Matthew 24, a letter to a friend

My response to a question about Matthew 24 I received recently:

Hey buddy,

Thank you for taking the time to respectfully write and explain your position. I am very familiar with your opinion as an AG Pre-Tribber, and you have stated it quite succinctly. Personally, I hold to a Historical-Contextual Hermeneutic, which means that I cannot make a passage mean something that it could have never meant to the original hearers. Thus I cannot take the Eagle in Scripture and say it means America, because that has no Hermeneutical justification, how do I know that I am interpreting that correctly? Couldn’t there be another nation with an Eagle as its symbol another 500 years from now? Anyway, I use the same hermeneutics that are taught by Dr. Gordon Fee, the most respected Theologian of the AG movement.

When I read Matthew 24 in its Historical-Cultural context, I start further back…