You Have Reached
ver.: 15 March 2008
Choose from these horsemen of the Apocalypse
(or at least something to bide your time till time ends...)
:
Oy Gevult, even...
You never thought you'd ever see the day, did you? Here you are, electronic surfboard at your fingertips, peaceably wandering through some stuff on what Christians believe about the Holy Spirit, and whammo! You've reached the End. Not just your end. THE End. The moment the whole human house of cards falls down.
Quiet, wasn't it? No space alien invasion. No encindering of the planet by overly-frisky atomic warheads. No return of Hitler or Alexander, or for that matter Nostradamus or Jimi Hendrix. No category 500 hurricanes or terrorist mass destruction of mass transit. No seven-headed beasts, lakes of fire, and strange-looking horsemen, not even a hot celestial brass section. No ruddy mob scene like when Manchester United scores a goal.
Just the tiny straw that broke the camel's back. Just the one more little lie that made all of creation really feel the weight of all the other lies. Just the one small act of hate that focused all the acts of hate humankind has perpetrated, like the kid focusing sunlight through a magnifier to burn a hole in a sheet of paper or to cook an ant. Just the one moment of greed that typifies a long string of greedy deeds over time. Just the pair of stoppered ears at the moment that listening was most important. Just the one person who in a moment chooses to be owned by the drive for a depth of power which eluded the long, long chain of others obsessed in that way since long ago. It might have even been the finger you flipped when some idiot cut you off in traffic this morning. As happens with the first fall in a line of dominos, it all falls down. Creation cannot bear the weight. God will not bear the injustices. It is all too much. The collapse starteth; the End beginneth....
...maybe not yet.
But ask yourself : if it were true, if it were happening as you were reading this (and it jolly well could), what's going through your mind? Thrill? Dread? Surprise? Chagrine? Or maybe you'll be thinking of someone else : your spouse, your child, your best friend.
Or maybe it's just stunned shock : "OmyGAWD."
(Especially if right after that you heard a deep, clear voice saying : "Yes??")
More importantly, what would God hope you'd be doing when the end comes? Is it different than what you're doing now? Are you rummaging through your mind for excuses for yourself -- as if that could help you against Time, Death, or God?
Perhaps God, like the thief in the night, caught you going
about doing what you often do. Were you living, in your own
special way, a life of God's love, bearing it to others? Was
your mouth telling God's truth? Was your mind scanning the
Internet to learn God's ways? (Not just 'love', 'truth', or
good 'ways'; God's love, truth, and ways.) Did
God find you at work? Or perhaps you were just caught resting
in between such things? If you're living your life in the ways
God hopes you do, then it doesn't really matter should the
curtain be brought down on Time Itself. You're ready for it. By
following Christ in your everyday way of life, you are as
prepared for the end times as you can get.
back to the beginning of The End ...
... and it ain't here, for sure!
Christians don't feel at home here, in this world as it is. It may be good sometimes, bad some other times, but it's like the feeling you get when you're at a vacation spot : it's a great place to visit, but it's just not Home. The End means going Home, to the kind of world where we belong (often called 'heaven', 'the Reign', or 'the Kingdom'). Thus, there's a spiritual restlessness in each devoted Christian.
Yet, the Bible tells us that there is something we can do
about it. Since we can't be at Home here, we can at least bring
a little of Home to where we are. It's "being an outpost of the
Kingdom of God", but it doesn't have to be so momentous or so
strategized as that. Start by just loving those around you,
just like you would if you were Home. Loving isn't so simple;
it's not a feeling so much as a way of envisioning others,
valuing and treasuring them, and living among them according to
that vision. God's here, too, much like at Home, so we're not
out there doing this by ourselves, and we are not
powerless.
pre-trib or post-trib, you can go pre-index...
