One of the latest word viruses making the rounds of blogtopia
† concerns the end-times language that has attached itself, lamprey-like, to the latest round of Middle East catastrophe.
It is scary. You've got Christians with their eyes almost rolled back in their sockets and their toes all but curled at the thought of "the tribulations" underway, and Condoleezza Rice playing into their language by speaking of the "birth pangs" of the New Middle East. That, of course, connects Christian apocalypticism to the secular end-times of the neo-cons, who are fond of speaking of World War III as a re-shaper of the world. Some of them have yet to renounce "the end of history," the last I checked. And then there's the Mehdi fans, convinced this latest war will usher in the age of the Shiite messiah.
Combine all that rhetoric and a boatload of weapons, and you get - well, you get pretty much what we've got in the Middle East these days. And it's only going to get worse now that Iran has given the UN Security Council the brush-off.
I can't tell you much about the weapons - I never was a fan of missiles and cluster bombs - but I can tell you something about apocalypticism, at least from the Christian perspective. So, more or less as a public service, here's my version of "Apocalypse 101". It's long
† † so I've broken it down into a few parts. I'll post parts 1 &2 tonight, 3 on Thursday, and 4 on Friday. Or, if you're impatient, you can go over to Street Prophets and read the whole thing now.
The condensed take:
- The Rapture and the Apocalypse are not the same thing
- The Rapture is politically tinged, and outside the norm of Christianity
- The tradition of the Apocalypse is explanatory, not predictive
- What it explains is of political significance
Now, the not-so-condensed version. First things first: as noted above, the apocalypse and the Christian "rapture" are not one and the same. The first is a tradition well-rooted in Biblical literature. The second, not so much. The Revelation to John is what most people think of when "apocalyptic literature" is mentioned. But in fact, "apocalyptic" is a literary genre that goes back into the Old Testament, though you can see in places in the New Testament as well. (The term "birth pangs" for example, actually comes from the gospel of Matthew.) More about all that in a minute.
The Rapture, on the other hand, is a product of the nineteenth century expanded upon by twentieth-century marketing This fantastic interview with the Lutheran scholar Barbara R. Rossing runs down the details far better than I ever could.
One of the few pieces not covered in the interview is the status of "private revelation" in Christian thought these days. It gets complex, but the upshot is that most Christians believe that visions received by a single person - 900 foot Jesuses and the like - are to be treated with suspicion, if they are accepted at all. The ongoing revelation of God's will is usually understood to take place through the moving of the Holy Spirit. That is, somebody gets an idea, which is then examined and debated by the community. The reason for that, of course, is to prevent this:
JWW: The first sentence in the first chapter of your book is, "The rapture is a racket." Why do you say that?
Barbara Rossing: My emphasis is not on the financial racket side of things, which I don't know much about. Some argue that the whole prophecy industry is hucksterism, but I am referring to the theological racket. It is also a political racket, I think. They are playing off of people's fears.
JWW: Are you talking about Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins?
BR: Yes, these people and their books, among others. It is the whole idea of the rapture, which plays on people's fears. They are instilling this terrible fear in children that people are going to be left behind. It is not biblical. There is no rapture in the Bible.
When God's word is given to only one or two, it's much too susceptible to abuse and flim-flam. To my knowledge, LaHaye and Jenkins have never claimed to have gotten the Left Behind series through special revelation, but the principle is the same.
LaHaye's connections to the world of Republican activism are well-known, and have been documented at Talk To Action, among other places. LaHaye is not alone, of course. Many of the drivers of apocalyptic thinking have a distinct political edge to them, as Greg Carey, a scholar of apocalyptic literature, indicated to me in an e-mail:
The end-timers believe Israel is the center of any last days scenario. Anything involving Israel is extra-sexy. You get a blend of philo-Judaism and anti-Semitism here. The line is, Support Israel at all costs, because God will bless those who do. Pro-Zionist, anti-Palestinian (they never, ever mention the Christians in Palestine, Lebanon, or Syria.) The other side is, they believe the Jews will suffer horrifically in the end times as a result of this scenario.
This is one of the reasons the voices of those forgotten Christians in the Middle East might be so powerful in coming weeks. Interrupting the narrative of the end times with the story of brothers and sisters in Christ suffering puts a whole new spin on how things are going. Once you begin to put a face and a name to tribulation, it seems like less fun to welcome it into your living room.
Like many varieties of apocalypticism, the Rapture is outside the mainstream of religious belief, despite what poll numbers might tell you. Karen Armstrong argues in a recent article in the Guardian that:
Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), whose ideology is followed by most Sunni fundamentalists, had no love for the west, but his jihad was primarily directed against such Muslim rulers as Jamal Abdul Nasser. In order to replace secularist Fatah, Hamas began by attacking the PLO, and was initially funded by Israel in order to undermine Arafat. Osama bin Laden began by campaigning against the Saudi royal family and secularist rulers such as Saddam Hussein; later, when he discovered the extent of their support for these regimes, he declared war against the US. Even when fundamentalists are engaged in a struggle with an external enemy, this internal hostility remains a potent force.
It is unrealistic to hope that radical Islamists will be chastened by a rebuke from "moderate" imams; they have nothing but contempt for traditional Muslims, who they see as part of the problem. Nor are extremists likely to be dismayed when told that terrorism violates the religion of Islam. We often use the word "fundamentalist" wrongly, as a synonym for "orthodox". In fact, fundamentalists are unorthodox - even anti-orthodox. They may invoke the past, but these are innovative movements that promote entirely new doctrines.
Though Armstrong writes here about fundamentalism in general, she could be talking about the subset of millennial thought just as easily. The point is not to argue about who is the authentic representative of a particular religious tradition, but to note that apocalyptics like Rapture enthusiasts, Mehdi devotees, and neo-con dead-enders are departures from a historical norm. They should have to defend it.
About those polls mentioned above: there are a variety of them out there, supposedly showing that belief in an oncoming end of the world is widespread and on the rise. Well, I don't know. Any given day, I might tell you the world was coming to a conclusion, based on the headlines from Iraq and how strong my coffee was in the morning. That doesn't mean I think the Rapture is coming, or even that I believe John's Apocalypse is coming true. Folks will say they agree with such things, but often, when you press a little, you find the belief is paper-thin.
Tomorrow night: People are scared, and they want some kind of framework to help them understand what's going on around them.