This approach -- which amounts to "say something counterfactual with confidence, and it will henceforth be true" -- is not unique to Aiken. Look at Donald Trump's recent claims that he's ended eight wars, steamrolled over China's Xi Jinping with his masterful strategizing, is the most beloved president in the history of ever, his poll numbers are amazing believe me, ICE only arrests evil drug-dealing criminal illegal immigrant terrorists, grocery prices are way down, the Democrats are a hundred percent responsible for the government shutdown, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
The problem, of course, occurs when people start to catch on and realize you've been talking out of your ass.
I've never seen this idea brought to such heights, though, as with a group of people I only found out a couple of days ago. They're called Full Preterists -- and they have an answer to all the scoffers who laugh about the fact that every time a preacher predicts some prophecy or another from the Bible will come true on such-and-such a date, it doesn't happen.
Scoff all you will, the Full Preterists say. You wanna know why all those preachers got it wrong?
It's because all the prophecies in the Bible already happened.
Yup. Everything. Not only Jesus's words in the Olivet Discourse that "the Sun will be darkened, and the Moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken," but all the stuff from the Books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, and the bad acid trip that is the Book of Revelation.
Full Preterism apparently got its start in the sixteenth century with the Jesuit theologian and mystic Luis del Alcázar. Del Alcázar was a major figure in the Counter Reformation, which was an attempt by the Catholics to prove to the Protestants that they were capable of cleaning their own house, thank you very much. It generated some creditable attempts to rid the Vatican of corruption, but also spawned a resurgence of the Inquisition and a lot of loony philosophizing. Del Alcázar very much belongs to the last-mentioned. His book Vestigatio Arcani Sensus in Apocalypsi (An Investigation into the Hidden Sense of the Apocalypse) concluded that everything but the very last bit of the Book of Revelation -- the part about Jesus returning and creating Paradise on Earth -- had already taken place, and in fact occurred before John of Patmos wrote it in around 90 C.E.
So John was mostly writing history, not prophecy.
"But wait," you might be saying. "What about stuff that's really specific? Like the Star Wormwood thing in Revelation 8 that 'fell from heaven and poisoned a third of the fresh water on Earth and made it too bitter to drink'? What about Revelation 6:12 where a giant earthquake rearranges all the continents, and the Sun turns black and the Moon red as blood? What about the giant crowned locusts with iron armor, men's faces, women's hair, lions' teeth, and scorpions' stings, that come out of the Earth in Revelation 9? It'd be kind of hard to miss all that."
Ha-ha, say the Full Preterists. Of course you didn't miss that. It's just that -- the inconvenient parts are symbolic. You know, metaphors. The Antichrist was Nero. Or maybe Domitian. Or was he the Beast? Or are the Antichrist and the Beast the same? The locusts are the armored soldiers of Rome (the sharp pointy objects they always carried are scorpions' stings). The Tribulation was the persecution of Christians by Rome. Or maybe the destruction of Jerusalem (and the Temple) in 70 C.E. After all, in Matthew 24:34 Jesus himself says, "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place," which sounds pretty unequivocal, so somehow, all of it must be in the past, right?
Of course right.
Oddly enough, when del Alcázar said all this stuff, only a few people responded by saying, "Okay, now you're just making shit up." I guess since the Counter Reformation went hand-in-hand with the Inquisition, it's understandable that most people went along with him. If someone says, "Hey, y'all, listen to this crazy claim I just now pulled out of my ass," then follows it up with, "... and if you don't believe it, I'll have you tortured and then burned alive," the vast majority of us would say, "Oh, yeah, brilliant idea, my man. Keep 'em coming, you're on a roll." Full Preterism jumped from the Catholics to the Protestants when Dutch theologian Hugo Grotius read del Alcázar's book, said, "Okay, that makes total sense," and wrote his own book called Commentary on Certain Texts That Deal With the Antichrist in 1640 elaborating even further. John Donne, of Death Be Not Proud fame, quoted del Alcázar in a sermon, even though it was at a point when the Church of England was ascendant and "papism" was frowned upon, to put it mildly. French writer and theologian Firmin Abauzit, whose accomplishments included proofreading Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, was a seventeenth-century Full Preterist, who was highly influential in the church -- and in intellectual circles -- at the time. The idea landed in America in 1845 with Robert Townley's The Second Advent of the Lord Jesus Christ: A Past Event, although apparently Townley later decided that the idea was silly and wrote a rebuttal of his own book.
Here's the problem, of course, and it's the same trap that closed on Harold Camping's ankle; if you make a highly detailed, extremely specific prediction, and it fails to come true, you're gonna lose credibility; but if you keep it vague and symbolic, people start asking awkward questions like "Why is this verse metaphorical, but that one is literally true?" The Full Preterists seem to want to make the weirder prophecies in the Bible into metaphors and keep the pieces they like as the inerrant Word of God, which strikes me as mighty convenient. At least the people who think it's all true, but the awkward bits simply haven't happened yet, are being consistent.
Me, I'm inclined to look at all of 'em with an expression like this:
But I guess that's no surprise to anyone.
Anyhow, I thought this was all interesting from a human psychology perspective. Once we've decided on a worldview, anything that threatens it it leaves us scrambling like mad to keep the whole thing from collapsing, however far-fetched some of those solutions end up being. Of course, I'm probably as guilty of that as the next guy; I've often wondered what I'd do if my rationalist, science-based view of reality received a serious challenge.
Like if the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons showed up, or something. My guess is I'd be pretty alarmed. Although considering the fact that I live in the hinterlands of upstate New York, at least it'd give me something more interesting to do than my usual occupation, which is avoiding working on my current novel by watching the cows in the field across the road.
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