The End of the World
How many end-of-the-world scenarios have been in the news in the past 50
years ?
There was Heaven's Gate and the presumed space aliens racing along with
Hale-Bopp comet. There was the supposed Harmonic Convergence which
never happened. There was Koresh and Waco, all of the fuss based on
Koresh's
interpretations of the Book of Revelation. There was a Taiwanese Christian
who,
to recall this episode dimly, foresaw The End as an event in which it would
be in the best interests of his followers to be in Texas for the Apocalypse
which was supposed to happen a decade ago. And so forth.
It would take some serious research to track down all of the false
predictions of the past five decades ; this is a short list from memory
and I am sure many have been forgotten.
In each case, Christian and non-Christian, there is a common denominator.
The true believers relied on their favorite source of "information" and
ignored
everything else that might be relevant. We can dismiss some sources as
specious on the face of it, of course. Jose Arguiles claimed to have
learned
how to translate Mayan writings into texts that were all about the stars
and time cycles and prophecies. But actual translations became available
due to archaeological detective work not long after the convergence
that never was, came and went, and the texts are mostly about Mayan
kings and family lineages and wars between city states.
But the Bible cannot be dismissed as a source of prophecy despite
some errors in some books in the Book. In other books there are what
surely seem like correct predictions. But is Revelation actually best
interpreted the way it is usually interpreted ? How literalistically
should it be taken ?
To the extent it is divinely inspired, what, exactly, were its sources ?
This is important to ask since, if it is inspired, which I think it was,
then its sources also have some kind of inspirational claim
Therein lies the problem. We have a pretty good idea of what
they were --Zoroastrian apocalyptic writings, a genre that
developed following the defeat of the Persians by Alexander
and a longing for a revival of their great empire-- but how
do we access those texts ? Nearly all lie within the history of
the least studied era of Persian history, that of the Parthians,
and as far as I know, very little Parthian eschatology
has made it into print in English.
Anyway, the part of Anatolia where John ( of Patmos ) lived
was a major Persian / Zoroastrian minority population center.
No question he knew about them, Revelation is crawling
with Persian imagery. But for now no-one really knows
the ins and outs of these figures of speech, only
very selectively and incompletely.
Which is a cautionary tale about over-reliance on internal evidence,
making use of the Bible to interpret the Bible. Actually, you need
external corroboration, especially for a number of specific books,
with Revelation at the top of the list. Without that corroboration
no-one can possibly "get it right."
Alas, bring up the subject of Persians to 99 + % of Christians
and no-one comprehends much of anything. Too bad, but
this is essential, not a luxury, even if, so far, this is a subject
that is near-universally overlooked. Why is this so ?
Because of hallowed traditions and because, for much of
Christian history the Persians ( like now ) were enemies of
Christian Europe. Forgotten was that ancient Persians were
not like the Iranian crazies of today ; those Persians protected
their very large Christian minority ( possibly 50 % in Iraq )
and did not go to war for religious purposes, but for dynastic
reasons, political reasons, etc.
Western Christians knew of Christians in the East but, another factor,
regarded them as heretics, thus to be shunned. Also too bad.
The cost has been the impossibility of ever learning what
the Book of Revelation actually says as a comprehensive total
and we are stuck with nothing better than partly knowing
the book, some verses here and there, maybe a few chapters,
but that's it, and nothing more.
My comments for today
Billy
=======================================================
Real Clear Politics / Religion
May 23, 2011
Why We Love the Apocalypse
By _Rod Dreher_ (/authors/?author=Rod+Dreher&id=14497)
It's hard to avoid sniggering at the folks who woke up on Sunday morning to
find that they had not been Raptured, and history put on a rapid
trajectory to its violent cosmological denouement. Rather, they found this
poor old
world grinding just as slowly as ever, and themselves, gullible grist, no
doubt cracked and broken by unrealized dreams of utopia. Most people --
Christians and unbelievers alike -- knew these people were fools before Harold
Camping's May 21 deadline arrived, and now they know it themselves.
I am uncharacteristically disinclined to gloat, because I know what it's
like to give oneself over to apocalyptic fervor. Though the Camping followers
were particularly absurd to pin their hopes and fears to a specific event
(the Rapture, a doctrine that no Christian had ever heard of until modern
times), and to a specific date (ignoring Jesus Christ's warning that "no man
knows the day or hour" of His return), the yearning for utopia, even one
achieved through catastrophe, is profoundly human. It's unsettling to
contemplate that Camping's followers are not so different from the rest of us.
