business as usual?
Harold Camping and his devoted followers claim a massive earthquake will mark the second coming of Jesus, or so-called Judgment Day on Saturday, May 21, ushering in a five month period of catastrophes before the world comes to a complete end in October.At the center of it all, Camping's organization, Family Radio, is perfectly happy to take your money -- and in fact, received $80 million in contributions between 2005 and 2009. Camping founded Family Radio, a nonprofit Christian radio network based in Oakland, Calif. with about 65 stations across the country, in 1958.
via money.cnn.com.
Esther, the receptionist in the Oakland office, said some of her most extreme coworkers have recently driven up in fancy cars or taken their families on nice vacations as a last hurrah.
But overall, she estimates about 80% of her coworkers don't even agree with Camping's May 21 forecast. She has stuck to her work as usual, booking appointments and filling up calendars for her coworkers well beyond the May 21 date.
Meanwhile, some employees are questioning the meaning of Harold Camping's goodbye letter sent to the Family Radio mailing list last week.
While he says farewell, he encourages employees to "steadfastly continue to stand with us to proclaim the Gospel through Family Radio."
Could that mean he plans on disappearing, but the company should still go about its business as usual?
The producer in Illinois said, "We're trying to guess what it means for the company. Our producers have programs done through the end of the month, so we're not looking at that having any effect on the work."
Also curious is why Family Radio requested an extension to file their nonprofit paperwork. The group is required to submit financial documents in many of the states where they solicit donations, and in Minnesota they requested an extension from their July 15 deadline to November 15.
July 15th was already well past their Judgment Day prediction -- when they say believers will ascend to heaven -- so why bother requesting an extension to November?
harold bloom
At the age of 80, with almost 40 books behind him and nearly as many accumulated honors, Harold Bloom has written, in “The Anatomy of Influence,” a kind of summing-up — or, as he puts it in his distinctive idiom, mixing irony with histrionism, “my virtual swan song,” born of his urge “to say in one place most of what I have learned to think about how influence works in imaginative literature.”
via NYTimes.com
“For me, Shakespeare is God,” he declares at one point, and in other places he says much the same thing, in much the same words, a reminder that to read Bloom once is in a sense to reread him, so often does he repeat himself. Twice he asserts that Shakespeare’s greatest creations are Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago and Cleopatra; twice that “The Tempest” and “The Winter’s Tale” are tragicomedies and not romances; three times that “Titus Andronicus” parodies the tragedies of Shakespeare’s defeated rival Marlowe. Prospero, Bloom shrewdly observes, “is one of those teachers who is always convinced his auditors are not quite attentive.”
tomorrow is coming...
In a comfortable office, Bible placed firmly atop his lap, 89-year-old Harold Camping is preaching with utter certainty about the end of the world. "May 21, 2011, is the day of judgment," he says with conviction, in a YouTube video posted last year. "It is the day that ends all gospel salvation activity ... It is the most important day by a billion times than any other day the world has ever known." On that day, Camping estimates roughly 207 million people, or about 3% of the world's population, will be plucked from the earth. What will follow is five months of earthquakes and other calamities until the world officially ends on Oct. 21 of this year.Like all who proselytize the end the world, Camping has spread his message using a small army of followers; in his case, they're supported by a substantial budget that by some estimates is more than $100 million. There have been stories in the media of families selling their homes, quitting their jobs and budgeting their finances such that by May 21 they will be left with nothing. After all, they won't need it, right?
via TIME.
Throughout history, movements like these have sprung up, especially in times of war or economic and political instability. "When you think your world is going to hell in a handbasket, it's comforting to say, 'The world is bad, but God will take me out of this,'" says Doug Weaver, an associate professor of religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, who teaches the history of Christianity.
...
So what does the Bible say about preparing for the end? Basically, be on your guard: "Ye know not on what day your Lord will come," as Matthew 24: 42 puts it. "The Bible teaches followers to wait expectantly," says Kathy Maxwell, assistant professor of biblical and theological studies at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida. "We're not supposed to be quitting our jobs, selling our stuff and moving onto compounds to wait, we're supposed to be taking care of people and contributing to society."
As for Weaver, when asked what he expects to be doing on May 22, he said he plans to go to church in the morning and jump on a trampoline with his grandson in the afternoon. Later in the day he plans to watch the Yankees game, which if they continue playing poorly, he says, will be the only way he will suffer that day.
