We’re doing a study of Eugene Peterson’s book on Revelation, Reversed Thunder. Below you can find the audio of our meetings:

• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3
• Week 4
• Week 5
• Week 6
• Week 7
• Week 8
• Week 9
• Week 10
• Week 11
• Week 12
• Week 13
• Week 14
• Week 15 (This week featured questions about some of the features of the “end times” that figure into dispensationalist teaching on the subject. I noted that when I was a brand new Christian I was very much into this approach to eschatology – in fact I was so much into it that I took it to be the most important part of theology. Books I read in that period included The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey and Things to Come by J. Dwight Pentecost. Some of the things that led me away from that approach to eschatology were reading the Bible for myself (and not finding neither the intricate mapping nor the fixation on end times that I had found in dispensationalist preachers and scholars) and growth in knowledge of Christian history. I heard American Bible teachers whose teaching on the end times sounded entirely America centric: persecution was coming to America, the antiChrist was coming, we see all the signs in our country. God will surely save his saints from the coming tribulation we see in America. But my knowledge of world Christian history led me to ask about believers around the world from millennia past. Why did God not rapture them when tribulation came for them? Does God reckon the Christians of my country so much more important than all those others that he would rapture us at the barest hint of hardship? Some of the books that I find more useful these days for understanding eschatology include Surprised by Hope by NT Wright, and A New Heaven and a New Earth by J. Richard Middleton. Recently Daniel Hummel has written The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism on the history of that movement in the American church. If you’re interested, you can find links to interviews with Hummel and links about the book HERE.
• Week 16