Apocalypse 2016

Now is the time when people start thinking about what the new year will bring. Aside from making resolutions (if one bothers to make them at all), we wonder whether 2016 will be a good year for us or not. As Christians – the only people in the world concerned with ‘worldviews’ – we may wonder how our experience of the last year fits with our framework for understanding the world and begin trying to work out how the next year will fit into our neatly formed schema.

If you are premillennial you likely look forward with a sense of foreboding, believing that things are bad and will only get worse. If you are postmillennial the new year may bring hope that things might get better, the ushering in of the golden-age of the millennium is but around the corner. If you are Amillennial, chances are you expect things to continue in much the same way as they always have with concerns about the eschaton not featuring high on your agenda. I exaggerate, of course, and accept there are shades of each view but I suspect our position on these things mean we are likely to sit there or thereabouts.

If you subscribe to one of the above (rather than pan-millennialism: hoping it will all pan out in the end), I wonder how last year fits within your overall view? Have things been a continual downward spiral for you, an upward trend, or have things been as up and down as ever with both good and bad? How far do you let your experiences inform your view of the eschaton? Does your sense of things getting better or worse, lead you toward pre- or post- millennialism or do you assess your circumstances according to your understanding of what scripture teaches on the millennium?

Of course, if you can’t be bothered to assess these things, you can always stand with John Calvin and assert that millennialism is ‘too childish either to need or to be worth a refutation’.