If you go to his website, this is what you see today :
Posted on 05/17/2011 2:23:27 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
If you happened to learn about Harold Camping’s May 21 rapture prediction from a placard on a subway car or bus shelter in New York City, the ad was probably funded by Robert Fitzpatrick – a 60-year-old, retired transit worker from Staten Island who invested his entire life savings of $140,000 into the campaign.
“I’m trying to warn people about what’s coming,” Fitzpatrick told the New York Daily News. “People who have an understanding [of end times] have an obligation to warn everyone.”
Fitzpatrick isn’t the only person to empty his bank account to warn others based on Camping’s prediction.
NPR recently reported on another one of Camping’s followers, 27-year-old Adrienne Martinez, as saying, “Knowing the date of the end of the world changes all your future plans.”
So, instead of going to medical school like she planned, she gave up that idea. She and her husband, Joel, quit their jobs and moved from New York City to Orlando, where they rented a home and are currently passing out tracts. Joel says they are spending the last of their savings because they don’t see a need for one more dollar.
“You know, you think about retirement and stuff like that,” he said. “What’s the point of having some money just sitting there?”
“We budgeted everything so that, on May 21, we won’t have anything left,” Adrienne added.
As sincere as Camping’s followers are when it comes to warning the world about the rapture, and ultimately Judgment Day, several Christian leaders are issuing a different sort of warning.
“The Christian church has seen this kind of false teaching before,” said Dr. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on his blog. “William Miller and his Adventist followers (known, surely enough, as Millerites) believed that Christ would return on March 21, 1844. In the 1970s, popular Christian preachers and writers predicted that Christ would return on various dates now long in the past. All this is embarrassing enough, but now we have the teachings of Harold Camping to deal with. Given the public controversy, many people are wondering how Christians should think about his claims.”
Mohler went on to say Christ specifically admonished his disciples not to claim such knowledge. And, he said, the Bible does not contain hidden codes that we are to find and decipher. Instead, he said, while Christians are indeed to be looking for Christ to return and seeking to be found faithful when Christ comes, we are not to draw a line in history and set a date.
“We are not to sit on rooftops like the Millerites,” Mohler said, “waiting for Christ’s return. We are to be busy doing what Christ has commanded us to do.”
W. Robert Godfrey, president and professor of church history at Westminster Seminary California, pointed out on the seminary’s blog, Valiant for Truth, a glaring omission from Camping’s prediction.
“Camping’s teaching reaches the status of heresy in his recent appeal to the world, ‘Judgment Day,’ an eight page statement online,” Godfrey said. “The saddest and most distressing element of Camping’s latest theological statement is that it is Christless. He does not write about Christ’s return, but about judgment day. In his eight pages of warning and call for repentance he writes only this of Christ: ‘Because God is so great and glorious He calls Himself by many different names. Each name tells us something about the glorious character and nature of God. Thus in the Bible we find such names as God, Jehovah, Christ, Jesus, Lord, Allah, Holy Spirit, Savior, etc. Names such as Jehovah, Jesus, Savior, and Christ particularly point to God as the only means by which forgiveness from all of our sins and eternal life can be obtained by God’s merciful and glorious actions.’”
Slightly differing versions of the document can now be found on the Family Radio website. One includes the quoted material mentioned by Godfrey. Another, the .pdf version, includes another paragraph directly below the one above, about the forgiveness of Christ.
Also joining the debate, Cal Thomas took on Camping in his recent column, saying the prophesized events of Matthew 24 haven’t been completely fulfilled yet. He concluded by saying, “I’m not expecting the end on May 21. That’s because of something else Jesus said. He said he would return when people “least expect it” (Luke 12:40). By that standard, Mr. Camping is wrong because he expects the end to come this Saturday. And so it won’t.”
Camping was recently interviewed by New York Magazine which pointed out that he was wrong about his first end of the world prediction in 1994, and wondered if he had any reservations about his ability to predict such things.
