Valiant for Truth

Camping’s reading of the Bible led him to a curiously self-contradictory method which is at some times excessively literal and at other times wildly allegorical. As an engineer he has had a particular interest in the numbers in the Bible. It is this interest that has led him to reach conclusions about the date of the end of the world. His first date was 1994 and he wrote a book showing the method by which he reached this date and to show how certain it was. Since then he has come to certain conclusions about several other dates, some of which he made public and some of which he did not. His repeated failures in calculating the end of the world have not led to repentance on his part or any basic revision of his method of interpreting the Bible.

If you were to drive the freeways of southern California, you would see from time to time billboards proclaiming the Judgment Day on May 21, 2011 and declaring that the Bible guarantees it. Presumably these billboards may be seen in many other parts of the country as well. Who is responsible for these signs and what do they really mean theologically?

Recently I read a paragraph which was a rather minor annoyance, but which illustrates for me a big problem in our society: namely the freedom many secularists in America feel to treat a Christian point of view with great disdain and a profound sense of superiority. My example comes from The New Yorker magazine of August 2, 2010. While I read The New Yorker mainly for the cartoons, I also am interested in the book reviews.

Many viewers of Ken Burns’ series on the Civil War, broadcast on PBS, were very affected by readings from various letters written by soldiers from the battlefield to family members at home. The letters were amazingly literate, eloquent, and full of allusions to Scripture and history. And many of those viewers commented on the serious decline of letter-writing in our time (as well as a serious decline of the kind of culture and education that led to such literacy). Clearly the invention of the telephone has tended to be the death-knell of letter-writing.