated time of arrival for Christ's Second Coming. Many churches are worried that false predictions of the Second Coming will undermine the authority of biblical teachings generally. In October, bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America issued a pastoral letter to their 5 million members, dismissing "wild prophecies" and declaring that the third Christian...
...could find last week. Miller, who had disappeared with more than 80 of his Denver-based Concerned Christians last September, has cast himself as one of the prophets prefigured by the 11th chapter of Revelation--one who would be killed on the streets of Jerusalem and then, Christ-like, be raised from the dead three days later. "Prepare to follow me and die," Miller exhorted his followers before the mass disappearance...