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 9:43 am
"In eternity when we see God face to face, either we will be those who love, or we will not be"
"Wherever the Christian life in commission or omission is good before God, the good thing about it is love"
"the Holy Spirit is the love of the Father for the Son, & the love of the Son for the Father, & it is this Spirit who is given to us"
"Not every man is in fact what it is decisive to be: Israel elect & loved of God... whose Head is Jesus Christ"
"If no one can hear without being a child of God, no one can be a child of God without ever hearing anew"
"Love to God consists decisively in recognising that we have nothing of our own to offer Him"
"Being loved by Him, and having Him as our Lord, we have no future apart from Him, and therefore no future without love"
"Thou shalt love can only mean: thou shalt not try to evade or escape thy future as opposed to thy present"
"where there is no otherness of the one who is loved, where the one who loves is alone, he does not really love"
"Our self-love can never be anything right or holy & acceptable to God. It is an affection which is the very opposite of love"
"The man who loves God will let himself be told & will himself confess that he is not in any sense righteous as one who loves"
"H.F. Kohlbrügge: the more the love of God increases in the heart, the more knowledge there is of inability... of unwillingness"
the sorrowful marks of the love of God in the children of God: http://goo.gl/2J9Fd
seeking & finding; finding & distancing : http://goo.gl/xzDks
"[Mt 5:48] is not a law which crushes & kills... it is the promise & form of the Gospel in the Law... news, glad & comforting"
feeling smugly superior reading barth on not making "certain anthropologico-theological presuppositions which are quite illegitimate"
"Love to God is the quintessence & hypostasised expression of what we know in a concretely perceptible & practical form as love to man"
"the commandment of love to the neighbour is enclosed by that of love to God. it is contained in it"
"we cannot understand the 'thou shalt' apart from the promise 'thou wilt'"
"if it is a real miracle that we can love God, it is necessarily a real miracle that we can love our neighbour"
on Luke 10:29 "this is a point at which Calvin's exegesis is obviously wide of the mark." obviously!
barth & the social gospel: http://goo.gl/VrW9o
"for it is this actual misery of man, the curse of an attempt to live which is fore-doomed to failure..."
"but this neighbor will cause me a really mortal headache" http://goo.gl/3tlVt
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 9:22 am
"Christians are sinners and... the Church is a Church of sinners... justified sinners... sanctified sinners"
"revelation is the removal of all religion"
"work is faith & faith is work"
"All things considered, the Christian life, the life of the children of God, consists in these two concepts of love & praise"
"The Christian life begins with love. It also ends with love. If we did not begin to love, we would not have come to faith"
"As Christians, we are continually asked about love, and in all that we can ever do or not do, it is the decisive question"
my true neighbor
Barth, CD I/2, p. 430-431:
The fellow-man who is unaware of his true plight, the fellow-man to whom we can look and about whom we can concern ourselves, above all the fellow-man who helps us confirm and enhance us in the role of benefactor, mentor and ameliorator: this fellow-man does not constitute any serious problem, and any headaches which he may incidentally cause will not be mortal. But this in the last resort not at all disconcerting fellow-man is not our neighbour in the sense of the second commandment. He is not the one who, sent and authorised by God, shows mercy upon us. He is lacking in the most important quality, in which alone he could do so, an actual similarity to the crucified Jesus Christ. At least, he is so in our eyes and in his relation to us. That is why he is not at all disconcerting. That is why we do not experience any serious unwillingness in relation to him. But that is also why he cannot help us seriously. This fellow-man will not summon us to the praise of God. Only afflicted, sinful fellow-man can do that. Only this man is my neighbour in the sense of the second commandment. But this neighbour will cause me a really mortal headache. I mean, he will seriously give me cause involuntarily to repudiate his existence and in that way to put myself in serious danger. In face of this neighbour I certainly have to admit to myself that I would really prefer to exist in some other way than in this co-existence. I would prefer this because from this neighbour a shadow falls inexorably and devastatingly upon myself. The wretched fellow-man beside me simply reveals to me in his existence my own misery. For can I see him in the futility and impotence of his attempt to live, without at once mutatis mutandis recognising myself? If I really see him, if as propinquissimus he is brought into such close contact with me that, unconfused by any intersecting feelings which may influence me, I can only see his misery, how can it be otherwise? This is the criterion: if it is otherwise, if I can still see him without seeing myself, then for all the direct sympathy I may have for him, for all the zeal and sacrifice I may perhaps offer him, I have not really seen him. He remains at root that in no way disconcerting fellow-man. He is still not my neighbour. The neighbour shows me that I myself am a sinner.
This passage, which really needs its greater context to fully explain itself, is so characteristic of Barth's style, at least to the extent I've read him so far.
It's a strange new world...
This bit of Barth, it seems to me, has something to say to the question of why short-term missions are taking off, while local dying neighborhoods continue to experience neglect.