Thoughts on the end times

It was in the 1800’s that the great waves of feeling that Jesus was coming back became a major movement in our religious history. And when it appeared that he wasn’t or hadn’t come back there was the “great disappointment”. From this emerged the Adventist Church and others. Later the Scottish theologian Darby wrote an understanding of this disappointment into a way of viewing the faith with terminology that brought into our language, “the rapture”. And now this way of thinking is a major understanding in the American Church. I have read and understood our religious history, but never tied it in very closely with other ways of reading history. And when I began doing such it was startling. How much of this way of thinking of the return of Christ was ignited by the change in our thinking that came about because of the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of Darwinian thought, and the pre-eminence of science and technology as the governing or driving force of society.