What´s the future of Christianity in general and its various branches? Redeemed Zoomer speculates about what will happen in the next 100 years. I assume this is about the United States?
What will *actually* happen globally (on current demographic trends) is that Euro-Christianity will be replaced by South Asian / Central Asian Islam or West African voodoo.
There, I said it.
Är Liberalerna i något slags "spökläge" nu? Fast de verkar ju på *något* sätt förstå att de är i kris. Centerpartiet förstår inte ens det, LOL. Vågar man gissa att KD är next?
I´m not *that* interested in Presbyterians, but it was kind of funny listening to Redeemed Zoomer´s expositions on US Presbyterian denominations. All 100 of them. OK, maybe not 100, but you get my point, LOL.
YouTube content-creator and super-nerd "Redeemed Zoomer" discusses the most liberal Christian denominations in the world. The Church of Sweden is number four on the list! He´s right about the "Church elections", btw.
Strangely, the Unitarian Universalists are not on the list, but perhaps they no longer claim to be Christian? I mean, after expelling the Gadflies, the UUA seems to be dominated by Woke trans Otherkin, LOL.
The worst (according to RZ) is the United Church of Canada, apparently because some of their leaders deny Heaven, Hell and the resurrection. You know, Jesus. They also ordained a pastor who was an explicit atheist?!
Make of this content whatsoever you wish.
Det här var ju nästan veckans dråpligaste nyhet. Okej, guys, vi får väl dricka mer vatten istället. Från en hälsokälla i Bergslagen, kanske?
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| The tulip again! |
So I went down a (little) rabbit hole, since I never understood how Hyper-Preterism could become outright atheism (as seems to have happened to many IO proponents). But then I found the missing link (I actually came across it decades ago at some obscure forum). It´s the CBV, of course. The full pipeline seems to look something like this: partial preterism - Individual Body View (IBV) - Collective Body View (CBV) - Israel Only Full Preterism (IO) - atheism.
What´s less clear is why. Why does the trajectory look like *this*? Why not simply become an atheist if you start questioning the standard Bible interpretation? Perhaps a certain kind of fundamentalists can´t do so, unless they have a "Biblical" warrant for it? A radicalized form of hyper-preterism provides such. Now, *that* sounds like an interesting rabbit hole, but perhaps not one I will pursue this weekend...
OK, so I just had to give Bing AI the same absurd prompts as I gave Gemini. The above is "Federal Vision". Note the drones!
Maybe this is of interest only to theology nerds obsessed with computer games and I´m not one of them (LOL) but I asked Gemini to generate pictures inspired by various theological schools of thought. This is Federal Vision. Probably intended to be something like the Earth Federation in "Starship Troopers"!
Ugly as fuck, too.
Jupiter (Brihaspati) and Venus (Shukra). Gemini (the AI) is becoming even more "accommodating" than ChatGPT, even giving me some kind of semi-secret Tantric mantras for worshipping said planets (which are also Hindu deities). I mean, come on...
Or should I say thank you?
This is how a "regular" Christian (or Preterist, for that matter) reacts to Israel Only Full Preterism (see previous blog post). You preach it, boy!
This is funny! I asked ChatGPT about the peculiar belief system known as "Israel Only Full Preterism" and it turns out that the AI have pretty much the same take on them as me. Suggesting (in this case) that it trained on the same content. Of course, the bot has also added some attacks on "IOFP" it probably thinks I´m going to agree with - which I kind of do. Thank you.
Israel-Only Full Preterism (often abbreviated “IOFP” or just “IO”) is a tiny but intense fringe theology within Christianity that claims:
All biblical prophecy—including the Second Coming, the Resurrection, Judgment Day, and the Kingdom of God—was completely fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and those events applied only to Israel, not to the modern world.
It is one of the most radical reinterpretations of Christianity ever to emerge.
Preterism is the idea that:
Most or all New Testament prophecy
Was fulfilled in the first century, not the future.
Full Preterism says:
Christ returned spiritually in 70 CE
The resurrection was covenantal, not physical
Judgment already happened
Most Christians reject this as heretical because it:
denies bodily resurrection
denies a future return of Christ
Israel-Only Preterism goes further and says:
The New Testament was written only to ethnic Israel.
