Pondering the End of the World

"There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves" (Luke 21:25). 

Jesus is speaking about the "Apocalypse" -- a Greek word that means a revelation or uncovering. Revealed and uncovered is the completion of God's work in the world, and the coming of the Son of Man.

Have you noticed how often a movie looks toward a post-apocalyptic situation, sometime after a major war, or a dystopian future, where the future takes a very negative turn? The most recent example, I suppose, is Hunger Games. This movie looks backward to a time when a major war broke out that led to tyranny in government.

So is the Apocalypse going to happen now?

Craig C. Hill explores the notion in his article, “The End of the World – Again,” in Dallas Morning News, October 26, 2002.

As he sees it, some people thought so. A journalist named Lawrence Joseph has written Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation Into Civilization's End, a book which predicts widespread catastrophe beginning this month. He looks to the sky and sees "signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars," just as Jesus did. Specifically, he notices that on December 21 of this year, the sun will line up with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in roughly 26,000 years. Joseph says, "Whatever energy typically streams to Earth from the center of the Milky Way will indeed be disrupted on 12/21/12 at 11:11 p.m." Well, he pieces widely scattered facts, some maybe and probably, and draws a frightful conclusion.

Lawrence Joseph was not alone. According to USA Today (March 27, 2007), a number of people thought that the Apocalypse was coming because of something else that happens on December 21, 2012: The Maya's "Long Count" calendar comes to the end of an era that has been running for 5,126 years.

A spiritual healer named Andrew Smith predicts a restoration of a "true balance between Divine Feminine and Masculine." Author Daniel Pinchbeck looks forward to a "change in the nature of consciousness," which he connects to psychedelic drug use. The movie 2012 portrays a series of cataclysmic events taking place this year, tied to the MesoAmerican Long Count calendar.

Rumors of the demise of the world have been around for centuries. Consider the example of William Miller, a Baptist farmer from New York who was convinced that Christ would return to Earth in the early 1840s. With the assistance of Boston preacher Joshua Himes, Miller persuaded tens of thousands of Christians that the "day of the Lord" was at hand. Some followers even quit jobs and sold property in anticipation of the Second Coming. What came instead was the so-called Great Disappointment, and with it the discrediting of William Miller. Within a short time, however, other people reinterpreted the writings of Miller, re-worked the math, and issued new and equally assured predictions. With that, we have the beginning of the Seventh Day Adventist denomination.

In her post-apocalyptic novel, Jennifer Bosworth says in Struck (2012 )  

If you want to remain in control of a doomsday cult, do not give a date for the end of the world unless you are really, really sure it's going to happen. Being wrong tends to undermine your authority. 

The advice is well taken but not often heeded. Yet, on occasion, the failure leads to the growth of a movement.

Carlos Wilton has another way of examining this interest, focusing upon the idea of a rapture.

The first End Times best seller was not Volume 1 of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series; nor was it Hal Lindsey's 1970s' blockbuster The Late Great Planet Earth. That distinction belongs instead to William E. Blackstone's 1878 book Jesus Is Coming, which was published in three editions and 47 languages. Since that time, waves of Last Days enthusiasm have swept regularly over portions of American Christianity. The current peak in interest is attributable to several factors, not least the effective use of mass media on the part of a handful of self-described fundamentalist "prophecy scholars."

"The Rapture" is prominent in several twentieth- and twenty-first-century approaches to interpreting the Bible's apocalyptic passages. Most people who use this term are unaware that it was all but unknown in Christian theology prior to the late nineteenth Century.

The only place in the Bible where anything resembling a "Rapture" is mentioned is in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, describing how the risen Christ will one day descend from heaven. At that time, Paul teaches, the "dead in Christ" will be raised, and "We who are alive... will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air" (v. 17).

"Rapture" is another way of rendering into English the phrase, "caught up." The underlying Greek word is the uncommon arpagnesometha, which one can translate "snatched up" or "kidnapped." The word bears a strong sense of violent coercion. It is, in fact, related to the English word, "rape" – not in the sense of a sexual act, but rather the snatching up and carrying off the wives and daughters of a defeated enemy.

While most Rapture theologians assume Jesus' arrival on the clouds of heaven is for the purpose of rescuing the faithful in the nick of time, just before he abandons the world to evil, there is no reason to conclude this is what Paul means. It is far more likely, based on the larger context of this letter, that the Apostle is depicting a movement in the opposite direction. In I Thessalonians 4, Jesus is not escaping the earth, but is, rather, on his way to redeem it and reign over it. The faithful are meeting him halfway: not so they may make their escape (as Rapture enthusiasts assume, based on scant biblical evidence), but rather so they may form ranks as the vanguard of his triumphant return.

To Paul's way of thinking, it is Jesus' downward, reconciling movement that brings hope, not his arranging for an upward, separating escape for a select group of his followers.

The question Rapture Theology must address -- but almost never does -- is how it reconciles the biblical proclamation of Jesus as loving redeemer with their own depiction of him as a spiritual commando who swoops in to rescue the members of his squad before allowing all hell to break loose.

Rapture Theology is particularly out of step with the verse with which Paul ends this section: "Comfort one another with these words." The reason Paul has raised this subject is so the Thessalonians' minds may be put at ease on the baffling question of "those who have died" prior to the Messiah's return (v. 13). First-century Christians would derive little comfort from the belief that, more than two millennia in the future, the Messiah would suddenly drop from the sky and snatch up the faithful, abandoning those who are "left behind" to their own devices. Rather, the "comfort" of which Paul speaks is the conviction that Christ will soon return to establish a reign of justice and of peace.

            Regardless of your approach to the rapture, Fred Craddock, a preacher and writer, has a challenging way of putting all of this into perspective. Christians might experience some temptation to set aside all talk of the end. He thinks they do so to their peril. 

For all that Christian faith means to each individual who embraces it, the church cannot continue to permit, much less endorse, a subjective captivity of the gospel. Not even the community of faith is adequate as the arena of Christ's saving work. The whole creation stands at the window eagerly awaiting the arrival of the day of redemption for the children of God. We like to think that we, modern as we are, have risen above primitive apocalyptic thought. What we have learned in recent years is that our negative assessment of apocalyptic texts has more to do with our social location that with our alleged modern minds. People in power, people on the top, are always more comfortable with the social, economic, and political status quo than with apocalyptic images of dismantling and revolution. God is coming. Is that good news or bad? 

            “The end” is not so much a matter of chronology but rather a debate over who, in the end, is in charge. Alternatively, as H. Richard Niebuhr put it, eschatology “does not lie in the time-factor so much as on the God-factor.” Eschatology, as John Howard Yoder says, is the peculiar way we Christians remind ourselves of the weird truth that “There is no significance to human effort and, strictly speaking, no history unless life can be seen in terms of ultimate goals.”

We Christians know that God is at work in the long march of history, and is moving us toward the day when the Son of Man will come with power and great glory. This may be a fearful time, but it will ultimately be a celebration, for God will replace all of the brokenness and injustice of this world by healing and righteousness.

In the meantime, I like the way William Barclay put it: “The only way to prepare to meet God is to live daily with God.”