Download or Stream this Episode

“Two men walking up a hill/ one disappears, and one’s left standing still.”  Whether someone hears that first as a Larry Norman melody or, like me, one discovered it on the “Jesus Freak” single by DC Talk, the image has its roots in a certain reading of certain passages of certain books of the New Testament called alternatively dispensationalism or end-times interpretation.  These ways of reading have their ebbs and its flows, taking modern form in the early nineteenth century, reappearing in the trumpets of the Second Great Awakening in American Church history, and eventually in the nineteen seventies and nineteen nineties as popular books of the Cold-War and post-Cold-War eras brought them back to popularity.  And for those most deeply immersed in them, these kinds of reading have lasting psychological effects even among people who stop reading that way or stop reading the Bible altogether. It’s that last phenomenon, a psychological phantom that remains, that Dan Koch is studying in his psychological research and in his recent podcast episodes, “End Times Anxiety.”  Today on Christian Humanist Profiles he’s going to talk with us about some of that research.