Two Notable Deaths that Touched 20th Century Evangelicalism

Campolo, was a champion of ‘Red Letter’ Christianity, highlighting the words of Jesus in the gospels. The Baptist pastor and sociologist argued that caring for the poor was an integral part of proclaiming the gospel.

The second was Hal Lindsey an end-of-the world apologist who sought to scare people with the imminent return of Christ that could leave them behind if they were unsaved. He was 95. Despite his prognostications, Jesus has not returned and is apparently not immediately doing so even though so called American apocalyptic “prophets” still predict his return based on the theologically ill-informed exegesis of texts that have nothing to do with history, the Book of Daniel or America. His school of thought became known as Dispensationalism.

God might just be interested in making sure his gospel is heard in emerging Islamic nations like Iran, with millions in North Korea, China, Mongolia, and Tibet who have yet to hear the Good News.

TONY CAMPOLO

Tony, a sociologist, was always a controversial figure in evangelicalism. He hung out with folk like the late Ron Sider whose books with titles like “Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger,” and “I am not a Social Activist,” reflected a concern for the poor. Campolo was the public, charismatic spokesman and face of the movement; Sider the academic.

It is inaccurate to accuse Campolo of advocating for the “social gospel,” that is the province of liberal mainline churches and heirs of Walter Rauschenbusch.

Campolo deplored the identification of the gospel with right-wing America and the excesses of capitalism and believed God is more concerned for the poor and downtrodden. From his crusades and rallies, Campolo expected new converts to hook up with church ministries that reached out into the community and to the “least of these.”

Campolo was a lifelong Democrat, counselor to President Bill Clinton and a fixture at Democratic conventions. He attempted to ameliorate the party’s pro-abortion stance but with little success. The party would go on to embrace a whole range of woke issues on human sexuality.

Christianity Today reported that in 1985, Campolo was accused of heresy. He was uninvited from a Washington, DC, youth rally organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru) and Youth for Christ because he had written that Jesus is present in other people, that the fullest expression of God was in Christ’s humanness, and that while Jesus is the only savior, “not everybody who is saved by Him is aware that He is the one who is doing the saving.”

A panel led by Anglican theologian J. I. Packer reviewed the charges, grilled Campolo for six hours, and found him orthodox. He was “verbally incautious” and guilty of “unbiblical faux pas,” the panel concluded, but it was inadvertent and born out of his eagerness to evangelize.

In later years Campolo’s wife pushed him to accept homosexuality as a legitimate alternative for two persons with same sex attraction and he later fully embraced same sex marriage to the sadness of evangelicals who had been his fervent admirers. His son Bart later renounced the faith and embraced atheism, which caused consternation and heartburn to his aging father.

From the late 90s on his popularity waned as the Religious Right, under the influence of Gerry Falwell and The Moral Majority rose to prominence leading to the eventual emergence of Donald Trump.

The evangelical left has all but faded from the Christian scene in America. Sadly, Campolo will be remembered for what he came to believe in his later years on sexuality issues and not for the good his efforts he inspired in converts to integrate the gospel with loving your neighbor in practical ways.

His legacy is being carried on by red letter Bible advocate and Eastern University fellow alumnus Shane Claiborne who launched a network for Christians with left-leaning politics. The network grew to include 120 affiliated organizations and churches, as well as a popular podcast, an annual gathering, and social justice campaigns, such as events where Claiborne and a Mennonite blacksmith invite people to turn firearms into garden tools in fulfillment of Isaiah 2:4.

Full disclosure. I was on the board of Tony’s ministry, the Evangelical Alliance for the Promotion of Education (EAPE) and traveled to Haiti with Campolo. I will remember him as a captivating preacher who could draw people to faith in Christ and then call on converts to go out and do good in a world growing increasingly divided along political and cultural lines.

HAL LINDSEY

Lindsey rose to fame peddling end times theories, writing a popular book The Late Great Planet Earth, that compared end-time prophecies in the Bible with then-current events in an attempt to predict future scenarios resulting in the rapture of believers before the Great Tribulation and Second Coming of Jesus to establish his thousand-year (i.e. millennial) kingdom on Earth. Emphasizing various passages in the books of Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation, Lindsey originally suggested the possibility that these climactic events might occur during the 1980s, which he interpreted as one generation from the foundation of modern Israel during 1948, a major event according to some conservative evangelical schools of eschatological thought. It never happened.

In his Requiem for a False Prophet, the Rev. James Gibson writes; “Hal Lindsey never failed to make failed prognostications. I am happy if you did not have to endure the repeated prognostications about the “rapture” and “the end of the world” that he propagated ad nauseum for nearly half a century.

“The flawed hermeneutic of dispensationalism that John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Ingersoll Scofield developed and systematized, respectively, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hal Lindsey popularized in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. His magnum opus, The Late Great Planet Earth, first published in 1970, was a runaway bestseller whose unfortunate influence on evangelical thinking on the end times is still felt to this day.”

Lindsey’s writings were regurgitations of earlier dispensationalists simply delivered in a popular, easily readable style that appealed to the masses and made him a small fortune over the years. Even after fifty years peddling the end was near, Lindsey kept repeating the claim he had been making for four decades, namely, that “the end” was near.

Charles Spurgeon, the nineteenth century “prince of preachers,” decried and belittled his contemporaries who engaged in what he called “exegesis by current events.” Lindsey was no contemporary of Spurgeon, but he was the unrivaled master of this dubious technique. Its fatal flaw should be obvious to any serious student of the Bible. It violates one of the basic rules of biblical interpretation, namely, that Scripture is its own best interpreter. The prophecies of Daniel which were “closed up and sealed till the time of the end” were, in fact, unsealed in the final book of the New Testament.

Anglican scholar Alice Linsley writes; “Dispensationalism is a “modern” (19th-20th century) template which when placed over the Bible causes great distortion. It verges on heresy in that God changes in the various dispensations.

Dispensationalism asks us to focus on various covenants and their signs: the rainbow, circumcision, the tower of Babel, etc. It teaches that God changes the way He rules at different stages of history. Focusing on the signs and mutability of God rather than on the eternal immutable One to whom the signs point is a terrible distraction, writes Linsley an anthropologist and cross-cultural specialist.

“Instead of dispensations, let us speak of an historical continuum: those who lived and died in expectation of the appearing of the Son of God (BC saints) and those who live and die having trusted Jesus as the Son of God (AD saints). Together these saints are unified in Christ. That is the meaning of the “communion of saints.”

On this continuum, the fulfillment of the promise of Genesis 3:15 is attested by three persons: Simeon the Priest (blood), Anna the Prophetess (Spirit) and John the Baptist (water).

The three witnesses stand at the nexus of the two covenants and testify to Jesus, the promised Son of God who came into the world to save repentant sinners and to restore Paradise. The central problem with Dispensationalism is that it tears this seamless work of God into many pieces. Even the soldiers at the Cross had the sense to cast lots for Jesus’ seamless robe rather than divide it between them.

Lindsey was neither a careful theologian nor a thoughtful biblical scholar. Despite living nearly a century, his prognostications were not realized and he did not see the “rapture” or live long enough to get “left behind.”

END

Two Notable Deaths that Touched 20th Century Evangelicalism

By David W. Virtue, DD
www.virtueonline.org
December 2, 2024

Two notable deaths took place last week that marked much of what Twentieth Century evangelicalism looked like.

The first was the passing of Tony Campolo, 89, an evangelical social activist responsible for making the social dimension of the gospel front and center of his public ministry. He attributed his vision to John Wesley.