Using written imagery in a helpful way
The root of the great End-Times theories is the book of Revelation to John. I have my own views on this, but they're not much more than that. As I see it, the 'catholic' or 'traditional' view that the Revelation is symbolic about the Roman persecutions is probably true, in that the book was written with the aim of bringing hope to those who were facing those persecutions. Its imagery is the imagery of the popular apocalyptic writings of Jesus' time. However, the 'traditional' line of thinking says it is all symbolic of the era of ancient Rome. But then, by the book's own inner logic, what came after the persecutions was 'Christendom', the rule of Christ. (Never mind that 'Christendom' is now a thing of the past, and wise Christians everywhere are partying over its demise.) Thus, what's described in the Revelation has no need to ever happen again, and is still with us today just to inspire distant hope by saying that Jesus will somehow, someday return again in power. The 'preterist' viewpoint is even more fixated on Revelation's past role - that the prophetic symbolism is almost completely fulfilled in the writer's own times.
Fundamentalists have a point too, and I think it's a telling one. Revelation continues to be shared as Scripture by the Church precisely because John conveys to us a sense that something far worse than the Roman persecutions is yet to come -- and after that, something far better than life as we know it, the Kingdom of God coming in full. We ain't seen nothin' yet. But while the evil and the hope are expressed in symbol, they are not merely symbolic. Somewhere in the future our descendants (and still possibly ourselves) will experience in daily life what full-blooded evil and glorious rescue is like. It will be their blood which is actually shed, their social systems perverted, their leaders co-opted, their minds and desires warped, much more than is the case today. In the face of the great evils to come, the only hope Christians will have is the same only hope that the Church had in besting ancient Rome : Jesus. Through the Revelation, God is putting the hope there so that the believers to come can find it when they will need it most. If the 'catholic' view was all that the Revelation is, then the book's apocalypse chapters honestly fail to be living Scripture for those living after the Christianization of Rome. (The Christian belief in Christ's return is rooted not in the Revelation, but in the Gospels, backed by Acts and Paul. So the Revelation is not at all needed for such belief.) Fortunately, that's not all it is.
The wild language of apocalyptic writings doesn't tell us about the actual events to come. The usual fundamentalist talk of the Tribulation, Rapture, and Millenium reads far too much into the symbolic language, and thus leads us away from the main thrust of it. The language is meant to convey not the events or sequence, but the core nature of what we will eventually be up against, so that it's recognized whenever it comes, and so that in the meantime we recognize its foreshadowings in whatever forms they may take. Apocalyptic language grabs the senses and catches the feel of what such an era is like and of the depth of the evil forces behind it. It is the language of images and imagination. (Indeed, even this wild kind of talk may pale next to what is to come; it may be the only way to speak the unspeakable.) Taken in this way, Revelation speaks volumes of hope and practical insight, and sings in bountiful worship and praise. It tells of being a community of believers in a hell-bent world, and tells of the Kingdom which really is to come.
reverse eschatology - go away
from the End
Or, see what readers asked about the role of
popes and America in the
end times.
Addiction to the ultimate extreme event
Some Christians have become quite well-known for their detailed studies of what will happen in The End. The Web is full of pages dedicated to it. Studying end-times writings can become quite addictive : premillenial this and elders that, beasts and horns and powers and such. Books like Hal Lindsey's *The Late Great Planet Earth*, and novels like the *Left Behind* series. There's so much detail, so much tribulation and apocalypse and destruction and excitement, yet there's so much that's vague. It becomes easy to begin to envision what it could be like -- there's lots of room for imagination and symbolism. Studying eschatology (end-times stuff) is fun, fascinating, and frustrating. Therein lies the addiction : the imagination and the mind get thrills, but it's never quite right or quite full, always being corrected and changed, sometimes drastically (for instance, by a hot new book, or by some new evil deed by a real-life menace such as the terrorists). Your vision never gets "there", no matter how much you might thirst for it. If you frantically race to get "there", how much time or attention will you put into learning what faith is made of, and what time will you have for acts of kindness, grace, witness, solidarity or justice?
