Time For Us To Leave?

I rediscovered Larry Norman's music for some reason early last year. I don't remember what prompted me to listen to him, except perhaps the fact that I was trying to track down Geoff Moore's version of "UFO" and, failing to do so, settled for the original.

But I wasn't settling at all. Having grown up on a compilation of contemporary versions of Norman's songs - One Way, released by Forefront Records in 1995 - I had been fairly convinced that the originals would be too daggy for words. I was wrong. The years that had interceded had made the 90s pop schtick of most of the covers from "One Way" a little less than ideal for my ears, but I loved folk, and Larry Norman, I discovered, did too. I went from "UFO" to "Why Don't You Look Into Jesus?" and "Righteous Rocker #1" and "The Great American Novel". I didn't like everything I heard, but I liked most of it. Larry was sort of equal parts Bob Dylan and a more rebellious Keith Green. This was, to my mind, a very good thing.

There's only one problem with Larry: his theology of the end-times. Perhaps it was the way people thought in the 1960s - my parents suggest to me that it was - but there is a fairly pervasive sense, in many of his songs, that the end of the world is looming and that Jesus and the rapture are only seconds away. We know, of course, that this wasn't the case, but it's a little hard for a child of the 80s and 90s like myself to really get why he would have thought this way. Songs like "If the Bombs Fall" help, I think; Larry, like everyone else in his day, lived with the semi-regular threat of nuclear war and other similar catastrophes. Global politics seemed, to him and to others, to have gone mad. His most distinctly eschatological song, the famous "I Wish We'd All Been Ready", captures what Larry saw to be the mood of his day with its opening line:

Life was filled with guns and war

And everyone got trampled on the floor.

The song has remained something of an anthem for - generally American - dispensationalist thinking, the sort that made the Left Behind books such an immense success. This video set to Norman's song demonstrates this phenomenon quite well:

Now, I only recently realised that, having grown up in a moderate Brethren church in rural Australia, I was exposed to my fair share of dispensationalist thinking without realising. It shocked me to learn that, for many theologians, the concept of a literal rapture seems both spurious and unbiblical. I suspect that learning the lyrics to "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" and feeling deeply moved by it at a fairly young age also had quite a bit to do with this thinking. I'm not here to critique the theology of such an interpretation, partly because I'm still very early in my thinking about it and partly because I don't think this is the place to do so. Certainly N.T. Wright has done a pretty good job of at least laying the groundwork for a solid theological challenge to it, and I'm not going to try to regurgitate his ideas here.

But it does strike me that, much as I love Larry Norman's music, there's a line of thinking which goes very well with a rapture-oriented perspective, which is the mindset conveyed in the final line of an otherwise very subtle Norman song, "The Outlaw": "And I think we should get ready 'cause it's time for us to leave". What's wrong with this kind of thinking? I suspect it views the world primarily as something we should be seeking to escape from rather than working to redeem. It fails, in fact, to fully grasp what Jesus was praying for His disciples, and for the church, when He said:

"My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one." (John 17:15)

Now, this does not mean at all that Jesus wants us to stay in this fallen world permanently. There is a very real sense in which Jesus will deliver His followers from the pain of separation from Him. But will He snatch us out of this earth and take us to a celestial kingdom, or will He invade and transform the earth, making it what it was always intended to be? Interestingly, I have long believed the latter, but have still not quite grasped what that means for my thinking about the rapture. But I'm open to being challenged in it, and think it might be wise to begin with these questions posed by Wright in his article:

We might begin by asking, What view of the world is sustained, even legitimized, by the Left Behind ideology? How might it be confronted and subverted by genuinely biblical thinking? For a start, is not the Left Behind mentality in thrall to a dualistic view of reality that allows people to pollute God’s world on the grounds that it’s all going to be destroyed soon? Wouldn’t this be overturned if we recaptured Paul’s wholistic [sic] vision of God’s whole creation? (N.T. Wright, "Farewell to the Rapture")

What, I wonder, would be the implications of living like Jesus wanted us to stay here and invest in this place, painful as it is? What would it mean for us if we knew that our home here was being redeemed, not destroyed? I suspect we might start living a lot more like Jesus, because we would have to love this place just as much as He did. We might even have to start dying for it, instead of waiting for our ticket out.