Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

“Often had these left-behind ones been warned, but in vain,” wrote the preacher. “Servants of God had faithfully set before them their imperative need of fleeing from the wrath to come only to be laughed at for their pains. And now the tables will be turned. God will laugh at them, laugh at their calamity and mock at their fear.” 97

To be sure, the God of Israel is famously depicted as a jealous and wrathful deity in certain horrific passages of the Hebrew Bible. “Vengeance will I wreak on my foes,” promises God in the book of Deuteronomy. “I will make my arrows drunk with blood as my sword devours flesh.” 98But here we see exactly how God is transformed in the new readings of Revelation from judge, king, and warrior into a cackling killer who takes pleasure in avenging himself on the men, women, and children whom he created in the first place.

At the same time that Christian fundamentalists were seeking to save Jewish souls, they were also engaged in a bitter struggle with some of their fellow Christians over the right way to read the book of Revelation. The same debate that had divided Christians in late antiquity—whether to read Revelation “spiritually” or “carnally”—was now setting traditionalists against modernists in the opening years of the twentieth century.

Revelation, according to one Christian commentator writing in 1907, was “a ‘queer bird’ hatched from ‘visions of the impossible,’” and he insisted that a majority of modern Christians had abandoned the whole apocalyptic enterprise in favor of “saner and more spiritual conceptions.” Other critics resorted to the old argument that the book of Revelation tempted Christians to engage in the error of “Judaizing” the biblical text: “A product of ‘highly imaginative Jewish thought,’” as James H. Moorhead sums up the argument, “apocalypticism seduced the early Christian community for a time but was never consistent with the basic thrust of the church’s message.” 99

Against the overheated doomsday scenario of the premillennialists, the Christian progressives advocated what came to be characterized as postmillennialism—that is, the notion that the second coming of Jesus Christ will take place only after the world is perfected by human effort. Advocates of the Social Gospel, for example, believed that “the kingdom of God would come as Christians joined others of goodwill in supporting labor unions, battling child labor, campaigning for laws to protect factory workers and immigrant slum dwellers, and otherwise joining the struggle for social justice in urban-industrial America.” 100In a real sense, they were engaged in precisely the kind of spiritual reading of Revelation that Augustine had recommended: “The Kingdom of God is always coming,” writes Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) in A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). 101

Ironically, the most progressive ideas in Christianity appealed to some of the most wealthy and powerful Christians. For example, it was John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874–1960), son of the founder of Standard Oil and a major American philanthropist, who financed the so-called Interchurch World Movement, an early effort to engage the Christian churches with the grave and ever-growing problems of the modern world. “I see it literally establishing the Kingdom of God on earth,” he affirmed in an article in the Saturday Evening Post, thus embracing the most fundamental tenet of the Social Gospel. 102

But the Christian fundamentalists were able to recruit a few captains of industry of their own. In 1910, for example, the two brothers who owned Union Oil Company, Lyman and Milton Stewart, sponsored the free distribution of 3 million copies of The Fundamentals, a series of pamphlets designed to win Protestant clergy across America to the credo of Christian fundamentalism. And the Stewart brothers also paid for the distribution of some seven hundred thousand copies of William E. Blackstone’s apocalyptic manifesto, Jesus Is Coming, to the same influential readership.

Such lavish efforts prompted a kind of third great awakening in the opening years of the twentieth century—“more than three hundred separate denominational bodies,” according to Paul Boyer, “all committed to belief in Christ’s premillennial return.” 103The ancient apocalyptic ideas of the book of Revelation, as revised and reinvigorated by the teachings of John Darby, attracted men and women across the spectrum of Christian belief and practice, ranging from the old-line Protestant churches to the Pentecostalists, who embraced such practices as speaking in tongues and the laying on of hands.

One notable example of the fresh outbreak of apocalyptic fever began with Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916), a haberdasher from Pennsylvania whose reading of Revelation and the other apocalyptic texts convinced him that the first stirrings of the millennium had already commenced. At any moment, he believed, God will snatch 144,000 “saints” off the face of the earth, and they will soon return in the company of Jesus Christ to fight the battle of Armageddon against the armies of Satan. Russell’s followers, numbering some thirty thousand by the beginning of the twentieth century, were first organized as the Watchtower Society and later changed the name of their church to the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“Millions now living,” Russell assured them, echoing the words of Jesus and Paul as first recorded in Christian scriptures nearly twenty centuries earlier, “will never die.” 104

Russell, like so many other apocalyptic preachers before and after him, was daring enough to set a date for doomsday. He fixed 1874 as the starting date of the countdown clock, and he predicted that the reign of Jesus Christ would begin forty years later—that is, in 1914. For that reason, when the opening shots of the First World War were fired, his prophecy took on sudden and urgent meaning, not only for his own followers but for a great many other apocalyptic true believers.

“War! War! War!!!” enthused one Pentecostal journal. “The Nations of Europe Battle and Unconsciously Prepare the Way for the Return of the Lord Jesus.” 105

By the late summer of 1914, America was still clinging to the happy notion that goodwill, enterprise, and ingenuity are all that humankind needs to achieve the secular equivalent of the millennial kingdom right here on earth. “The word machine, ” as Paul Fussell puts it in The Great War and Modern Memory, “was not yet invariably coupled with the word gun. ” 106Such bright hopes were among the first casualties of the First World War, which demonstrated that the promising new technology of the twentieth century was capable of killing and maiming young men by the millions. For the readers of Revelation, however, the ghastly spectacle of modern combat only confirmed their conviction that they were witnessing nothing less than the battle of Armageddon.

Ironically, the First World War was dubbed “the war to end all wars” by optimistic and high-minded propagandists—a phrase that certainly applies to Armageddon—but the conflagration turned out to be neither the end of war nor the end of the world. Still, the terror and tumult of the Great War sparked the same kind of apocalyptic speculation that had attended every war in Western history since the sack of Rome in the fifth century. The latest generation of seers studied the ancient texts and decided that the world was witnessing the events that had been prophesied in the book of Daniel: “And a mighty king shall stand up, that shall rule with great dominion, and do according to his will, and his kingdom shall be broken, and shall be divided toward the four winds of heaven.” 107

Indeed, the First World War was so traumatic—and the postwar world so terrifying—that it scared the bejesus out of men and women who had placed themselves on the cutting edge of the modern world. Thus, for example, Christabel Pankhurst (1880–1958) was transformed by the experience of the First World War from a famously militant feminist into a stump speaker for the premillennialist cause and “the promised return of Jesus as King of Kings and Lord of Lords,” as she witnessed in one of her own works of biblical prophecy. 108