Searching for God # 95

 Excerpts of two essays appearing in The Conversation, today, March 19, 2026

Spiritual warfare and an end times revival

Among some pro-Trump leaders in neo-Pentecostal and neo-Charismatic circles, the conflict with Iran is interpreted as spiritual warfare. They view global events as part of an ongoing struggle between divine and demonic forces and believe the prayers of Christians help push back what they see as evil powers.

Lou Engle, a U.S. neo-Charismatic prophet, posted one day before the attack, that in 2006, a group of 70 believers gathered in Boston for a prolonged period of prayer lasting 40 days and nights. He referenced the prophecy of Jeremiah 49:34-38, which names the judgment against Elam — an ancient region located in what is now southern Iran. Mobilizing this text, he said believers prayed “God would break the bow of Islam and set His throne in Iran.”

The Jewish feast of Purim, which was celebrated on March 2 and 3, was leveraged to explain the current conflict as spiritual warfare.

This framing is rooted in how some of these pro-Trump Pentecostal leaders see examples of cosmic battles in biblical texts, such as Daniel 10,12-21 which depicts supernatural forces at work in conflict among nations. By André Gagné Full Professor, Department of Theological Studies, Concordia University

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Seeking Armageddon Rhetoric about wars being religious, and Trump being divinely anointed and about to cause Armageddon, is deeply disturbing and has catalyzed condemnation from Christians in the U.S. and beyond advocating non-violent and diplomatic foreign policy.

Violent U.S. religious rhetoric being amplified with the U.S.-Israel war against Iran is associated with beliefs that once Israel is restored as a nation and the temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt, Jesus will return and judge humanity

Christians adhering to these views read the Biblical Book of Revelation, with its vivid symbolic apocalyptic language, as making literal claims about history. They maintain their inspired and authoritative Biblical interpretation allows them to know that conflicts in the Middle East initiate God’s final act in history, with Trump seen as the dominating and aggressive man who can help usher in God’s violent judgment of his enemies.

Interpretations of Jesus’s death and violence It’s relevant to consider how some Christian beliefs about Jesus’s death correlate with a willingness to support or justify violence.

Protestant Evangelical theologians, such as J. I. Packer and John Stott, argue that Jesus’s death primarily “paid the penalty” for human sin. They emphasize that God’s holiness requires a payment for this sin. In this framework, God orchestrates the violent death of Jesus to satisfy God’s penal justice to forgive humanity.

Non-evangelical Christians, on the other hand, like 19th-century Congregationalist Horace Bushnell and contemporary Mennonite theologian J. Denny Weaver, understand the death of Jesus as an example of God’s love.

In this interpretation, Jesus doesn’t endure violence to pay a debt to God. Instead, the death of Jesus is more akin to that of a martyr’s tragic death. These theologians reject violence as a condition for forgiveness.

A 2012 debate in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) about a hymn demonstrates this tension, with a proposed change of hymn lyrics from “on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied” to “the love of God was magnified.” Ultimately, the authors rejected the proposal.

A more responsible evangelical theology

I argue Christians should not believe in a God of violent death, but life. Violent atonement and eschatology portrays a God who is not above revenge and a God who leaves most of humanity hopeless.

We are left asking a series of disturbing questions if God is indeed about to end the world with violence. Why does the tone of this theology resemble the tone of empire, which crushes enemies instead of building bridges with them? Why does Jesus, as One Person of the One God, expect his followers to love their enemies — if God the Father ultimately does not?

All Christians in the U.S. and beyond need to reject violent theology as incompatible with the love of God that was magnified on the cross. By Matthew Burkholder PhD Candidate, Theological Studies, University of Toronto

In this space in the last post, the word eschatology was referenced, as the study of the end of times. Throughout that piece I had attempted to discern between a literal, historical reading of scripture and a mythical, poetic, imaginative reading of those same words, stories, and their ultimate intent. The question of loving one’s enemies, as posed by Burkholder, positing Jesus as a symbol of love and his father as symbol of enmity, lies at the heart of much of what has been discussed in this space for some weeks.

Tolstoy notes that loving enemies for most of us might extend to a level of forgiveness of which humans might be capable, without demanding or requiring a perfect absolution of which only God is capable. It is the absolutism, the literalism, and the ‘imposition’ of such dogmatic, intractable, self-righteous, and even imperialistic attitudes as integral to one’s Christian (or any other) faith that is and will continue to be so repulsive, so anti-theology of all forms, faces, iterations and applications.

The symbiotic confluence of expecting the ‘rapture’ by both Jews and Christians, for example, is a piece of theology in which many legitimate scholars, far more schooled and brilliant of mind than this scribe, disagree, again except in the ‘metaphoric, the imaginative, and the beyond anything humans can ‘conceive conceptualise and certainly deliver.

From sdmorrison.org, in a piece entitled, Jurgen Moltmann on the Rapture and ‘Left Behind’ by Stephen D. Morrison, November 18, 2017, we read:

Jurgen Moltmann discusses the problem of religious escapism with a particular appeal  again the rapture theory, in his book, Ethic of Hope:

Here a religious escapism is coming to the fore especially in the present spread of a vague Gnostic religiosity of redemption. The person who surrenders himself to this religiosity feels at home in ‘the world beyond’ and on earth sees himself merely as a guest. So it is only by the way he is concerned about the fate of life on this earth. His soul is going to heaven, that is the main thing. In the body and on the earth it was no more than a guest, so the fate of this hostelry really has nothing to do with him. Religious practices lauding an indifference to life are offered under many high sounding names…American pop-apocalyptic offers an especially dramatic escapism. Before the great afflictions of the end of the world, true believers will be ‘raptured’ ---snatched away to heaven, so that they can then build with Christ as the Second Coming. All unbelievers unfortunately belong to the ‘Left Behind’, the people who are not ‘caught up’ and who will perish in the downfall of the world. (Left Behind is the title of an American book series read by millions). Whether people throw themselves into the pleasures of he present or flee into the next world because they either cannot or will not withstand the threats, they destroy the love for life and put themselves at the service of terror and annihilation of the world. Today life is in acute danger because in one way or the other it is not longer loved but is delivered over to the forces of destruction.

Morrison editorialises:

When our Earthly/bodily life is not loved, affirmed and accepted, we either resign ourselves to a religious escapism or numb ourselves with hedonistic pleasures….Redemption does not mean an escape from this world, but we hope that together with creation we will be made new.

Morrison then quotes Moltmann again from Ethics of Hope:

I don’t want to go to heave. Heaven is there for the angels, and I am a child of the earth. But I expect passionately the world to come: The new heaven and the new earth where justice dwells, where God will wipe away every tear and make all things new. And this expectation makes life in this world for me, here and now, most lovable.

It is past time for the mainline churches to come out of the closet, not only to publicly criticize the lies and the duplicity and the propaganda and the insidious narcissism married to an even more insidious religiosity that undergirds arguments for the American administrations wars, injustices, and nihilism. It is time for the mainline clergy, and their bishops to underscore a theology that relegates the escapism, cloaked in heroic American white Christian nationalism predicated on a ‘rapture’ of self-and-other-delusion, to the margins, or into the waste basket, where it belongs.

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On a personal note, (again referenced several times in this space) I was a child in a ‘Christian fundamentalist, evangelical, born-again cult of a Northern Irish charismatic clergy from Balleymena, where I chose, at sixteen, to become one of the ‘Left Behind’ long before I had ever heard of or read Moltmann. The power and influence of this theology is as dangerous as fascism and warnings against its hegemony need to have as many voices as possible, relentlessly protesting the evil both of its content and of its ‘praxis’.