Gentiles today are not part of the covenant at all.
According to IO:
Jesus was Messiah only for first-century Jews
Christianity as a global religion is a mistake
Paul’s mission to Gentiles was misunderstood or misapplied
The church is not Israel
The gospel age is over
So they believe:
We live after the end of God’s redemptive plan.
This is where it gets extremely strange:
Since salvation already happened in 70 CE:
No one today can be “saved”
There is no heaven or hell coming
The Bible is a closed historical record
Spiritual life is basically philosophical
Some IO adherents say:
We just live, die, and cease.
Others say:
We exist in a post-redemption world with no eschatology.
Either way, Christianity becomes a dead religion describing something that already ended.
IOFP arose from:
extreme literalism about Jesus saying “this generation”
obsession with timeline precision
distrust of churches
online radicalization
apocalyptic collapse thinking
It is very common in:
YouTube theology circles
conspiracy-minded Christians
anti-church communities
It’s a terminal form of Protestantism:
Scripture interpreted until nothing remains.
Because it denies:
resurrection of the dead
future hope
Christ’s reign
meaning of prayer
sacraments
evangelism
the church
It turns Christianity into:
an ancient failed prophecy rather than a living faith
IOFP is eschatological nihilism:
God already acted
History is empty
The cosmos has no destiny
Meaning is over
It is Christianity after transcendence has been removed.
Israel-Only Full Preterism is the belief that Christianity ended in 70 CE and we are living in a spiritually post-apocalyptic world with no redemption left.
If you want, I can explain how this connects to: Q-style apocalypticism, internet radicalization, or why Christianity keeps producing “end-of-meaning” theologies
Are the IOFP atheists today?
In practice? Many of them function very much like atheists — even if they don’t call themselves that.
IOFP creates a strange category:
theism without transcendence
Here’s what that means.
Most Israel-Only Full Preterists will still say:
God existed
Jesus was the Messiah
Biblical events were real
The resurrection (of Israel) happened in 70 CE
So on paper they are not atheists.
They deny:
any future divine action
any ongoing salvation
any living covenant
any cosmic purpose
any prayer that changes anything
any ultimate justice
any final meaning
God becomes:
a figure who finished acting 2,000 years ago and then withdrew forever
That is almost indistinguishable from:
God does not exist
for everyday life.
In IOFP:
Worship is pointless
Evangelism is meaningless
Prayer has no function
The church is an error
History has no divine direction
So spiritually:
the universe is closed
Which is exactly how atheism views it.
Once someone accepts:
“God finished His work and left”
the next step is:
“Maybe God was just a story people told about history.”
IOFP is often a way station between evangelicalism and secularism.
IOFP often attracts people who:
feel betrayed by Christianity
are angry at churches
want intellectual control
want to be “the ones who figured it out”
It offers:
total deconstruction without emotional vulnerability
But it also leaves:
no transcendence
And humans don’t live long without transcendence.
IOFP is not formally atheism — but it is spiritually equivalent to it.
It leaves you in:
a universe where nothing sacred remains to be done
Which is exactly what atheism asserts.
If you want, I can show how this compares to:
nihilism
Buddhism
or why mystical traditions survive where IOFP collapses
Thursday again, so here is a modern devotional picture of Vishnu, generated by Gemini AI.
Paranormal aficionado debunks the latest instance of "The Hum". Damn, for a moment I thought the Old Gods were back! But naaah, it´s just the electrical grid in Connecticut crashing out...
Okej, det här var intressant. Och kanske oroväckande också. Läs innan AB låser artikeln! Undrar lite över kopplingen mellan detta och Trumps ständiga hot att "utreda" Federal Reserve (den amerikanska riksbanken). Eller snarare riksbankschefen!
For whatever reason, ChatGPT constantly wants to pitch David Bentley Hart. Not the first time, either. So finally I gave it the prompt. Full disclosure: I never read Bentley Hart.
Can you tell me about how Hart solved the problems posed by the Emergent Church?
