Watching Through the Ages

The version of the end times most familiar from popular Christian books and movies is barely two hundred years old. So what did Christians believe before that -- and how did today's ideas actually develop?Watching Through the Ages traces two thousand years of Christian thinking about the last days, from the earliest church's expectation of Christ's imminent return, through Augustine's influential turn toward symbolic reading, medieval apocalyptic speculation, the Reformation's fierce prophetic polemics, the nineteenth-century rise of dispensationalism, and the twentieth-century publishing phenomena that shaped how millions of readers now picture the rapture and the Antichrist. Along the way, it steps outside the Protestant mainstream to show how Catholic and Orthodox Christians -- together the majority of believers worldwide -- have largely followed a different, quieter path.What's inside:- How the earliest Christians actually understood Christ's return- Why Augustine's fifth-century reading shaped a thousand years of theology- The nineteenth-century origins of the pretribulational rapture- How bestselling prophecy books and novels shaped modern expectations- A clear-eyed look at history's long, unbroken record of failed predictionsPerfect for readers who want context before conviction, history buffs interested in how doctrine develops, and anyone who assumed today's popular prophecy teaching was older -- or more universal -- than it actually is.