The End?

Some Christians believe the end of the world is coming on May 21, 2011.

Harold Camping is the leader of Family Radio Worldwide, and is apparently the one behind this movement. Camping details his evidence for the impending end of the world at the link above.

Where to begin? For one thing, how did Camping arrive at the date May 21, 2011? His calculations (if I am understanding them correctly) run like this:

In Genesis 1, one day must be interpreted as a thousand years. This is crucial to Camping's date of 5/21/11.

The justification for one day being a thousand years comes from 2 Peter 3:8 ("But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." (NIV)).

By this interpretation of 2 Peter 3:8, Camping reasons that the world was created in 11,013 B.C. (and not 4004 B.C., as some Biblical scholars claim).

Following this reasoning, the Flood took place in 4990 B.C., which Camping regards as the crucial date for determining the date for the end of the world.

Using the formula 1 day = 1000 years, and starting with the 4990 B.C. date for the Flood, Camping comes up with the year 2011 (I have not been able to determine where May 21 came from).

I am not a Biblical scholar. My knowledge of Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek is equal to exactly zero, so I cannot get into an argument over whether "days" and "years" have interchangeable meanings.

But to me, there seems to be two serious problems with Camping's conclusions. For one, the link between the Flood story in Genesis and 2 Peter 3:8 seems extremely tenuous at best. Why (for example) does the "1 day = 1000 years" formula Camping relies on so heavily apply in this case and nowhere else in the Bible?

Worse still, there are statements like the following ones. In attempting to explain passages like Acts 1:7 and Matthew 24 (which tell us that we are not to know the exact time of the end of the world) Camping writes:

Therefore, regardless of how brilliant or how learned a theologian or Bible student might have been, or how diligently they studied the Bible or faithfully served Christ, it was impossible to learn from the Bible the timetable for the end of the world. Anyone who claimed he knew the time of the end was always wrong.

This is followed up almost immediately with:

In the Bible a wise man is a true believer, to whom God has given a profound trust in the authority of the Bible. True believers have been in existence since the beginning of time. But the timeline of history as it is revealed in the Bible was never revealed to the hearts of the true believers. For example, throughout most of the church age it was generally believed that Creation occurred in the year 4004 B.C.

However, about 35 years ago God began to open the true believers’ understanding of the timeline of history. Thus it was discovered that the Bible teaches that when the events of the past are coordinated with our modern calendar, we can learn dates of history such as Creation (11,013 B.C.), the flood of Noah’s day (4990 B.C.), the exodus of Israel from Egypt (1447 B.C.) and the death of Solomon (93l B.C.)*

However, it was not until a very few years ago that the accurate knowledge of the entire timeline of history was revealed to true believers by God from the Bible. This timeline extends all the way to the end of time. During these past several years God has been revealing a great many truths, which have been completely hidden in the Bible until this time when we are so near the end of the world.

Camping seems to be arguing that even true believers could not possibly know the exact time of the end of the world - until now. How convenient.

Camping's predictions are almost certainly incorrect, unless he has stumbled upon the actual time of the end of the world by blind luck. As to whether he is a crook or a sincere believer who has made a very embarrassing public error, only time will tell.

Reading Camping's rather bizarre claim about how modern-day believers now somehow have knowledge about the Bible not available to others in the past, I was struck at how similar his reasoning was to the ELCA's attempts to find Biblical justification for homosexual behavior. Like Camping, the leadership of the ELCA claims special knowledge unavailable to past Christians (modern-day understanding of homosexual behavior) validates their position. Like Camping, the ELCA uses numerous Biblical passages and Christian beliefs that usually have little or nothing to do with the issue at had. Like Camping, the ELCA skips over any evidence that contradict their claims. Like Camping, the ELCA's claims are well outside hundreds of years of Biblical scholarship (I am not a fan of "scholarship by consensus", but it does have some weight that cannot be casually cast aside).

And like Camping, even a layman can easily demolish the wishful think that makes up the ELCA's position by asking a few simple questions. Frankly, I find that more alarming than the end of the world.