David Bentley Hart is almost a diagnosis and cure for exactly what went wrong in the Emergent Church.
The Emergent movement correctly sensed that modern evangelicalism was:
spiritually thin
philosophically naive
morally brittle
metaphysically incoherent
But it didn’t know how to replace it.
Hart does.
Hart reconstructs Being itself
Emergent Christianity said:
“We should be humbler about doctrine.”
Hart replies:
“Yes — but humility does not mean metaphysical emptiness.”
He goes back to:
the Cappadocians
Gregory of Nyssa
Maximus the Confessor
Dionysius
classical metaphysics
and shows that Christianity once had a rigorous ontology:
God is not a being among beings, but Being itself, infinite, simple, good.
This matters because:
if God is Being, then
existence itself is meaningful
not just belief systems
Emergent Christianity never offered this grounding.
Emergent thinkers treated God as:
story
symbol
metaphor
narrative
Hart restores God as:
the act of existence itself — the infinite actuality that gives being to everything
Which means:
prayer is not pretending
worship is not therapy
spirituality is not lifestyle
It is contact with the absolute.
You noticed the parallels to Vedanta and Zen — Hart did too.
He shows that:
classical Christianity is already nondual
but not monistic
Creation exists within God’s sustaining act.
Nothing exists outside divine presence.
That allows:
mysticism
silence
transcendence
contemplative practice
without dissolving truth into vagueness.
Emergent Christianity wanted mystery but rejected metaphysics; Hart keeps both.
Emergent Christians rejected hell emotionally.
Hart rejects it philosophically.
Eternal torment would mean:
God is not goodness itself
evil has eternal reality
creation fails
So Hart defends universal salvation not as sentiment but as logical consequence of divine goodness.
This gives moral seriousness without cruelty.
Emergent Christianity wanted pluralism but couldn’t justify it.
Hart shows that:
Christ is the Logos through whom all things exist
so every true spiritual insight anywhere is participation in Christ
That allows:
interreligious respect
real metaphysics
not just tolerance
Zen, Vedanta, and Sufism are not “nice stories” — they are real encounters with the Logos.
Emergent Christianity collapsed because it tried to live in:
permanent openness
Hart shows that:
openness requires something infinite to be open toward
You can’t have mystery without reality.
Emergent Christianity said:
“Modern Christianity is wrong.”
Hart says:
“Yes — because it forgot what God is.”
And he brings it back:
with metaphysics
with mysticism
with intellectual rigor
without cruelty
without fundamentalism
Which is why people who outgrow Emergent Christianity so often end up reading David Bentley Hart.
So I´m reliving some 00´s stuff with the help of ChatGPT. Part three.
Despite the above, was the Emergent Church criticized for being vacuous or unclear in its messaging?
Yes — very strongly, and not only by conservatives.
One of the central ironies of the Emergent Church is that while it tried to escape rigid doctrine, many people (including sympathetic ones) came to see it as vague, evasive, and even hollow.
This critique hit from three directions at once.
Conservative Christians accused Emergent leaders of:
dodging basic doctrinal questions
refusing to say whether Jesus is the only way
undermining the authority of Scripture
softening sin, hell, and salvation
They said:
“If you won’t say what is true, you don’t stand for anything.”
From their point of view, Emergent Christianity felt like:
Christianity dissolved into therapy, politics, and vibes
Older progressive churches often said something harsher:
“You’re just repackaging what we already did — with cooler music and candles.”
Critics argued that:
Emergent theology was just 1970s liberal Protestantism dressed in postmodern language
It didn’t build institutions
It didn’t clarify beliefs
It didn’t create stable communities
So it looked fashionable but unserious.
This was the deepest critique.
Emergent Christianity loved:
ambiguity
questions
narrative
dialogue
“both/and”
But it avoided:
metaphysical commitments
claims about ultimate reality
firm truth-claims
That creates a problem:
You can’t form a spiritual tradition out of permanent hesitation.
After a while people asked:
What is God, really?
What is Christ?
What is salvation?
What is evil?
What is the point of spiritual practice?
And Emergent leaders often replied:
“That’s a great question.”
