It’s an oddity of many Christians today to be consumed by a need to work out the end times, prophecy, and the apocalyptic and eschatalogical passages in Daniel, Matthew 24, Revelation, and other places in scripture. To date, I don’t hold to a firm position on these things. For one thing, I don’t consider myself to be a learned enough student of scripture. For another, I don’t want to be so arrogant as to look at centuries of study and disagreement and claim to have the definitive answer for all people at all times. Lastly, though I regard all areas of theology as important, I would rather be able to speak clearly on the Gospel: The life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth, our Lord, the King and Messiah. Even if you wanted to pin me down, I’d only tell you where my leanings are, without laying claim to any one position.
(If you must know, I tend to hold to some form of Covenant or New Covenant Theology, Amillennialism with sympathies for Historical Premillennialism, and a guarded fondness for Partial Preterism. On that last one, I really need to do my homework, because I don’t know enough about the differences between the Preterist, Historicist, Idealist/Spiritual and Futurist views.)
Also, the more I study these things, without losing my immense respect for Dallas Theological Seminary and many of its grads, the less I am inclined to accept Dispensationalism, specifically the Premillennial, Pre-Tribulation Rapture variety made popular by the Left Behind books.
Enough of the opinions. Where does one go to learn about these things? Jason E. Robertson wrote a series of introductory posts on these topics at his site. They are as follows, with this index page:
Three Systems of Theology
Four Approaches to the Book of Revelation
Four Views of the Millennium
And, as always, you can use the Wikipedia entries as starting points for your research.
General Christian Theology
Covenant Theology
New Covenant Theology
Dispensational Theology
General Millennialism
Historic Premillennialism
(Dispensational Premillennialism is covered under the entries for Historic Premillennialism and Dispensational Theology)
Postmillennialism
Amillennialism
Tribulation
Rapture
Christian Eschatology
Preterist
Historicist
Idealist/Spiritual
Futurist
[...] May 17th, 2007 at 8:16 pm (Hot Buttons) In the several months we’ve been meeting, we’ve considered, but have not yet discussed all the different ways of looking at end times questions. Eschatology is a HUGE topic, and there’s so much to cover. Over at Ars Gratia, I put up a post with some summary links to various end times topics. If we do decide to tackle this, they might help everyone get familiar with all the seminary jargon that’s likely to get thrown around. I hope the links helps, or at least confuses the snot out of everybody. [...]