Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

Still, more than a few readers of Revelation in every age, including our own, have thrilled at the idea that the end is near. Indeed, they are perfectly willing to overlook the plain fact that the world has not ended as predicted, and they persist in poring over the text of Revelation in a fresh attempt to figure out the precise date when it will. They have always been wrong, too, of course, but nothing has discouraged the so-called date setters who study the text, crunch the numbers, and come up with dates when the world must end. Not a single century has passed since the ink dried on the first copy of Revelation without some new prediction of the precise date when its prophecies will finally come to pass.

Above all else, the author of Revelation is a good hater, and he embraces the simple principle that anyone who is not with him is against him. He rails against his rival preachers, condemning them as fornicators and false prophets. He heaps abuse on those of his fellow Christians whom he regards as insufficiently zealous for the Lamb of God. He offers the ultimate insult to Jews who do not embrace Jesus as the Messiah by insisting that Christians are the only authentic Jews. He reserves special contempt for anyone who indulges in carnal pleasure and, especially, the getting of goods. And, in a gesture of rhetorical overkill that is the hallmark of Revelation, he condemns his adversaries as not merely wrong, not merely sinful or criminal, but wholly corrupted by “the deep things of Satan.” 43

The black-or-white morality of Revelation—everyone and everything in the world is either all good or all bad—is artfully expressed in the author’s insistent pairing of opposites. The Great Whore is the evil twin of “the woman clothed with the sun,” the Beast is a vile parody of the Lamb of God, and the destruction of Babylon, Mother of Harlots, is followed by the creation of the New Jerusalem, a construction of crystal and precious stone that floats down from heaven. Here we find a particularly heartless theology of exclusion: the saints and martyrs will be granted eternal life, as the author of Revelation sees it, and the rest of humanity will burn in hell. Indeed, the book of Revelation fairly sizzles with the deferred pleasure of revenge.

Thus the author of Revelation, like Jesus as depicted in the Gospels, is a radical remaker of Judaism—but each moves in the opposite direction from the other. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor,” commands God in the Hebrew Bible (and not only one’s neighbor but even “the stranger that sojourneth with you”). Jesus cites the traditional Jewish commandment and then intensifies it: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” 44By contrast, the author of Revelation unambiguously promises his readers and hearers that God will avenge himself on their enemies and persecutors in a spasm of divine violence that can only be described as a holocaust.

“The second half of the Apocalypse is flamboyant hate and simple lust…for the end of the world,” writes novelist D. H. Lawrence, who was so appalled by what he found in Revelation that he was moved to write a commentary of his own. By his lights, the author of Revelation had devised “a grandiose scheme for wiping out and annihilating everybody who wasn’t of the elect [and] of climbing up himself right on to the throne of God.” 45

Thus, for example, the final destruction of “Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth”—the author’s symbol for pagan Rome in particular and all human sinfulness in general—betrays the lust for revenge that Lawrence discerns in the text. “Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine, and she shall be utterly burned with fire,” writes the author of Revelation, displaying not a hint of Christian charity but plenty of smug satisfaction at the scourging of his enemies. “Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets, for God hath avenged you on her.” 46At the climax of his vision of the end of the world, the author of Revelation is seized with the uncompromising (and unseemly) desire to watch his enemies suffer and die.

“Do unto her as she has done to your people,” he implores the sword-wielding Lamb of God. “She brewed a cup of terror for others, so give her twice as much as she gave out. She has lived in luxury and pleasure, so match it now with torments and sorrow.” 47

The conventional apology for such rhetorical excess is that Revelation consists of morale-boosting propaganda by and for the victims of oppression and persecution—“the messages addressed by ancient apocalyptic seers to those engulfed by suffering and overwhelmed by dread.” 48That is why, for example, one modern theologian insists that Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, a stirring manifesto of the American civil rights movement, reflects “experiences and hopes similar to the theology of Revelation.” 49More recently, however, some courageous scholars have suggested that the author of Revelation was probably not himself at risk of torture and death at the time and in the place where he lived and worked. Indeed, as it turns out, the rhetoric of Revelation is no less compelling to those who imagine themselves to be persecuted than it is to those who actually are persecuted.

“When thinking of the torments which will be the lot of Christians at the time of Anti-Christ,” mused Thérèse of Lisieux, a nun in nineteenth-century France, shortly before her death from illness at the age of twenty-four, “I feel my heart leap with joy and I would that these torments be reserved for me.” 50

But it is also true that Revelation, now and then, moves some of its more excitable readers to act out their own fantasies of revenge and martyrdom. “Assurance that the end is nigh,” observes one contemporary scholar, “often brings with it profoundly dangerous baggage.” 51A young man named Vernon Howell, for example, joined an apocalyptic sect called the Branch Davidians, dubbed himself “David Koresh” in a coded reference to two messianic figures of the Hebrew Bible, and led his followers into martyrdom in a standoff with federal law-enforcement agents, all because he was convinced that God had revealed to him that the battle of Armageddon was destined to start in Waco, Texas. Koresh, too, is an unremarkable example of a very old phenomenon, and we shall see how the apocalyptic idea has worked on unstable minds over the last twenty centuries.

Some of the recent readings of Revelation would be laughable if they were not so creepy. Contemporary traffickers in end-of-the-world prophecy have resorted to the ancient biblical text to find explanations for various phenomena of our anxiety-ridden age, both real and imagined, including alien abduction, UFOs, nuclear proliferation, the Kennedy assassination, the sexual revolution, the digital revolution, the AIDS epidemic, and much else besides—“an example of Americans’ insatiable appetite for the unusual, spectacular and exotic,” as one scholar proposes. 52And Revelation, which imagines the existence of a vast conspiracy of princes, powers, and principalities in ser vice to Satan, feeds even the most outlandish paranoid fantasies about the hidden workings of the world in which we live.

Above all, Revelation is now—and has always been—a potent rhetorical weapon in a certain kind of culture war, a war of contesting values and aspirations, that has been waged throughout human history. The author of Revelation, as we shall see, condemns any Christian who partakes of the pleasures and rewards of classical civilization at the peak of its enduring achievements in art, letters, and philosophy. When Savonarola called upon his parishioners to cast their paintings and pretty things on the Bonfire of the Vanities—and to thereby turn Florence into the “New Jerusalem” that is promised in Revelation—he was fighting a culture war against what he called paganism and we call the Renaissance. And modern readers of Revelation who inject the Bible into the rancorous public debate over the role of religion in American democracy are fighting the same war all over again.