I posted this in the comments section of my last post but just read it again and decided it needed more attention:

“The problem with the evangelicals who turn the Bible into a kind of crystal ball is that they show very little historical awareness. They speak assuredly about the signs that are being fulfilled “right before your very eyes” and point to the impending end. Hal Lindsay confidently refers to our own as “the terminal generation.” However, these writers do not seem to be aware that there have been many believers in every generation—from the Montanists of the second century through Joachin of Fiore (c. 1135–1202) and Martin Luther to those Russian Mennonites who undertook a “Great Trek” to Siberia in 1880–84 and the nineteenth-century proponents of dispensationalism—who have believed that they were living in the days immediately preceding the second coming of Christ. So far they have all been mistaken. How many people have lost confidence in clear doctrines of Scripture affecting eternal life because misguided prophetic teaching is, unfortunately, not likely to be investigated.”

~ By W. Ward Gasque (found in a paper by Dr. J. I. Packer entitled “Evangelical Annihilationism in Review”.