Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

“It’s not a shooting war, but it is a war,” declared one recent appointee to a federal judgeship, a religious fundamentalist whose nomination sparked a crisis in Congress. “These are perilous times for people of faith, not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.” 53

So the book of Revelation cannot be dismissed as a biblical oddity that belongs only to professional theologians, media-savvy preachers, and a few religious crackpots. The fact is that Revelation has come to be regarded by certain men and women in positions of power and influence as a source of inspiration, if not a divine handbook, for the conduct of war, diplomacy, and statecraft in the real world. When Ronald Reagan moved into a house whose street number was 666, he insisted on changing the address to a less satanic number, and he readily interpreted an otherwise unremarkable coup in Libya as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy:

“That’s a sign that the day of Armageddon isn’t far off,” he declared. “Everything’s falling into place. It can’t be long now.” 54

Such beliefs are especially alarming in a man with the power to inflict a nuclear Armageddon on the enemy he dubbed “the evil empire,” yet another oblique reference to the book of Revelation. Yet Reagan is hardly the only American politician to hold such beliefs. All occupants of the White House since Reagan—and many of their most trusted counselors and confidantes—have declared themselves to be “born again,” a phrase that identifies them with a strain of religious fundamentalism that assumes the accuracy and inevitability of biblical prophecy, including the end-time prophecies of Revelation. Such literalism in the reading of the Bible was regarded as a problem by the earliest Christian authorities in late antiquity, and it is no less problematic in the culture war that is being fought in American today.

Indeed, as we shall shortly see, Revelation has served as a “language arsenal” in a great many of the social, cultural, and political conflicts in Western history. 55Again and again, Revelation has stirred some dangerous men and women to act out their own private apocalypses. Above all, the moral calculus of Revelation—the demonization of one’s enemies, the sanctification of revenge taking, and the notion that history must end in catastrophe—can be detected in some of the worst atrocities and excesses of every age, including our own.

For all of these reasons, the rest of us ignore the book of Revelation only at our impoverishment and, more to the point, at our own peril.

Apocalypse” is derived from the Greek word that means “unveiling,” and “Revelation” is its Latin equivalent. Both words suggest the disclosure of something that has been kept secret. Both carry the sense that the secret being revealed is not merely arcane but also deeply mysterious and perhaps even dangerous—“spooky knowledge,” as pop philosopher Alan Watts laughingly puts it. 1And nothing else in the scriptures of Judaism or Christianity is quite so spooky as the book of Revelation.

Yet, as it turns out, Revelation is hardly unique among the writings in which men and women have set down their spiritual imaginings. Seers, shamans, and self-appointed prophets, in every age and all over the world, have claimed to hear voices and see visions, sometimes with divine assistance, sometimes by means of mystical incantations or magical potions, and sometimes using only their own powerful insight. The oracle at ancient Delphi, who may have begun to babble her words of prophecy after inhaling hallucinogenic vapors rising from a fissure beneath her hillside shrine, has something in common with the contemporary computer scientist who used a microprocessor to decipher what he dubbed the “Bible Code.”

The original author of Revelation, as we shall see, stands squarely in the same tradition. He was surely a gifted poet and a powerful preacher, and some of his readers may be willing to regard him as an authentic visionary who heard voices and saw sights from on high. But the book of Revelation did not spring from his forehead as something fresh and fully formed. A kind of theological and scriptural DNA can be extracted from the text of Revelation, and its bloodlines can be traced back to far older and even stranger texts that were regarded as sacred long before the author of Revelation was inspired to speak out loud about his visions of the end of the world.

The author, for example, was hardly the first human being who claimed to see mystical visions, nor was he the first whose claims were greeted with skepticism by the guardians of religious law and order. Organized religion has always been troubled by any mere mortal—and especially any mortal who has not been duly ordained as a rabbi, priest, imam, or minister—who insists that he or she has come into contact with God. The Hebrew Bible includes a passage that rules out any direct encounter between a human being and the deity: “Man shall not see me, and live,” decrees God in the book of Exodus. 2Now and then, God may choose to communicate with a human being, of course, but only in oblique ways: “If there be a prophet among you, I, the Lord, do make myself known to him in a vision, I do speak with him in a dream.” 3Even then, some divine mysteries are deemed to be wholly unfit for human consumption: “The secret things,” warns Moses in the book of Deuteronomy, “belong unto the Lord our God.” 4

The same strict rule is carried forward into Christian scripture, a fact that prompted some early Christian authorities to declare the book of Revelation to be unworthy of admission into the New Testament. “I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord,” allows Paul—but not until God is good and ready to grant them. “For now,” he goes on, “we see through a glass darkly.” 5And, to illustrate the point, he tells a tantalizing tale about a man he once knew who was carried all the way up to “the third heaven,” where he “heard unspeakable words”—is Paul speaking coyly of his own ecstatic visions?—but he refuses to repeat what was heard in heaven because “it is not lawful for a man to utter.” 6

So the perils of prophecy have always been obvious to guardians of orthodoxy, starting in biblical antiquity and never more so than today. David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and miscellaneous other religious zealots, less celebrated but no less dangerous, are only the most recent examples of what can happen when a human being with delusions of grandeur, paranoid tendencies, an overheated imagination, and a certain dark charisma convinces himself and his dutiful followers that he is on a mission from God. Indeed, we will encounter many such men and women in these pages, all of whom were agitated and provoked by what they read in the book of Revelation. More than a few of them ended their days on the torturer’s rack or the executioner’s block.

Not every self-appointed seer ends in death and disgrace. A few men and women throughout history have come to be revered as authentic prophets. Moses, Paul, and Muhammad are accepted and celebrated as makers (or remakers) of the three great faiths of the West, but the roster also includes more recent religious innovators such as Joseph Smith (1805–1844), the founder of Mormonism, and Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), the creator of Christian Science. To this day, the president of the Church of Latter-Day Saints bears the title Prophet, Seer and Revelator.