I listened to Harold Camping’s Open Forum radio program last night and found myself shaking my head and chuckling to myself repeatedly, not only at Mr. Camping’s own words but also at some of the comments made by callers. One caller actually still supported Camping and even indicated that it was possible a spiritual judgment actually happened on May 21. He essentially asked, “Why not?” It was incredible to hear.

More importantly, what I noticed was a distinct pattern in Mr. Camping’s responses to callers. Repeatedly he answered callers with a statement to the effect that God is still opening our spiritual eyes, we are still learning, and the like. So that is Mr. Camping’s explanation for his errors: We’re still working on it, we’re getting there, we’re learning, and so on. Our eyes aren’t fully opened to all of this, but we can still see more than the rest of Christianity.

But that creates a pesky little problem: If he’s right, how can anyone know for sure that the next prediction he makes—or anything he teaches from now on, for that matter—will be correct? If he is still learning and God is still opening his “spiritual eyes,” then anything he teaches has a big question mark over it.

The fact of the matter is that a true prophet who is faithfully speaking what God has said would never have to back-peddle in such a way because he would have gotten it right the first time. He wouldn’t have to explain his way out of anything. The prediction would have happened exactly as foretold because it would have come from God. The only exception to that would be if God decided to relent from what He had said He was going to do, as in the case of Nineveh after Jonah preached there (Jonah 3:10). If Mr. Camping wants to claim that, however, he would have to substantiate that authoritatively from Scripture, but what Scripture says that on May 21, God relented from the destruction Camping said was going to happen? None at all.

Mr. Camping’s prediction, then, did not come from God. It came from his own mind and an erroneous interpretation of Scripture.

For example, Mr. Camping’s proof-text for his method of interpreting the Bible allegorically comes from Matthew 13:34, which says, “All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable.” He takes this verse and applies it to everything in the Bible even though the text in Matthew 13 clearly has in mind Christ’s words to the crowds, not the words of the Bible. This is made even clearer when we see a parallel passage, Mark 4:33–34 (ESV, emphasis added): “With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.” Thus, Mr. Camping ignores the context in order to cling tenaciously to his hermeneutical approach.

Mr. Camping also needs to consider this: If everything in the Bible were a parable, then the very text quoted above—”he said nothing to them without a parable”—would itself be a parable and therefore would also have to be taken figuratively.

Perhaps Mr. Camping’s eyes have not been opened to that, either.