{"id":1119,"date":"2016-11-30T22:54:30","date_gmt":"2016-11-30T22:54:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/?p=1119"},"modified":"2016-11-30T22:54:30","modified_gmt":"2016-11-30T22:54:30","slug":"on-the-other-side-of-the-end-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/?p=1119","title":{"rendered":"On the other side of the &#8220;end times&#8221;&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Richard Beck has a great series of blog posts on preterism (the belief that the apocalyptic statements of Jesus refer to the events of 70 CE, when the Temple was destroyed and, to a great extent, Palestinian Judaism with it &#8211; the second had to wait for the Bar Kochba revolt of 135 to be fully the case, but if you take the &#8220;end times&#8221; as being 70-137, that would be full preterism). <a href=\"http:\/\/experimentaltheology.blogspot.co.uk\/2016\/11\/preterism-and-gospels-part-1-problem-is.html\">Here&#8217;s the first<\/a>, and the most recent is <a href=\"http:\/\/experimentaltheology.blogspot.co.uk\/2016\/11\/preterism-and-gospels-part-8.html\">her<\/a>e.<\/p>\n<p>After a lot of thinking, I&#8217;ve arrived at a full preterist understanding of the gospels myself, in that I do not think any &#8220;end times&#8221; described there have yet to come. This means that while I tend to read Jesus mostly as Marcus Borg&#8217;s &#8220;spirit man&#8221; (a mystic, in other words), I also read him as an apocalyptic prophet, prophesying the appalling actions of the Romans in 65-70 and 135-137. And I read him as a social and religious reformer (albeit not proposing reform imposed from the outside, but resulting from a metanoia, repentance, a turning to God and away from the courses of action being taken in those days).<\/p>\n<p>However, just because I think we are nearly 2000 years after the &#8220;end times&#8221; of the gospels doesn&#8217;t mean that some of my more conservative fellow Christians are completely incorrect, and that we are not, perhaps, looking at a new &#8220;end times&#8221; &#8211; certainly, all of the factors mentioned by George Monbiot in a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2016\/nov\/25\/13-crises-we-face-trump-soil-loss-global-collapse?CMP=share_btn_fb\">recent Guardian article <\/a>are cause for concern.<\/p>\n<p>But, of course, this merely means that when Richard stresses that the Kingdom of God is already here, among us, that is still the case. There is hope &#8211; but there may also need to repent of a lot of things which we are currently doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Richard Beck has a great series of blog posts on preterism (the belief that the apocalyptic statements of Jesus refer to the events of 70 CE, when the Temple was destroyed and, to a great extent, Palestinian Judaism with it &#8211; the second had to wait for the Bar Kochba revolt of 135 to be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,8,7,6],"class_list":["post-1119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bible-study","tag-biblical-history","tag-historical-jesus","tag-spirituality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1120,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions\/1120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}