I found this article at The Christian Post (link below on author's name) and thought it made some good points and was humorous in places. He wrote it with due respect to a fellow Christian, who no doubt meant well but caused many a lot of grief and financial loss. I believe he loved the Lord, though. Now he is in God's hands :-) His story should serve as a lesson for all of us and as a lesson in humility, which is rare in this age of self-absorption. CMR
December 18, 2013|4:19 pm
Harold
Camping, the civil engineer turned Bible-prognosticator and broadcaster
who died December 15, seemed certain he could use his mathematical mind
to work out Heaven's calendar and give the world the precise date for
the return of Christ.
When God's schedule for the Lord's Second
Coming failed to mesh with Camping's calculations on September 6, 1994,
Camping suggested the cause was "mathematical error."
The math
gremlin wouldn't give up, and confounded the numbers on May 21, 2011,
and again in October, 2011. Camping kept proving one of Albert
Einstein's axioms: "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality,
they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer
to reality."
Camping, though a conservative Christian, was a
technological modernist.
Modernism, bred in the Age of Reason,
presupposed that human science and reason could figure out and hence
eliminate all the mystery in the universe. Postmodernism pole-vaulted to
the other extreme, thinking there is nothing but mystical mystery – but
that's another topic.
For technological (if not theological)
modernists like Camping, all you have to do is open the Bible, add up
the numbers, and Eureka! You have discovered the date of Christ's
Return.
Ah, but there's a "ghost in the (mathematical) machine,"
to borrow a notion from philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Arthur Koestler.
Camping's technological modernism had no room for the "ghost" and it
made mischief with his calculations.
It
was not so much mathematics that tripped Camping as it was a failure to
understand the Bible's revelations concerning the physics of time. That
mistake made Camping look like an engineer trying to design a
one-dimensional cube.
The Bible, however, reveals that time is
multi-dimensional. That branch of physics tagged "quantum mechanics" we
are just beginning to understand. One thinks of astrophysicist Robert
Jastrow's pungent observation: "For the scientist who has lived by his
faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has
scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest
peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band
of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
Technological
modernist Harold Camping wasn't among the band of theologians sitting
on the peak, but down there with the calculators trying to haul himself
up the slope on the pitons of his mathematical reasoning.
For good
reason God Himself discourages us from making prophetic calendars out
of our cerebral musings. It's a human being thinking his sand-dripping
hourglass or sundial is as good as an atomic clock. Casting the calendar
through human contrivance gets one bogged down in "might and power"
that is not the authoritative revelation of God's Spirit. (Zechariah
4:6)
That revelation shows that time is even more intricate than
Einstein's Relativity. Both the Old and New Testaments have distinct
words for the two dimensions of time. The New Testament Greek word kronos refers
to chronological time – the ticking of the clock, the seeping of the
sand in an hourglass, the passage of solar radiance on a sundial. Kairos is the Greek word that signifies time on the scale of eternity. It is time unbounded by kronos, in which a day is as a thousand years. (2 Peter 3:8)
"Mere abstract calibrations that graph concrete history by space and kronos are
like the 'inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,'" writes Peter
Kreeft, borrowing from Frank Loesser. Camping and the techno-modernists
measure the stalk and stem but fail to bring us to the flower in full
bloom. That only happens in kairos – God-time.
"Of that
day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son,
but the Father alone," says Jesus, with good reason. (Matthew 24:36) As
Camping shows, our kronos calibrations and predictions without kairos are
as futile as geometry in a world without shapes. God doesn't want us to
go there because it will cause us to try to invent shapes to fit the
math. The figments of our imagination become our reality.
No doubt
Harold Camping's motives were pure: he wanted to alert people to be
ready for Christ's coming and the Day of the Lord. But because he
calculated only on the kronos scale he kept trying to concoct the shape that would fit the geometry.
And
God brought it to nothing because "God has chosen the foolish things of
the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the
world to shame the things which are strong… the things that are not, so
that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before
God." (1 Corinthians 1:26-31)
Wallace
Henley, Senior Associate Pastor at Houston's Second Baptist Church,
teaches biblical and worldview studies there and at Belhaven University.
His book, Globequake, explores the theology of time. Wallace Henley's
newest book, Spillover: War In Heaven, to be published this spring,
shows how the Bible's doctrine of time is a key to interpreting the Book
of Revelation.
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