_
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And they aren't very different at all from the
kid I was in 1979, when, at age 12, I saw a movie trailer for "The Late,
Great Planet Earth," a documentary version of Hal Lindsey's mega-selling book
interpreting current events as a Biblically-predicted plan immediately
preceding the end of the world. Until that moment, I had never heard of Bible
prophecy, the Rapture, the Antichrist, or any of it. In our small-town
Methodist church, we didn't talk about that stuff.
Later that day, I coaxed my mother into taking me to a five-and-dime store
to buy the Lindsey book. I read it straight through that night, prayed the
sinner's prayer sometime before sunrise, and prepared myself for the
imminent apocalypse.
I lived for the next two years at a fever pitch. Fellow Christians who
showed skepticism, or even simply a lack of interest, in the Rapture and the
Antichrist? Lukewarm sellouts, I thought. I badgered my little sister about
Armageddon until she finally prayed the sinner's prayer, probably to shut me
up.
I burned out on all that in due course, and felt like such a nitwit that it
was years before I could take religious faith seriously again. The
Christianity I accepted as an adult certainly has an eschatological component,
which is intrinsic to all orthodox forms of the Christian faith. But I'd
learned how dangerous it is to build one's spirituality on apocalyptic
speculation.
Nevertheless, many people do, and it's not hard to understand why. Hal
Lindsey wrote Late, Great in 1970, at the end of a decade of epochal social
upheaval. It grew in popularity throughout the Seventies, a time of economic
and political turmoil, wars and rumors of wars -- chiefly with the Soviet
Union, a conflict that stood to exterminate humanity in a nuclear
Armageddon. As alarmist as Lindsey's book was -- it did, after all, argue that
things
were going to get a lot worse, and soon -- it provided immense comfort to
its readers, because it imposed a kind of order on the chaotic times.
Late, Great promised that there was ultimate meaning in the seemingly
random scary events of the era. It provided not only the key to understanding
these events as part of God's plan, but also, in the doctrine of the
Rapture, an escape hatch for true believers. As a newspaper-reading adolescent
freaked out about nuclear war and the emotional and biological disaster that
is puberty, I was an easy mark.
It's like that with us all, isn't it? The same people who laugh at the
credulousness of Rapture-ready Christians are often ready to believe their own
secular soothsayers -- economists, scientists, and others -- who plausibly
preach a kind of order beneath the apparent randomness of unsettling
events, and who offer knowledge that purports to grant control over future
events
to those who believe them. My point is not that prophets, religious or
secular, ought to be disbelieved -- sometimes they are right -- but only that
it's normal to be frightened and confused by uncontrollable events, and to
seek explanation and deliverance from their effects.
It's also the case that there is something profoundly satisfying in
embracing apocalyptic scenarios. As a born-again teenager, I would wake up
every
morning as a bit player in the last act of a cosmic drama that only a few of
us believers were aware of. The cool kids might think of me as a zitfaced
social outcast today, but just you wait!
Juvenile? Sure. But the longing for a state of existence in which justice
prevails, suffering ceases, and all that is wrong is made right, is deeply,
ineradicably human. It is the hope of heaven, and the source of the craving
for utopia, i.e., heaven on earth. In his 2007 book Black Mass, the
skeptical English philosopher John Gray writes that all modern political
movements -- notably, the French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism, and even theories
of
liberal progress -- are all "chapters in the history of religion" because
they "answer the human need for meaning."
Along those lines, the novelist Walker Percy has observed that we claim to
want peace and security, but perversely desire apocalypse, because it
relieves us of boredom and alienation. Living in New York City in the
aftermath
of 9/11 was, I confess, one of the happiest times in my life. It was also
the most sorrowful and anxious, and I would not relive it again for
anything. But the truth is that that localized apocalypse gave me a newfound
sense
of purpose and meaning. After that, I knew who I was, what was happening in
the world, and what I was to do.
As it turned out, I was mostly wrong, but you could no more have convinced
me of that then than you could have broken through to Camping's ardent
backers on Rapture Eve.
To be drunk on Apocalypse is a fearful thing. There is no problem that the
Apocalypse -- religious or secular -- cannot solve. I roll my eyes at the
crude Armageddonists, whose number I left behind as a teenager, but the
radical prospect of rebirth through total catastrophe still tempts me in less
culturally embarrassing ways. I read secular prophets with more mainstream
credibility -- peak-oil catastrophists, economic Cassandras, and
global-warming gloomers -- and that familiar decadent feeling returns: the
perverse
pleasure in the prospect of catastrophe, because, to paraphrase the poet C.V.
Cavafy, the End is a kind of solution.
The world didn't end last weekend, but for the Camping faithful, a world
ended. But not for long. The human need for utopia and its shadow side,
apocalypse, will not be suppressed. That's one prophecy that's not going to
fail
because, as John Gray puts it, both are "myths, which answer the human
need for meaning."
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
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