Harold Camping's mulligan: We've seen this before

Borrowing a page from failed end-times predictions in America's past, 89-year-old Harold Camping said Monday that his bold forecast of apocalyptic events on May 21 actually did take place, but only in the spiritual realm, and that the rapture will now take place Oct. 21.

Camping's teachings were widely criticized as unbiblical by Christians of all denominations heading into May 21, and his latest statement did nothing to change that.

"Here we go again," Jerry Vines, a former Southern Baptist Convention president, wrote in a Tweet.

Camping's Family Radio ministry, using an unknown amount of money from donors, had paid for thousands of billboards, radio and TV ads around the world proclaiming the May 21 "Judgment Day" date, perhaps spending as much as $100 million on the ads, a Camping employee told ChristianPost.com. Some people sold most of their possessions to finance the ads.

The Family Radio website has been scrubbed of all May 21 materials.

According to Camping's previous prediction, Christians were to be raptured from the earth May 21, and the world would end Oct. 21. He now says that both of those events will take place on one day, Oct. 21.

"We were convinced that on May 21 God would return here in a very physical way -- by bringing a great earthquake and by ushering in the final five months of the day of judgment," Camping said two days after the failed prediction. "And the fact is when we look at it spiritually, then we find He did come."

Camping said he was wrong to interpret Scripture "physically" and not "spiritually."

"And yet the sense of it is still the same, that judgment has come," he said. "The world is now under judgment, where it was not prior to May 21. Spiritually, there's a big difference in the world that we can't detect at all with our eyes."

To students of American church history, that sounded awfully familiar. In the 19th century, pastor William Miller set two dates for Christ's return: 1843 and 1844. When nothing happened, his most ardent supporters maintained that the events had taken place, but only in heaven. They were known as "Millerites."

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