What matters most is that we follow God in our lives today. We don't know what the future holds, so it's best that we get to know Who holds
the future.
go to the start of this disaster of
a page...
|
"Liberate us
from building our kingdoms and liberate us for the
Kingdom of God." |
THROUGH THE ERASWe've moved through many eras of belief about last things, and each of them has taught us truth but left us with many scars :
Each of these eras is a mix of the cries of the
desperate with the grumbling of Israel in the Sinai when
they got tired of their menu. Each of these eras have
fallen or is falling. Each era ends with the damage that
comes from the sudden stop at the bottom. And hit bottom
they will. For each offers a false promise, a fake
solution, a gimmick. Each one depends on something other
than God, God's love for the creaturely world, and God's
sense of justice. Anything that isn't from God will
not last, so nothing else but God will do. |
One of the things that most throws off many of today's 'rational' people about all this end times stuff is the talk about what is to come once Time is up. It doesn't make sense that a life form which depends on the chemicals and synapses and stuff of bodily life can ever exist again once the body is gone. Even if the body were somehow re-created, there would be a discontinuity -- the being will have stopped, and thus the new being would not have the same identity. So why should we care? This view says there is no life after death, just the fast fizzle of nerve cells and the slow fade of legacies.
Firstly, that's not necessarily the same as saying that there is no heaven. Heaven is where God's part of the supernatural world lives, if such beings exist. A lot of people who reject life after death believe in beings or entities that transcend the material life we live in. (For instance, many New Agers believe in angels and space aliens, but no personal afterlife for humans.) Today's reasoning doesn't demand that spirit-beings end when time does, only that material beings like us are ended at death and can't be brought back.
Secondly, it doesn't necessarily mean that there is no Kingdom of God. (By 'Kingdom', I don't mean the same thing as by 'heaven'. The 'Kingdom' involves God's remaking and perfecting of the material world once Time in its current form ends. 'Heaven', in this sense, is the non-material side of it.) God doesn't have to reclaim the dead to complete the created world. God can do that with whoever's alive at the time that Time ends, or with an entirely new set of created beings. There may be a Kingdom, but today's bitter way of thinking says we won't be in it.
The part that really butts up against Christian belief has to do with the faith's unique claim about Christ. When someone is 'discontinued', so today's thinking goes, that's the end of it. What the New Testament claims is not only that Jesus of Nazareth was bodily 'discontinued', but that He did come back from it, with a body that's His own and with His identity intact. Even more, the New Testament holds forward the promise that those who share in this Jesus' death by following Him will come back from death just like He did, when Jesus Himself returns to us again. If we're with Him in life, we're with Him in death, and we're with Him in whatever is beyond death.
If the Christian claim about that is not true, there would still be a lot of truth in Christianity, but the core would be rotten. And down the road, if today's cynical mindset is right, what good would those good truths be? There would be ultimately no reason for hope, only despair, for ultimately all of existence will dissipate, or will get wiped out by collapsing into a point. The star fires will all go out, even the neutron stars and pulsars. Every type of being will become extinct. The end times would really be The End. Material existence itself would have literally been a waste of Time, an unfunny joke for which there would be noone left to give the punch line to.
If the Christian claim is true, then Time itself has an end, in both senses of the word 'end'. 'End' as a final destination, which is the remade creation - including a remade Time. The Kingdom comes, a home truly worthy of spirits and bodies. 'End' as a purpose, for Time's purpose would have been to get us there. (How can that be? I don't know. I'd have to be at the End, looking back, to grasp that rightly.) And God, the great divine Lover, would bring us back from whatever death is, with a body that is our own and with our identity intact, to be fully a part of this Kingdom, our true home. And the neutron stars and black holes and whales and lizards and people and such would all be a part of it, as intended by the One who made them.
Christians believe that the End is just a beginning. We
believe that it's in the very character of God to make it that
way. Even when great military machines and economic systems
fail, even in the face of extreme evil and apparent
hopelessness, there is hope, because God loves us and with God
all things are possible. It is that which we must trust when
all else fails.
click here or be left behind....
Sign outside a church:
The Last World War. Where and when will it be fought?
St. Margaret's, Hartford Street on Tuesday 22nd of February at
7:00 p.m
"Under the crisis of persecution and under the
urgency of an imminent end, reality is revealed suddenly for
what it is. We have supposed our lives were so utterly
ordinary. Sin-habits dull our free faith into stodgy
moralism and respectable boredom; then crisis rips the veneer
of cliché off everyday routines and reveals the side-by-side
splendors and terrors of heaven and hell."
----- Eugene Peterson, *The Contemplative Pastor*
(Leadership/Word, 1989), p. 51.
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