January 8, 2021
Bill Svelmoe rocks his education and his upbringing to help folks who want to get answers.. well... begin to get answers. This short essay by Bill was posted on Facebook in the aftermath of the uprising at the U.S. Capitol which was promulgated by the 45th president on Wednesday, January 6, 2021. It speaks volumes. Just as the ceremony to cast the Electoral College votes to proclaim Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the 45th President of the United States and whatever number Kamala gets.. was underway, all Hell, literally, broke loose in Washington, D.C.
Why? Bill's educated take may give us all food for thought. Thank you, Professor Velmoe.
I have not vetted the links Bill tacked onto his essay.
Michael Sheehan
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January 8, 2021
by Bill Svelmoe
I have been following, for the past several months, the various evangelical Pentecostal prophets who were convinced God had told them Trump would serve a second term.
My interest is personal. I grew up in this community. I understand how the internal logic works. And I also have a professional interest, as my academic specialty is American religion. And I tend to gravitate to the more exotic manifestations of that religion. It's one thing to explain the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr to your students. It's quite another to stroll into class and say, "Let's talk about snakes."
Consequently, speaking of exotic, I've been following closely to see how the prophets would deal with the fact that, how to put it nicely, they kinda one-upped William Miller. No return of Jesus on October 22, 1844. And no second term for their boy on January 6, 2021. Just another "Great Disappointment" in a long history of great evangelical disappointments. Jesus seems in no hurry to return, and God seems in no hurry to grant kingly rule to one Donald Trump. As Trump himself might say, Sad!
The question remains, however. Are they false prophets? Did they really hear from God? Did God screw up? Did Satan pull a fast one? How to explain this disconcerting turn of events.
I have attached a number of links below. As one might expect, the prophets have varying reactions. Some are holding fast. When the machinations of humans are exhausted, God will still install Trump. Some are slickly redefining how prophecy works. And some are owning up to getting it wrong. Trying to explain how it happened. Even apologizing. I've tried to arrange the various reactions in that order below. If you're curious.
What none do, however, is challenge the underlying presupposition under which they function. Is God communicating to human beings in the manner they expect? Is their theology correct? Isn't it a much larger question than whether they are interpreting that "still small voice" correctly? Might it be that there is no still small voice? Or might it be that the still small voice is self-generated? These questions they never ask. But is this not the most important question of all? Especially for religious believers.
In that regard, I find the following story instructive.
One hot summer afternoon in Mississippi, Sam Bowers, failure in every aspect of his life, drove his pickup down a back road contemplating suicide.
Suddenly Bowers felt "transported by a power greater than he had ever before experienced." Bowers heard the voice of God say to him, "Don't be afraid; everything is all right." He explained, "The living God made himself real to me even when I did not deserve it."
For three days he felt "on air," as he experienced the overwhelming power of unmerited grace. He vowed to spend the rest of his life serving God.
Bowers understood from his reading of Scripture that God was locked in a battle with "principalities and powers" that served Satan. He set out to wage war against the servants of the devil on the side of God.
And so he created an organization to battle the devil and called it the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Inspired by the prophet Elijah's butchering of the 450 prophets of Baal, Bowers set out to destroy the 20th century Baal prophets -- uppity blacks, the international Jewish banking cabal, and most importantly, "the pagan academy," the intellectual elite who siphoned off good southern boys and girls into the godless "socialist universe."
During Bowers' four-year period of most intense service to God, determined to see all of Christ's enemies "bow the knee," he was responsible for nine murders, including the three Civil Rights workers killed in the summer of '64, 75 bombings of black churches, and 300 assaults and beatings.
Tried a number of times, all-white juries refused to convict him until he was jailed for seven years on a federal charge of violating the civil rights of the three murdered young men. Very late in life he was convicted of another murder, and he died in jail in 2006.
But as late as 2000, he was teaching an adult Sunday School class at his Baptist church.
The moral of the story?! That I leave to you.
But it cautions me to always remember that if history has taught us anything, it's that the voices I hear are likely my own. The gods, it turns out, are created in our image every bit as much as we are created in theirs. We are all Narcissus, gazing into the chalice with a shock of recognition ...
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