Word: millennium
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...alarmists have no such concerns about how their post-millennium credibility will stand. The impulse to find signs of the Second Coming and all its attendant disasters is a durable one. It can thrive in the face of continuing disappointments. All the same, in the probable event that the world does not come undone next year, academics like Richard Landes, director of Boston University's Center for Millennial Studies, expect that alarmists "will be totally discredited. Millennialism will fade rapidly." His group has a theme chosen for the 2002 edition of the International Conference on Millennialism: "Millennial Disappointment...
Good title. Apocalyptic imaginings are fun, but they're wishful thinking. It's more likely that the world will just churn on as it is. Or as R.E.M., another set of millennium prophets, once...
...then, and not two decades earlier? Why De Jager, and not Bemer? Proximity to the millennium may have had something to do with it as well as the increasingly ominous tone of the warnings. This was Bemer's dry 1979 prophecy of doom: "Don't drop the first two digits. The program may well fail from ambiguity." Twenty years later, here's De Jager's jeremiad: "The economy worldwide would stop...you would not have water. You would not have power...
...esoteric lore, with the Mount of Olives and the Temple Mount, the site of Solomon's Temple, as possible touchdown sites for the Lord. That is almost certainly why the followers of Colorado cult leader Monte Kim Miller were in Israel--and why Israel, increasingly wary as the millennium approaches, ordered the expulsion of as many of them as it 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...