Why not spend these "dog days" of summer musing on end times prophecies?
Just relax beside the pool with your copy of the Book of Revelation
We are all very familiar with the quote from Winston Churchill about democracy as the worst form of government, except for “all those other forms”.
That now almost hackneyed quip, however, might take on new life it were applied to the Book of Revelation in the Bible. The new maxim might go something like this: “End time prophecy is the most ridiculous way to spend your time, except for all those other ways.”
No, I haven’t now just put on my prophet cap and am about to declaim what is coming in the next few days, weeks, or even months.
But I’ve always been fascinated with the Book of Revelation my entire academic career, and even taught about routinely a number of years back with a course simply titled “The End of the World”.
As the news headlines ever more routinely feature warnings about World War III , while unanticipated geopolitical crises like the 12-day war last June seem to erupt these days almost as regularly as the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone, it occurred to me this week that I should take advantage of the August doldrums in ruminate a little myself about what it entails for the world to “end”.
For millennia societies everywhere on the planet have been engrossed with the idea of the world ending. Given the recent 12-day war between Israel, America, and Iran, not to mention both Trump and Russia’s recent nuclear saber-rattling, it is once more subject matter driving buzz on social media.
A recent academic study found that discussions of the end of the world, or “apocalyptic”, scenarios has now gone mainstream. One German-English website even goes so far as to postulate that the end of the world already took place half a century ago.
Interest in the Book Revelation, in particular, spikes during wars, pandemics, or economic crises. The book’s imagery and prophecies seem to resonate with widespread anxieties about the future.
Many look to Revelation for reassurance about what is to come. Revelation promises hope and ultimate victory to those who are afflicted or persecuted, portraying present trials as temporary and promising that justice will inevitably triumph.
No matter how bad the bad guys get, it’s going to turn out okay.
A number of academics, at the same time, have argued that Revelation has itself sparked political mayhem down through the ages.
In his celebrated book The Pursuit of the Millennium (1970) the Jewish scholar Norman Cohn detailed the manner in which the visions of John the Revelator stoked wars and insurrections across Europe for five centuries, including combat with Muslim powers, consistent anti-Jewish pogroms, and the brutal Peasant Wars of the early 1500s.
In his master’s thesis US Army intelligence officer Paul Aitchison contends persuasively that the supernatural dramaturgy and cosmic clashes recounted in the Book of Revelation were directly responsible for the First Crusade. He proposes “that eschatological elements were not only a significant influence on the course of the First Crusade but also a primary motivation for the crusaders to take up the cross”.
The word “eschatology” by the way derives from the Greek eschata, or “the last things”. It could also be translated “what happens in the end”.
Eschatology from a historical perspective is the theological sub-discipline that focuses on the “end times”.
Of course, scholars by and large agree that from the outset Revelation had a not-so-covert political agenda, though not necessarily a militant one. For readers of the original text, most probably composed at the close of the first century CE during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian, the mysterious “whore of Babylon” and the two “beasts” indisputable alluded to the imperial regime and the mad Caesars who occupied the throne during that era.
The Book of Revelation has always been eyed with undue suspicion by those perched atop the political power pyramid in any given generation because of its insinuation that they are aligned with what the apostle Paul characterized as the demonic “rulers of the present age.”
Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s affluent patron and confrere in revolution-making, opined in an 1883 essay that the Book of Revelation had striking parallels with the Communist Manifesto.
“Christianity got hold of the masses,” he wrote, “exactly as modern socialism does, under the shape of a variety of sects, and still more of conflicting individual views clearer, some more confused, these latter the great majority — but all opposed to the ruling system, to ‘the powers that be.’”
Engels described it as “the simplest and clearest book of the whole New Testament”.
That’s light years away from the runaway Christian fundamentalist, best-seller book series Left Behind, which was published in 16 volumes from 1995 to 2007 and, according to Publisher’s Weekly by 2016 alone had sold a staggering 80 million copies.