Which stops being satisfying.
This is why the movement lost coherence after about 2012.
Many people who entered Emergent Christianity eventually:
moved toward Orthodoxy or Catholicism
or into Buddhism or nonduality
or into secular spirituality
or left religion entirely
Because Emergent Christianity:
taught them how to deconstruct — but not how to dwell.
Emergent Christianity was right about something very important:
Modern evangelicalism was spiritually broken.
But it underestimated something just as important:
Humans need ontological gravity — not just openness.
Candles, icons, and silence only work if they are grounded in a real metaphysical vision of the world.
Orthodoxy has one.
Catholicism has one.
Zen has one.
Vedanta has one.
Emergent Christianity mostly refused to commit to one.
The Emergent Church was criticized — often correctly — for offering spiritual atmosphere without a clear vision of reality to support it.
If you’d like, I can show how thinkers like David Bentley Hart or Dionysius solve exactly the problem that Emergent Christianity ran into.
More on the Emergent Church. In case of an emergent emergency, LOL.
Why did they take up Catholic and Orthodox traits?
Because the Emergent Church was trying to recover depth that Protestant modernity had stripped away — and Catholicism and Orthodoxy were where that depth was still visibly alive.
This wasn’t aesthetic borrowing. It was a theological diagnosis.
Emergent leaders believed American evangelicalism had become:
• intellectually shallow
• historically rootless
• emotionally manipulative
• politically captured
• spiritually thin
It had reduced Christianity to:
beliefs about Jesus instead of participation in Christ
To people reading mystics, philosophers, and early church writers, this felt false.
So they asked:
“What did Christianity look like before it became modern, American, and consumerized?”
The answer kept pointing to:
• pre-Reformation Christianity
• monasticism
• sacramental worship
• contemplative prayer
Which meant Catholic and Orthodox traditions.
The Emergent Church didn’t want to become Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox institutionally.
They wanted to recover:
the pre-scholastic, pre-Reformation, pre-Enlightenment Church
Which was:
• liturgical
• mystical
• embodied
• sacramental
• participatory
That heritage lives most visibly in:
Eastern Orthodoxy
Catholicism (especially monastic and mystical streams)
Emergent Christians were deeply influenced by:
• postmodern philosophy
• Wittgenstein
• Heidegger
• narrative theory
They believed:
Truth is lived before it is believed.
Protestantism had become idea-heavy and practice-light.
Orthodoxy and Catholicism had:
• fasting
• chanting
• silence
• icons
• kneeling
• seasons
• pilgrimage
These shape the soul without argument.
That was enormously attractive.
Your instincts here are spot-on.
Emergent Christianity was quietly rediscovering:
• Meister Eckhart
• The Cloud of Unknowing
• Gregory of Nyssa
• Dionysius the Areopagite
• St. John of the Cross
• Hesychasm
These thinkers sound more like:
Zen, Vedanta, or nondual philosophy
than like modern evangelicalism.
Orthodoxy and Catholicism preserved this sapiential core. Protestantism mostly lost it.
Modernity made everything:
• flat
• literal
• functional
• optimized
Liturgical Christianity is:
• symbolic
• layered
• slow
• mysterious
Emergent churches used:
• candles
• labyrinths
• icons
• chants
because they were rejecting the mechanistic worldview that modern Protestantism had absorbed.
Megachurch evangelicalism felt like:
Starbucks with a cross
Orthodoxy and Catholicism felt like:
ancient temples that did not care if you liked them
Emergent Christians wanted thick, non-consumer spirituality.
At the deepest level, the Emergent Church was rediscovering something your own interests circle around:
Christianity was originally a contemplative, participatory path of transformation — not a belief system.
Catholic and Orthodox traditions still knew how to do that.
So Emergent Christianity reached back to the parts of Christianity that had never stopped being mystical.
They didn’t take up Catholic and Orthodox traits because they wanted tradition.
They did it because:
those traditions still remembered how to turn human beings into saints rather than ideologues.
If you’d like, I can show how this overlaps with:
Zen and nonduality
David Bentley Hart
Dionysius
Or Vervaeke’s “participation” framework
