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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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The one thing I have never grasped about Christian Zionism is implication that God is waiting for humanity to gather all 7 dragon balls before Jesus can be summoned. I'm pretty sure the Second Coming is going to happen when God plans it to, and that human efforts to bring it about are at best ridiculous and at worst extremely presumptuous. Jesus clearly says that nobody knows the hour or the day, so what's the point? I'm genuinely curious, do Christian Zionists have some theological justification or rationalization for this?

I grew up around many Christian Zionists. I think they would agree that "the Second Coming is going to happen when God plans it to" but would add that (1) God puts his plans into motion largely through the actions of people and (2) the Bible sets forth the outline of what that plan looks like. Because people have free will, it's therefore important for them to choose to follow God's plan as laid out in the Bible.

To them, your critique would sound a little like if someone said: "What's so bad about murder? Everything happens according to God's plan, therefore if someone commits murder that must be God's plan."

"What's so bad about murder? Everything happens according to God's plan, therefore if someone commits murder that must be God's plan."

Don't Christians say this all the time? When good or bad things happen, it's "all part of God's plan". Either God exerts agency in this world or he does not.

Christians generally believe humans have free will that enables them to act contrary to God's will. Those bad actions are still "part of God's plan" in the sense that he anticipates them and "plans around them" so to speak, but those sinful actions are "contrary to God's plan" in the sense that he does not want them to happen.

It is the ISIS ideology of building a caliphate and invoking the return of Jesus. The idea of commanding god and ordering Jesus back to Earth is an antithesis to what pretty much 99% of Christians throughout history have believed. It is a big part of the rift between Al Qaeda and ISIS in which Al Qaeda considered ISIS to be completely out of control.

I think the whole idea is frankly pagan. I don’t think it’s very Christian to say that God has to do anything we decide he should, and the idea smacks of magical thinking.