Beginnings and The Big Finale

  • I never did fol­low up to the thoughts back here on the book of Rev­e­la­tion. I didn’t have any more thoughts (col­lec­tive sigh of relief from weary read­ers), until I fol­lowed up on Steven’s sug­ges­tion and went to check out the four-part series that was done on Our Life in Christ radio. Wow, what an excel­lent resource these guys are! Not only did they hand­ily cover every­thing that I had man­aged to glean out of the Ortho­dox Study Bible and another book or two, but they had lots more to add.

    I’ll leave it to oth­ers to go through the series them­selves — link to the archive page HERE – but I was specif­i­cally keen to hear their run­down of the many times through­out the Church Age that there has been a strong con­sen­sus that the end times have come and the Sec­ond Com­ing is at hand.

    I actu­ally bought a lec­ture series from The Teach­ing Com­pany about the his­tory of apoc­a­lyp­tic thought just search­ing for that kind of infor­ma­tion. I was sorely dis­ap­pointed by the lec­tures — the pro­fes­sor was sec­u­lar and seemed to only be able to think that things were done for polit­i­cal rea­sons. But I had an idea that it would be very telling to look at the his­tory of the last two mil­len­nia through this lens — the hope and fear of the end times, the dis­ap­point­ment and adjust­ment when life goes on. Doesn’t it seem like the impact of that would have shaped the course of whole soci­eties? You can find books out now about how salt changed his­tory, or cod or spice. Why are we always so slow to credit reli­gious trends of thought with impact­ing how we live?

    I think that the antic­i­pa­tion (or fear or dis­ap­point­ment) con­cern­ing the end times still holds sway over all of us, includ­ing skep­tics and agnos­tics. Being fallen, we aren’t often easy in our mind with a future we don’t know and can’t con­trol. If we have done badly — and sec­u­lar types are often more dis­gusted with human­ity than reli­gious peo­ple — we don’t want to live in sus­pense any­more. If the ham­mer is com­ing down, we’d just as soon it would happen.

    Besides, look at how much trou­ble we’ve got­ten into. Surely, God can’t take much more of this. In other words, the world should come to an end just because we can’t con­ceive of how it would keep going on.

    We want some­thing that we’ve got­ten used to in the movies — a fade­out. We are look­ing for a dra­matic device that just fades to black and lets us be the audi­ence for once rather than the actors. And it should hap­pen … when? When nuclear war breaks out? When Israel is wiped off the map again? (Both of these things are look­ing likely to hap­pen in the next decade or two.) When we start cloning in earnest? When some­thing cat­a­strophic — either nat­ural or man made — hap­pens to the earth’s ecology?

    These all sound like good times to cue the apoc­a­lypse. It seems like human­ity couldn’t go on as human­ity in the face of those kinds of changes.

    But if I’d lived in other times, wouldn’t I have thought that about the fall of the Byzan­tine Empire? Or the Great Schism, or Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion? Or the Bubonic Plague? Or WW I and II?

    It seems like if you’re going to look at the his­tory of apoc­a­lyp­tic thought through­out his­tory, at least a part of the les­son has be that we seem to have a much more lim­ited imag­i­na­tion than God does about what we can survive.

    Worth think­ing about as another year gets under­way. And with a Demo­c­ra­tic Con­gress, no less. (Kid­ding.) (Well, pretty much.)


    Related posts:

    1. Poi­son by trifles
    2. The per­va­sive­ness of the Chris­t­ian idea
    3. “The Russ­ian Priest”: On our rela­tion­ship to the state
    4. The Lord will have mercy; the Lord has had mercy
    5. Three quotes

    January 2nd, 2007 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 01.02.2007

    Hi Grace,
    Thanks for the won­der­ful plug for the Radio Show. It is inter­est­ing when you look at his­tory… on man’s “sign of the apoc­a­lypse” is another man’s “sign of progress” whether it is sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery or world dom­i­na­tion under one ruler. I saw a dis­play of weapons of Bor­neo that a mis­sion­ary put up a few years ago. Some­one said, “How bar­baric…” I said, “Hmmmm…they kill one at a time face to face, we kill thou­sands with a click of a but­ton, who is the true bar­bar­ian?” An apoc­a­lyp­tic event to the natives of Bor­neo would cer­tainly look dif­fer­ent than one in Detroit.
    I’m con­vinced apoc­a­lyp­tic thinkers are dri­ven pri­mar­ily by fear and nar­cis­sism. We fear los­ing con­trol and our life as we know it, and we think our gen­er­a­tion is the focal point of His­tory. bleeeech!

  • Grace

    There are so many inter­est­ing thoughts in that short com­ment that I don’t know where to start. I love the comparison/contrast between end of the world and bold new sign of progress.

    And I may have to break out the sub­ject of bar­bar­ity being a point of view into a new blog entry, because I can tell I’ll get too ver­bose for a self-respecting comment.

    Any­way, very impres­sive work you guys have done. I’ll have to see if I can fig­ure out a way to make it through more of the archives while still get­ting my work done.

  • s-p

    ummm… thanks for the com­pli­ment. Suc­cinct­ness is forced on me mostly. I wish I had time to blog and write and pro­duce radio shows on stuff I think about, but I’m pretty much con­strained to one sen­tence syn­opses on other people’s blogs.
    If you know of any­one who’ll give me money to write let me know. I’ll tell YOU about the sec­ond per­son I find who’s will­ing to do that.… :)

  • This Side of Glory » Blog Archive » 7 Signs End Times Begin in 2007!

    […] Fol­low­ing up on all the thoughts about Rev­e­la­tion and the obses­sion with the “end times,” we can all rest easy. Wait­ing in the gro­cery line, I saw that the tabloid The Sun has the scoop we’ve been wait­ing for. “New Dead Sea Scrolls Shocker! 7 SIGNS END TIMES BEGIN IN 2007!” […]

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