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.