Broadcaster says Christians go to heaven on Saturday
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Harold Camping during a television broadcast in 2002.
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Harold Camping, the radio mogul who warned that all Christians would be swept up into heaven in 1994, has set a new date: Saturday. Those left behind will have five months to suffer before the world is destroyed on Oct. 21.
He qualified his prior prediction, titling his self-published book "1994?" Now he's sure.
"The Biblical evidence is too overwhelming and specific to be wrong," he wrote on www.familyradio.com, which opens to a countdown ticker.
He has spread the word via the 66 stations in his Family Radio Network. Although his idiosyncratic teachings have no support from evangelical Bible scholars or churches, some of his listeners have reportedly quit jobs and given their life savings to help him warn others.
"He's a dangerous person," said the Rev. Jerry O'Neill, president and professor of pastoral theology at Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary, an evangelical school in Point Breeze.
"After 1994 I'm surprised that he has any traction anywhere, but he does. He still has quite a following."
Few, if any, are in Pittsburgh. His closest stations are in Youngstown, Ohio, and Johnstown. The Johnstown station has a weak transmitter in Pittsburgh, which is buried by powerful stations farther away.
Local Christian media personality Richard Hatch said he hadn't had one question about Mr. Camping during his Friday night call-in show, "The Hatchery," on Cornerstone Television.
"I'm not hearing anything about it. I don't even know who this guy is," he said.
Mr. Camping, 89, is a civil engineer who started his first radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1958. His background is in the Reformed (Presbyterian) stream of evangelicalism. But Reformed doctrine doesn't include the rapture -- the belief that all Christians will suddenly be swept alive into heaven a few years before Jesus' return. That's a signature belief of dispensational evangelicals -- whose strength is independent churches in the Midwest, South and West Coast -- with carryover into charismatic churches. But Mr. Camping's end times scenario differs with dispensational teaching, and he has stated that the charismatic movement is satanic.
First Published May 16, 2011 12:00 am
