As I said before. My biggest beef about your comment was that you said Bush is a fundamentalist.

As far as this general, you will have to forgive my ignorance because I’ve never heard of him. If I misread your statement, please accept my apology.

You said, “One of the scary postulations about GW Bush is that he is a religious fundamentalist who actually believes that screwing up in the middle east and maybe having a nice nuclear war is helping to bring about Jesus’ return, and some high up members of the military seem to concur.”

First of all. A religious fundamentalist and an evangelical Christian are two completely different expressions of Christianity. In the States these are two seperate things. To call an evangelical a fundamentalist is an insult… even though our roots lie in fundamentalism. Long story, both groups identified with the same books published in 1911 called “The Fundamentals” edited by R.A. Torrey.

The two sides parted company in the 1940s as those who wanted to reach the world became evangelicals (ala Billy Graham) and those who wanted to hide from the world kept calling themselves fundamentalists.

Bush is an evangelical… and a pretty moderate one too. Are there some whack jobs that think Armageddon, as John writes about in Revelation 17-19 will result in a nuclear war? Yeah, but like I said… they still think the Communists are gonna do that too.

So, your statement is wrong on 2 fronts.

1. Bush, as an evangelical, holds to whats called a pretribulational rapture. This means that if God, who initiates tribulation according the Revelation, decides that the 7 years are beginning He will remove all believers from the earth to be with Jesus. So Bush wouldn’t want to start a war… he’d be gone according to his beliefs!

2. Revelation 18-19 clearly teach that the final battle will not be between men but that Christ will do the battling against the forces of Satan. If you read that you’ll see that the men and angels dress for battle but they don’t do anything. Jesus does it all.

So, I hope that clears up what I meant by my comment. I’d love to answer more questions.

for what it’s worth, i will be back shortly.

Relatively few evangelicals think that tribulation will have anything to do with nuclear war. That was said a lot before the fall of communism when “the kingdom of the north” was thoguht to be the USSR by theologians… but upon further study and understanding of Daniel’s context most now think that has nothing to do with anyhting north of Turkey.

Along with ‘Everything I know I learnt from Melvyn Bragg’.