Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming

"In the tumultuous five decades after 1875, American evangelicalism was challenged and changed by a series of unprecedented social and theological crises. While evangelicals coped in a variety of ways, thousands of conservatives were attracted to a particular kind of "premillennialism," the belief that Jesus Christ was about to return to earth to establish his millennial kingdom. Despite its small beginnings after the Civil War, the new premillennialist movement quickly advanced until it became almost synonymous with fundamentalism in the 1920s. It currently claims the allegiance of well over ten million people. More than a survey of premillennialist beliefs, living in the Shadow of the Second Coming is a study of premillennialist religious and social behavior. Once they accepted the doctrine of Christ's imminent return, most premillennialists altered their lives in significant ways. They threw themselves into revivalism and foreign missionary work with a new sense of urgency, viewed the rise of Zionism and World War I from a distinct perspective, and even changed their personal lifestyles in light of the possibility of Christ's any-moment arrival. Throughout his study, Professor Weber unravels the intricate relationship between belief and behavior among American premillennialists and helps to account for some of the ambiguities and tensions facing those who tried to live in the light of Christ's imminent return. His analysis should be helpful to those who seek to understand and account for the persistence of premillennial thought in American evangelicalism. Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming is an important contribution to the history of American Evangelicalism at a time when the movement is again as active and extensive as in the period of which Timothy Weber writes." -Publisher