Needless to say, the authors of the Left Behind series have had an outsize effect on both American evangelical readings of Scripture and American culture overall.
Barbara Rossing, a New Testament professor at Lutheran School of Theology, published a book in 2005 entitled The Rapture Exposed in which she blasted the rendering of the Book of Revelation by Left Behind authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
Dramatizing and sensationalizing for the masses the already dubious theological take on Revelation known as “premillennial dispensationalism” and sired by 19th century Irish evangelist John Nelson Darby, the Left Behind series feeds the delusion that the “end times” is mainly about natural disasters, foreign conflicts, social upheavals, and the persecution of evangelicals themselves rather the final breakthrough of God’s true purpose for humanity, according to Rossing.
Rossing was herself incensed by the perceived influence on the part of some researchers at the time of premillennial dispensationalism on George W. Bush’s foreign policy, particularly with regard to Iraq and the War on Terror. While the issue is extremely complex and nuanced, there is, in fact, an appreciable body of evidence for the claim.
In her work Rossing seems to obsess far more than necessary about the politics of the religious right. And she certainly tortures the text of Revelation in a fairly unconvincing fashion to make the case that the book is simply about “the non-violent Lamb, who triumphs not by killing people but by giving his life in love,” and that all the catastrophism and violence it contains is of virtually no consequence.
Rossing apparently hasn’t read chapter 6 of Revelation, which expounds in vivid detail the horror and suffering after the Lamb opens the sixth seal. In fact, the “Lamb” in chapter 16 is more like Arnold Schwartzenegger’s Terminator than “sweet Jesus, meek and mild”.
Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free, hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us[f] from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?” (Rev. 6:15-17)
Not exactly the same gooey feeling you get with the Beatles’ song “all you need is love”.
One is reminded of the renowned theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s snarky characterization of how Protestant liberalism views the Bible in general and the New Testament in particular: “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross”.
But Rossing does have a crucial point when she writes in the preface to the hardcover edition: “Revelation’s gift to us is a story of God who loves us and comes to live with us”.
Let’s focus for a minute on the second part of that proposition.
After the monumentally gory battle of Armageddon luridly depicted in the second half of chapter 19 and the judgement of Satan in chapter 20, John sketches the breathtaking vision of a cosmic transformation - “a new heaven and a new earth”.
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’[ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Rev. 21:3-4)
Verse 3 repeatedly plays on the Greek word skene (σκηνὴ), which means “tabernacle”, that is, “the tent of meeting”, the place of God’s intimate presence.
In short, Revelation “in the end” comes down to the manifestation throughout an all-encompassing “new earth” (i.e., a whole new dimension of reality) of God’s total, intimate presence.
If Leon Trotsky imagined world Communism in its final, “eschatological” version as “permanent revolution”, the Book of Revelation envisions it as permanent incarnation.
Yes, if one reads the Bible seriously without cherry-picking passages that fit one’s preconceived theological or spiritual frame of reference, the historical trajectory that gets us to the 21st chapter of Revelation is a colossal – and at times violent and protracted - contest in which no compromise is possible.
Jesus himself warned in Matthew 10:24:
Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
But the “sword” in this instances slashes to divide between truth and falsity, not between right and wrong “beliefs”. And the English word “truth” is etymologically imbricated with the archaic term troth (as in “betrothed”), implying an intimate and committed face-to-face relationship, not some victorious ideological narrative, whether religious or political.
God battles to be intimately present among and between all of us.
Revelation makes it clear that an authentic committed “Christ follower” has to “fight” for the new heaven and earth, but not in the way many presume
If one really takes the Bible at “face value”, one has to fight to open wide a space where the full, intimate presence of the divine as a “face-to-face” encounter can take place without mediation or constraint.
That’s what the “end times” in the end, according to the book that sparked all the brouhaha two thousand years ago, is all about.