The Bible Is Not Divided — We Are

by John Wiertzema

Few rooms in the church feel as divided as the one where we talk about the end. A conversation that began in curiosity hardens, somewhere along the way, into a standoff. People sort into camps and defend them with an intensity that seems out of proportion to the subject. Friendships cool. Churches strain over a timeline. And a great many sincere believers quietly decide that the whole subject is too contentious to be worth the trouble.

I understand the instinct. For a stretch of my own life, I came at the end of the age the same way.

But there is something here that is easy to walk right past — and once you see it, the room begins to look different.

The Bible is not divided. It is one book, one story, one voice, running from the first page to the last. It does not argue with itself about the end. It does not sort into camps. We do. And if the book is one and its readers are divided, then the division was never in the text. It is in us — and, more precisely, in how we have learned to read.

I have made that case more fully elsewhere, in Toward Peace in Eschatology and the essays around it, and I won’t rebuild it here. What I want to do in this essay is something more useful than making it again. I want to take you one step past it — to the door that case keeps pointing at, and then through it.

Here is the hinge the whole thing turns on. Most of us were handed conclusions about the end long before anyone taught us how Scripture speaks about it. We were given the answers before we were given the language. I include myself in that. I could have told you what I believed about the end years before I could have told you how the prophets used imagery of the sun and the moon and the sea, or why Jesus spoke the way he did about his own appearing, or what Revelation is doing when it gathers up the imagery of the prophets and shows it.

Let me make that concrete, because it is the kind of thing that stays abstract until you feel it.

Think of a passage about the end that has tangled you up before. You can probably tell me a conclusion about it — what it predicts, which position it supports, where it sits on a chart. Now notice the question underneath that conclusion, the one almost none of us were ever handed: not what does this predict? but what kind of language is this — and where else does Scripture speak this way?

Because Scripture, when it turns to speak of the end, reaches for a particular kind of language. A sun going dark. Stars falling. Seas in tumult. A mountain, a city, a wilderness. Most of us were trained, by reflex, to do one of two things with that language. Some of us flatten it into literal forecast and start scanning the headlines for the fulfillment — and then the contradictions multiply, because the language was never built to be read that way. Others wave it off as dramatic decoration, something not to be taken too seriously — and the weight quietly drains out of it. The two reflexes look opposite, but they make the same move underneath. Both reach for an answer before learning the language the answer is written in. Both skip the prior question.

I am not going to resolve that question here. That is the work of the book, and of the essays that follow. What I want you to feel, right now, is simply the difference between being handed an answer and being taught to ask. It is a small shift, and almost everything downstream of it changes. Once you have felt it, you cannot quite unfeel it.

And this is the part worth slowing down on, because it is where the relief is. The language Scripture uses for the end is not a private code, and it is not random. It is a shared way of speaking — built up patiently across the whole of Scripture, returned to again and again, drawn upon at the moments of greatest weight. It was given to be heard. Which means it can be learned. You do not need to be an expert in the original languages or own a shelf full of commentaries to begin. You need to slow down long enough to hear what is already there.

That is why this should land as good news rather than bad. A divided Bible would be a problem we could never fix — we would be left to argue forever, with nothing solid underneath us. But a reading we were never taught is another thing entirely. The trouble is not in the text, and it is not in you. It is in a skill almost none of us were handed — and skills can be picked up. That should land as relief, not rebuke.

It helps, while you learn, to remember what is already settled — because it is easy to lose under the noise. There is a unity in Christian eschatology, and there always has been. It is the oldest thing the church has. For two thousand years, across every century and continent, Christians have confessed the same hope about the end — not a chart, not a timeline, a confession:

Christ reigns. Christ will appear. The dead will rise. Evil will be judged. The kingdom will come in full.

When the early church wrote its creeds, that is what it put down. It held those promises with total certainty — and then it stopped. It did not map the sequence, or settle the millennium, or ask anyone to resolve the tribulation before they could belong. That restraint was not weakness. It was wisdom. That confession is real, and it is enough to stand on while the rest is still being learned.

So this is a doorway, and it opens onto a path.

The essays in this series take up the language one piece at a time. What Scripture’s imagery is doing, and why it is more than decoration. The symbolic world Scripture draws upon. How Scripture sounds when it announces judgment, and the ending of a world. How its visions are meant to be read. None of these is an advanced argument. Each one is a more basic one — a small, learnable part of the listening that most of us were simply never taught. You do not have to take them all at once. The point of a door is that you can step through it, and then take the next step, and the one after that.

Two things to carry with you in the meantime.

The first is about how you hold other believers. The next time you are across the table from someone who lands somewhere different than you do on the end, you can hold your own conviction firmly and still see them clearly. You are not enemies. You are two people reading the same undivided book, who were probably handed different assumptions about how to read it. Recognizing that is a big step on the path toward unity.

The second is about you. If the division is in the reading, then there is a door in front of you that anyone can walk through. You can go back — before the conclusions — and pick up a slower, more careful reading of how Scripture speaks about the end. Let me be clear about what that is not. It is not a claim that your convictions don’t matter, or that careful study is wasted; just the opposite, studying Scripture deeply is a faithful thing to do. And it is not a promise that if everyone simply read a certain way, every disagreement would fall away. The foundation of our unity was never our agreement on the details. It is the shared confession, and that holds no matter where your study lands. Learning to read better does not put that at risk. It serves it.

So — is it naïve to hope for unity about the end?

No. But it helps to rest the hope on the right thing. The unity that is already finished — the confession the church has carried for two thousand years — is enough to stand on now. The other kind is not a finish line at all. It is a direction you can start walking: a slower, more careful way of listening, until a Bible that once sounded divided begins to sound like the one voice it has been all along.

That slower, more careful reading is what my book How Scripture Speaks About the End is for — learning to hear the imagery, the patterns, and the prophetic voice Scripture uses when it speaks of judgment, deliverance, and hope, until the prophets and Jesus and Revelation begin to sound like one voice, speaking one grammar. The book teaches it in full. This series walks you toward it, one step at a time.

That is where we will start.

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