“In 1992, two years earlier than that, I had already begun to see that there was a good likelihood that 2011 would be the end,” Camping said, “but at that time when my research in the Bible was not nearly complete – there were whole books of the Bible that I had not gone through yet very carefully – I thought that at that time that there was a possibility it might be 1994, and so I wrote a book, '1994?' but I put a big question mark after it, and in the book it also indicated that 2011 was also a good possibility. And so it was just a preliminary study that I've been able to complete during the last fifteen years.”
Camping believes the rapture will occur May 21 and that God will destroy the earth on October 21.
He and his family WERE ( past tense ) members of the Christian Reformed Church until the year 1988. During this time he served as an Elder and Sunday school teacher at the Alameda Bible Fellowship.
Because of his penchant for date setting, and his stubborn refusal to change, Camping was stripped of his role as teacher at Alameda. The official date the elders took over the adult Sunday school class was September 11, 1988.
The whole controversy that spanned Camping’s censure and departure from the church was roughly from May to September, 1988.
Is it therefore, not the least bit suspect that Camping would later declare that the Holy Spirit was removed from the church beginning on May 21, 1988, the very same period Camping himself was removed from teaching ‘in” the church? And is it not alarming that Camping now “outside” of the church would declare, soon after his own departure, that anyone still identified with any church is now under the judgment of God? I think it’s safe to say we have motive.
Pride and bitterness had so overcome Camping that he was able to declare that upon the year of his censure and departure from the church, God was done with the entire church, and from that time forward, God would only work in the “true believers” who were willing to take the stand with Camping and come out of the church.
The "times and the seasons" yes, but the actual day? Nope. Anyone know how Camping explains away that piece of Jesus' words?
I agree and not just Christ, but there are bozos on this forum that are using it to blame ALL Christians who are "Protestant". They seem to think the doctrine of the Bible being the word of God and the authority he gave us for what is true about Christianity (sola scriptura) is what caused people like Camping to come up with his weirdness. Go figure!
Again, you're doing it wrong. Run up every credit card you can and get as many loans as possible and live way beyond your means. Fly first class to exotic places you've always wanted to see. Buy that fancy sports car. Blow hundreds on expensive meals in 5 star restaurants. You won't have to worry about paying it all back, right?
RE: Back in 1988 there was a little book written about Jesus coming back that year
Is this the same group ???
Harold Camping was stripped of his privilege of teaching at his Reformed Church for continually (after being asked to stop ) teaching that Jesus Christ would return in 1994.
He wrote a book entitled 1994 to warn the world about it ( he was asked not only by the elders of his church, but by Christians from other denominations to quit doing what he was doing, but he stubbornly held to his beliefs).
1994 came and nothing happened. I was driving to work that day and eagerly tuned in to 94.7 FM ( Family Radio’s frequency in my area ) to hear what Camping had to say....
His radio program came on and he said nothing. The program that day was a Bible study on the book of Ruth.
He claimed after 1994 that it was a miscalculation and this time, he has it right ... the end of the world will be this Saturday — May 21, 2011.
Since he was stripped of his privilege of teaching in church, Camping has been teaching that ALL churches have apostasized and believers have to LEAVE the church.
Hmmm.....not sure.
That’s very enlightening. However, I still don’t understand why (or if) he believes in the “rapture.” Isn’t that associated with eschatologies/theologies that he has opposed for decades?
Are you serious? Really. This looney toon is going to give The Son of God a’’ bad name’’? What is it, a slow news day where you are?
Amongst unbelievers, you bet.
In the last days there will be mockers, who will mock the return of Christ.
These false flags will only encourage such nonsense.
But I guess it is a slow news day where you are, eh?
Never a slow news day where I am friend and no stupid, deluded Irishman blowing all his money on a bill-board proclaiming ‘’the end of the world’’ is EVER going to give my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ a bad name. LOL!!
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