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Every time there’s a war or rumors of war in the Middle East, Americans start arguing over prophecy charts again. The onset of the Iran war is no exception. People debate about unverified reports—whether US service members are told they are fighting for Armageddon or whether some US or Israeli leaders expect a third temple in Jerusalem to result from this tumult in fulfillment of dispensationalist ideas about prophecy.
Prosperity gospel preacher John Hagee is still here, arguing from his pulpit that the Iran war is the prompt the Bible predicted for the end times, just as he was doing almost a quarter century ago with the Iraq War. There’s a relationship between how we view the end of the world and how we see the political events around us, but I’ve changed my mind on what that relationship is.
My doctoral dissertation was about how viewpoints on last things shaped evangelical Christian attitudes toward social and political engagement. In agreement with theologian Carl F. H. Henry’s important book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, I argued that overly utopian views of the thrust of history led to social gospel activism and thus usually to disillusionment. And I argued that overly pessimistic views of the kingdom of God—that history spirals downward until the sudden, cataclysmic coming of Christ, as in popular premillennialism—tend to deaden concern for social action that isn’t about winning souls to Christ.
I still agree with all of that. An understanding of the kingdom of God as a wholly present reality that can be brought in by human effort ultimately spawns a religion that is about social restructuring at the expense of personal renewal. And an understanding of the kingdom of God as a wholly future promise sees the world as a doomed project, for which the only remedy is for people to be rescued, soul by soul. Where I’ve changed is that I wonder whether, in 21st-century America at least, it’s not so much that end times theology influences politics as the other way around.
With the “kingdom now” category, we’ve had an entire century to see its trajectory. As Henry suggested in the 1960s, some churchgoers who aren’t sure whether Isaiah or Ephesians are the Word of God or not are fully confident about God’s position on energy policy. But these parts of the church tend not to have prophecy charts—unless it’s what “side of history” one should be on as it progresses.
What about the prophecy charts, though? Is that really the opposite problem—that these Christians are too focused on heaven, and their place in it, to be concerned about the things of earth? At least in some eras, the temptation of American Christianity has often been caricatured as a hyperspiritual otherworldliness. Is this why these Christians tend to think of love of neighbor only in the most individual and personal terms? For some, undoubtedly, that is the case. But for most of us, the fundamental problem is not otherworldliness but carnality. It’s not that we love the present world too little but that we love it too much.
What changed my mind on this is, first, how malleable the prophecy charts actually are. Here, I don’t mean the way certain pronouncements about the imminent end of the world have failed so repeatedly. The 1970s or 1980s, we were told, were the “terminal generation” because of the way Ezekiel clearly prophesied the European common market or the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Then the 1990s were the obvious end, because Saddam Hussein was allegedly reconstructing the Babylonian Empire.
When these things turn out not to be so clear after all, none of the prophecy teachers ever says, “Well, I was wrong. Let me go back to the Scriptures and see where I failed.” They usually just move to the next confident set of assertions. But the real problem of malleability isn’t so much the kind that takes years to track.
Instead, the problem is that now we can count on hearing certain answers whenever any political issue arises. For those who use Bible prophecy, the answer to “What will lead to the second coming of Christ?” always lines up with whatever their political tribe supports and can change as fast as that changes.
If the Iran war wraps up soon and the Iranian people finally have a free republic instead of a dictatorship, that will be, for some of these people, clearly the result foreseen in the Book of Daniel. If the war drags on for years, people who support the war will say, “Support the president,” and people who oppose the war will say, “This is the disaster the Bible foretold right before the coming of Christ.”
For some of these people, when the tribe was “America first” with no foreign interventions, that was God sparing the country from the “globalist” New World Order, and it was necessary for the second coming of Christ. And for some of these same people, now that President Trump is intervening in Venezuela and Iran, all this is prophesied, the right thing to do, and necessary for the second coming of Christ.
All of that is human. Very human. All too human.
But it’s more than that. It’s also that many people’s understanding of the kingdom of God seems to have different implications depending on the political or social questions at hand. For some on the “kingdom now” side, ushering in the kingdom meant supporting freedom, justice, and self-determination and denouncing authoritarianism and empire—unless the empire in question was the USSR or the authoritarians were Cuban.
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And for the “kingdom future” people, there was always what we could call “the weave.” If the question was prohibition of alcohol, then God calls us to social action, to be salt and light in our world. If the question was Jim Crow, police-state segregation, then God forbids us to be distracted from saving souls by bringing politics into the church. And the same dynamic is at work in the same sectors today. Taking on abortion or gambling is Christians standing up for what is right (and I agree on both of those), but other matters the Bible takes up repeatedly—such as the treatment of the poor or partiality toward people on the basis of their race or ethnicity—are “social justice” and a “distraction.”
And so it goes.
Twenty-five years ago, I argued that an “already, not yet” framework of the kingdom is necessary for Christians to stop choosing between grace and justice, between love of God and love of neighbor, between regenerate hearts and thriving communities. I still think that. What I would change is that it’s not so much that we miss the what of the “already, not yet” but the who.
In what might be one of the most important passages in all of Scripture, Jesus said to his disciples, “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:20–21, ESV throughout). Jesus himself is the kingdom of God in person. And he tells us not to be shaken by events, not to be conformed to this present age, but to keep looking to him.
Once we get bored by the actual Messiah, we will look for others. Once we lose our awe at the kingdom of God, we will look for other kingdoms. But the Christ of the kingdom frees us—from carnality pretending to be otherworldliness, from fear pretending to be conviction, from Machiavellianism pretending to be worldview, and from tribalism pretending to be community.
The kingdom of God—present already but not yet fulfilled—tells us what to care about (justice, peace, the poor, the vulnerable) while also shielding us from the disillusionment or bloodthirstiness that can come with expecting to have to bring the fullness of that kingdom on our own. As embodied in Jesus, the kingdom concerns us not just with outcomes but with ways and means, even as it prompts humility on how to get to those common goals.
I have no idea what will happen in Iran. I have no idea what will happen in the modern state of Israel. I have no idea whether we have 5 more minutes or 45 million more years before the Apocalypse. Jesus said, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority” (Acts 1:7).
Who needs a prophecy chart when we already have the Way?
Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.
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