Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

As with so much else in postwar America, however, the old ways of thinking and talking about the end of the world were about to change in profound and enduring ways. America was swept by wave after wave of radical new ideas and unsettling new experiences in the 1960s and 1970s—war, riot, and assassination, of course, but also the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement, the sexual revolution and the computer revolution, Beatlemania and Woodstock, the birth-control pill and men on the moon. The times they were a-changing, according to Bob Dylan’s anthem, and Christian fundamentalism caught the same the winds of change. The New World was the site of yet another apocalyptic invasion that carried the book of Revelation out of the Christian ghetto and into the heart of American politics and popular culture.

The self-made apocalyptic seer who literally put the apocalyptic idea on the best-seller lists of America was a colorful and charismatic preacher named Hal Lindsey (b. 1930). He was working as a tugboat captain on the Mississippi in the 1950s when he experienced a powerful religious conversion. After studying at the Dallas Theological Seminary, a center of premillennialist doctrine, Lindsey went on the road as a preacher for the Campus Crusade for Christ. Inspired by the lively response to the sermons on Bible prophecy that he delivered in the late 1960s, Lindsey and his collaborator, C. C. Carlson, went public with his prediction that the end was near with the publication of The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970.

Like the “medieval best sellers” of an earlier age, Lindsey’s book repurposed and reinterpreted the text of Revelation and other apocalyptic passages of the Bible in terms that made sense to contemporary readers. And Lindsey was rewarded with best-seller status that far exceeded even the Scofield Reference Bible and, significantly, reached far beyond the customary readership of Christian fundamentalist texts and tracts. The Late Great Planet Earth sold more than 20 million copies, and Lindsey was hailed by the New York Times as “the best-selling author of the 1970s.” 31Bart Ehrman goes even further and declares that Lindsey is “probably the single most read author of religion in modern times.” 32

Lindsey comes across in The Late Great Planet Earth as media savvy and thoroughly modern, but he is only the latest in a long line of apocalyptic preachers that reaches all the way back to the author of Revelation himself. He is a supercharged culture warrior, setting himself against all the bogeymen that he discerns in the counterculture and the so-called New Age—astrology, extrasensory perception, meditation, mysticism, spiritualism, witchcraft, hallucinogenic drugs, progressive politics, Christian ecumenicalism, and what he calls “oriental religions.” 33And, again like the author of Revelation, he condemns all ideas about religion except his own, and he suggests that diversity and toleration in matters of faith are, quite literally, the tools of Satan.

“Satan loves religion, which is why he invades certain churches on Sunday,” Lindsey writes, hinting but never stating exactly which churches he regards as the “throne of Satan.” “Religion is a great blinder of the minds of men.” 34

Above all, he insists that God’s plan for the imminent end of the world is to be found in “the tested truths of Bible prophecy.” The Late Great Planet Earth, in fact, is essentially a restatement of the doctrine of dispensational premillennialism as framed by John Darby in the nineteenth century. “Some time in the future there will be a seven-year period climaxed by the visible return of Jesus Christ,” Lindsey begins, and he proceeds to describe the standard version of the end-time scenario that he learned at the Dallas Theological Seminary. In fact, some of his former fellow seminarians, surely a bit envious of his remarkable success, “complained that Lindsey had simply repackaged his lecture notes!” 35

The “seven-year countdown” to the Second Coming will be triggered by the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the resumption of animal sacrifice by the Jewish people. Next will come the world dictatorship of the Antichrist and the period of persecution known as the Tribulation—but not before Christian true believers are raptured to heaven. At the end of the Tribulation, Jesus Christ will return to fight the battle of Armageddon, reign over a peaceable kingdom on earth for a thousand years, and then, at last, defeat Satan once and for all, sit in judgment over all humankind, and reward the Christian saints with eternal life in a new heaven and a new earth.

“Someday, a day that only God knows, Jesus Christ is coming to take away all those who believe in Him,” writes Lindsey about the Rapture. “Without benefit of science, space suits, or interplanetary rockets, there will be those who will be transported into a glorious place more beautiful, more awesome, than we can possibly comprehend.” 36

What distinguishes Lindsey from doomsayers with more modest book sales is his undeniable genius for hot-wiring the book of Revelation to the geopolitical realities of the contemporary world. Here, too, Lindsey is following the example of earlier readers of Revelation; indeed, as we have seen, the author of Revelation himself apparently sees the Roman emperor Nero as the Antichrist, and successive generations have come up with their own suspects, ranging from Muhammad to Mussolini. And, like exegetes in every age, Lindsey offers his readers and hearers a way to make sense of the baffling and frightening world in which they find themselves. For Lindsey, it is a world haunted by the realpolitik of the Cold War and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation.

The Antichrist, according to Lindsey, will be a flesh-and-blood politician who rises to a position of leadership in what he calls “the revived Roman Empire”—that is, the Common Market, the community of nations that was the forerunner of today’s European Union. 37Magog, he insists, is the Soviet Union, and Gog is its head of state. The “kings of the east,” briefly mentioned in Revelation as combatants in the battle of Armageddon, are meant to identify the People’s Republic of China. 38And the final conflagration, described in Revelation in terms of stars falling from heaven and monstrous creatures rising from the abyss, is actually meant to be a global nuclear war—“an all-out attack of ballistic missiles upon the great metropolitan areas of the world.” 39

Lindsey insists that God granted visions of the far distant future to the ancient prophets that were wholly unintelligible to them or the readers and hearers to whom they preached during their own lifetimes. Thus, for example, Lindsey quotes from the book of Zechariah—“Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongues shall consume away in their mouths” 40—and then he credits the Hebrew prophet with a vision of events that would come to pass only in the atomic age: “Has it occurred to you that this is exactly what happens to those who are in a thermonuclear blast?” asks Lindsey. “It appears that this will be the case at the return of the Christ.” 41

Then, too, Lindsey adopts a “language arsenal” of his own making in The Late Great Planet Earth, a vocabulary that is intended to capture the attention of jaded readers who would not otherwise pick up a book of Christian witness or Bible prophecy. Thus, for example, the Bible itself is “the Best Seller.” The Antichrist is called “the ‘Future Fuehrer,’” and the Great Whore of Babylon is “Scarlet O’Harlot.” Armageddon is “World War III.” Those 144,000 male virgins from the twelve tribes of Israel who are said to be “sealed” by Jesus Christ in the end-times are dubbed “Jewish Billy Grahams”—that is, “physical, literal Jews who are going to believe with a vengeance that Jesus is the Messiah.” (All other Jews, he suggests, will be dead and gone.) And Lindsey, after having condemned the use of hallucinogenic substances, proceeds to describe the experience of the Rapture as “The ultimate trip.” 42