How I got to know Kevin Beck

This blog entry is a precursor to the book review I promised in my previous post. I thought it would be fitting and appropriate to first write about how I got to know the book's author. It's a long story, so if you're willing to wade through it I'll try to make it as short as possible.

A few years ago I was involved in a Bible Study on the Gospel of Mark. In this study we made a cursory overview of the Old Testament and the Intertestamental Period to get somewhat of an understanding of what Jesus was dealing with in his ministry. In passing I should mention that the Bible Study leader was (and still is) a Biblical scholar in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, of which I am a member. He is a man I greatly admire for his knowledge of the Scriptures and for his charitable work. When the course he was leading got to Mark 13, he told us that Mark's "Little Apocalypse" was not about the end of the world. I was shocked to hear this because I always understood Mark 13 as Jesus' predictions of the end of the world. I had always taught and preached that Jesus will visibly return on the last day of history, snatch up all of the believers to heaven, and destroy the planet and the universe in a ball of fire. And I regularly used the accounts of the Olivet Discourse (Mark 13, Luke 21, Matthew 24 and 25) and other statements in the Epistles as proof of what I taught.

The course instructor insisted that we have to read Mark 13 very carefully and make sure that we read it in its historical context. We already had in our minds, after surveying the Old Testament, a picture of God as a deity who takes great displeasure in any buildings that claim to "house" him and keep him locked in a room. The Jerusalem Temple served as one such building, confining the presence of God to a cubicle and all the while keeping people out. This "house" had to go, and Jesus was warning that such a day would occur "within this generation", meaning Jesus' contemporaries. I was so accustomed to projecting Mark 13 to some indefinite future that it never occured to me to read it as something that would have been very important to the Jewish people in the 1st century.

Now I need to back up a bit. A couple of years before I took this course on Mark I read a book called The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is by N.T. Wright. In this book, Wright had made the claim that the Fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple was prophecied by Jesus in Mark 13 in its entirety. In other words, the whole chapter is devoted to the destruction of the Temple. So claimed Dr. Wright. I automatically blew off this assertion thinking that it had no real significance to the Biblical story anyway. But Wright's interpretation kept ringing in my ears. Lo and behold, I heard it again, and this time it was from the course instructor (did I mention he's LCMS?). But something was a little bit different.

In the course we were taught that Mark 13 is about the destruction of the Temple, but not in its entirety. Our instructor said that a division must be made at verse 32, because from then on, Jesus is talking about the last day of history. I won't get into the details of how that could be. Many theories have been offered to try to explain this division. But now I was a bit confused-- one scholar said that the entire chapter is about the destruction of the Temple; another one said that only part of the chapter is about the destruction of Temple. Who was right?

After studying the issue a bit, I started to side more with Wright because the flow of Mark 13 seemed to be maintained with his interpretation. The theories offered to explain a supposed division in Mark 13 seemed to me to be nothing more than mental gymnastics, desperately trying to hold on to deep seated beliefs about an end to the planet, while concurrently keeping up with modern scholarship about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. It's called "having your cake and eating it too"! So I concluded that Mark 13 is about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, which occurred in AD 70-- the whole chapter!!

I then began to wonder if there was anyone else out there who was thinking along these lines. I went to Google and typed in the search bar "AD 70 destruction of Jerusalem". The first link was to a website called "Preterist Archive". Since I didn't know what a "preterist" was, I clicked on the link out of curiosity and found out that a preterist is one who holds to the view that all Scriptural prophecy has been fulfilled, the final event being the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70. I found the Preterist Archive website to be quite tedious and hard to navigate, but there were links to other sites. I clicked on them thinking that they would be much easier to glean information from. Most of them were just as noisy as the Archive, but there was one that, for me, stood out above the rest as far as navigability and simplicity. It was called "Presence Ministries". Here was a site with friendly voices and friendly faces. It was also a site that, while holding to a preterist interpretation of Scripture, worked out the implications of such interpretation. I became intrigued by it and delved a bit further. The site had an open forum that anyone could join, so I did! I "lurked" for awhile, reading what other people were saying. It turned out that there were more people than I thought who held to a preterist view of Scripture.

I was convinced that Mark 13 was about the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, but I was not ready to hold to the preterist view. I was bound and determined to hold to the traditional Amillennial view that the Lord will visibly return in the future, but it was through the Presence site that I got to converse with a man by the name of Kevin Beck. At the time, he was serving a Church of Christ parish in Ohio, but was also the vice president of Presence Ministries, which is located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I remember thinking that it's very odd to have your vice president living a thousand miles away!! The president of Presence Ministries was a man by the name of Tim King, who's father Max, wrote a 700+ page tome entitled The Cross and the Parousia of Christ: The Two Dimensions of One Age-Changing Eschaton. Tim is an author himself and wanted to spend more time in his writing career. Kevin Beck was then asked to become the president. He accepted and moved to Colorado Springs.

I have never met Kevin Beck face-to-face. We only know each other over the internet. I have met Tim King, who is a gentle giant of a man, and thought if Kevin is anything like Tim then he must be a great guy. I hope to meet him someday, and finally shake his hand for fielding my many questions, commenting on this blog, and being in charge of a ministry that is well-equipped to address pertinent issues facing our post-modern society.

Thanks for reading!!