TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021191/0211640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 126 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 88

Apocalypse Now?


By John Elson


    "Wail, for the day of the Lord is near; as destruction from
the Almighty it will come!"

    -- Isaiah 13: 6


    To judge by what's selling in Christian bookstores these
days, the war in the Persian Gulf is not about anything so
mundane as liberating Kuwait or neutralizing the Butcher of
Baghdad. Rather, the "mother of battles" (as Saddam Hussein
likes to call it) is about the fulfillment of biblical
prophecies regarding the imminence of Armageddon.

    Consider the evidence. Zondervan, a leading U.S. publisher
of Fundamentalist and Evangelical literature, has issued an
updated version of John F. Walvoord's 1974 best seller,
Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis, with an initial
print order of -- get this -- 1 million copies. (Nine were
reportedly ordered by the White House, whose previous occupant
was a confessed believer in Armageddon theology.) Walvoord is
chancellor of Dallas Theological Seminary, where Charles H. Dyer
is associate professor of Bible exposition. Dyer's new book,
The Rise of Babylon, which argues that Saddam's announced plan
to build a replica of that ancient city is an omen of the Last
Days, has sold 180,000 copies just in the past two weeks.
Ratings are up for conservative televangelists who preach about
impending apocalypse. Among them is the Rev. Jack Van Impe of
Detroit, whose scriptural prophecies point to an Iraqi defeat
but also to eventual world war in this decade between Russia
and the West.

    Armageddon is a serious game that any number can play. The
electronic bulletin boards offered by such computer networks
as CompuServe and Genie are stuffed with doomsday speculations.
And one need not be born again to experience a frisson of
apocalyptic concern. Also enjoying a new spasm of popularity
is the 16th century astrologer Nostradamus, one of whose gnomic
utterances predicts the arrival in 1999 of the "Great King of
Terror" -- easily identifiable as Saddam, to those with vivid
imaginations.

    It is no great surprise that the gulf conflict would give
rise to so much spiritual hand wringing. As TIME senior writer
Otto Friedrich observed in his meditation on history, The End
of the World, solemn predictions of earth's final days have
accompanied natural and man-made catastrophes down through the
ages, from the sack of Rome to the Nazi Holocaust. This
century's military technology has given new power to those
primordial fears and illusions, wrote Friedrich in his book.
Thus the most chilling uncertainty of the gulf war is whether
Saddam, in an act of cynical desperation, might launch a few
surviving Scuds armed with biological, chemical or nuclear
warheads.

    Armageddon is a fine, thumping word, almost onomatopoeic in
its evocation of finality. This metaphor for ultimate conflict
probably gets its name from Mount Megiddo, a scraggly hill on
a great plain in northern Israel where, as many conservative
Protestants believe, a great battle will end history's most
terrible war. According to scenarios drawn from prophetic
passages in Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Revelation, a number
of nations, including Babylon (read Iraq) and led by an evil
Antichrist, will invade Israel during this conflict. But then
the Son of God will return to halt the slaughter and,
according to some visions, inaugurate a thousand-year era of
peace before presiding at the Final Judgment.

    Historians have proposed that this millenarian kingdom come
is the ultimate (but unacknowledged) source of that now
discredited Marxist paradise, the withering away of the state.
Faith in Jesus' Second Coming has persisted through history,
even though predictions about its timing have inevitably proved
premature. The first Christians thought he would return to
earth within their lifetime. As the Goths decimated imperial
legions in the 4th century, St. Ambrose of Milan saw the
Antichrist among the pagan invaders and proclaimed that the end
of the world was nigh. A 12th century Cistercian abbot, Joachim
of Flora, was quite precise: the Age of the Spirit, which he
saw as the culmination of human history, would begin between
A.D. 1200 and 1260. William Miller, the Baptist layman who
founded the Adventist movement in America, was sure that the
Second Coming would take place on March 21, 1843, and then,
after recalculating, on Oct. 22, 1844. (Miller had the grace
to confess his errors when the deadlines passed; the movement
survived.)

    To the nonbeliever, all such speculation is bootless. If God
does not exist, there is no First Coming, much less a Second,
and the end of the world is a concept without meaning. Many
mainstream Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians argue that
millenarians like Walvoord and Dyer misuse scriptural
prophecies about the final days. These are not detail-specific
guides to beating some kind of celestial point spread but
timeless alerts that humanity must be constantly vigilant
against sin's allure. The temptation to seek clues to the
Second Coming on CNN is easy to understand, since Saddam has
proclaimed himself a successor to Nebuchadnezzar, the
Babylonian King who enslaved the Israelites of old. That makes
it deceptively easy for prophecy mongers to identify Iraq with
Babylon. Somewhat awkwardly, it also undercuts a long-standing
Protestant tradition that this symbol of corruption refers to
the Church of Rome.

    Ultimately, Christian critics of the millenarians can argue
that they are guilty of two errors. One is emulating Abbot
Joachim's egotistic heresy: falsely assuming that the age in
which they live is unique. The other mistake -- an undertone
in some of the Armageddon literature but overt in much of the
computerized End Days babbling -- is to interpret events in the
gulf with eschatological glee, as if the real message were
"Hey, fellas, our troubles are almost over." No one has the
right to that assumption. History unfurls as God's secret,
wrote the French novelist Leon Bloy. But it is also man's
destiny, from which there is no abdication.