The Washington Post’s religion team has been working overtime, it seems, in covering every facet possible of the coronavirus-and-God story but they posted one story recently that was weird — at best.
It came with this clunker headline: “This is not the end of the world according to Christians who study the end of the world” and it went downhill from there.
For starters, the real folks who study eschatology, which is the study of the End Times, weren’t interviewed. The word “study” is important. Might that include seminary professors and historians in various major Christian traditions? You think?
Instead, the interviewees were minor players in the charismatic/Pentecostal world. There is a belief among some charismatics that God is restoring apostles and prophets to Christianity in the same way they operated in the first century. Presumably, these folks would have a good idea when the Second Coming was about to occur.
Chuck Pierce’s son was concerned, like a lot of other people looking out on a world of ransacked grocery stores and canceled sports seasons and eerie lines of people standing six feet apart from one another. So he asked his dad: “Is this the end of the world?”
That’s a question you can ask when you have a dad who calls himself an apostolic prophet and leads a prophetic ministry. “No,” said Pierce, who is based in Corinth, Tex. “The Lord’s shown me through 2026, so I know this isn’t the end of time.”
The worldwide upheaval caused by the fast-spreading novel coronavirus pandemic has many people reaching for their Bibles, and some starting to wonder: Could this be a sign of the apocalypse?
A couple of things here:
I liked the lead being about Chuck Pierce, as he’s a celebrity in these circles even though many Christians have never heard of him. But the story didn’t mention the real news about Chuck Pierce in that he is claiming he prophesied coronavirus. That’s a major factor to leave out of a story.
So who in the evangelical/charismatic Christian universe is saying this is The End? Even Pat Robertson, who can be counted on to come up with zany things, isn’t posturing this. So why is the Post asking the question? To get the click-bait headline?
It feels like this was a story hatched in a news meeting where everyone was told to come up with original religion ideas.
It sure might feel apocalyptic. But not if you ask Christian writers and pastors who have spent years focusing their message on the Book of Revelation — the New Testament’s final book. It lays out a lurid, poetic vision of the End Times, in which many evangelical leaders interpret it to mean that Jesus will return to Earth, believers will be raptured to heaven and those left behind will suffer seven dreadful years of calamities. Most of these Revelation-focused prophesiers don’t see coronavirus as heralding the Second Coming and the end of life on Earth as we know it.
So there is no story here, right? But the text stumbles on.
“If a person were just completely ignorant about what the Bible says about the End Times, they may think this right now: This is it,” said Jeff Kinley, a writer of books on biblical prophecy who lives in Harrison, Ark.
Why are we only talking with evangelical Protestants here? Do Catholics, Orthodox, Mormons and so on have nothing to say about this, not to mention other religions such as Islam and Judaism, both of which believe in the coming of a Messiah?
I follow the apostolic/prophetic movement quite closely and I’ve never heard of Jeff Kinley. Do the Post writers know of the Elijah List, which is a more representative gathering of prophetic types such as Patricia King, Cindy Jacobs, Katie Souza, James Goll, Lou Engle and others? Try interviewing one of them, not more obscure personalities.
Michael Brown, host of the Christian radio show “The Line of Fire,” based in Charlotte, also said coronavirus is not a sign of the End Times, but a good opportunity for reflection on what he believes will come. “I see this as a trial run to see how we respond to calamity and hardship,” he said. “If we’re shaken now, how are we going to react when it really gets wild?”
The reporting here is so aimless, it’s getting painful to read. Saying that Michael Brown hosts a Christian radio show in Charlotte, N.C., is like saying that Donald Trump is just a real estate tycoon. A ton of more important details about the man were left out. Brown was one of the preeminent leaders in well-known 1990s movement called the Brownsville Revival, which happened in Pensacola, Fla. Then he started the FIRE School of Ministry to train more revivalist leaders. More recently, he was involved in the condemnation of a notorious prophet named Todd Bentley, which I wrote about here.
Let’s add a bit more bio to this story, OK?
The one good choice of interviewees was James Beverley who is really tied into the prophetic movement.
There’s a lot reporters don’t know about the whole apostles/prophets genre and who the main players are. I pitched a workshop for the upcoming Religion Newswriters convention in October that would have featured Beverley and others but unfortunately the conference committee deep-sixed it.
So what we have here is a story posing questions that no one was asking. A better angle would have been to assemble a bunch of these prophetic types and ask why not one of these folks foretold coronavirus. This is a massive failure on their part and I haven’t seen one “prophet” in this movement admit it. In the same Todd Bentley link above, I questioned why all these supposed prophets were calling 2020 a banner year. As we can see, it’s been anything but.
This blog calls out coronavirus as “God’s plague on charismatics,” and while I wouldn’t go that far, I agree that the credibility of the prophetic movement is in shreds. That is where the story is, not in whether some folks think the Second Coming is around the corner.