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    Longing for the End of the World

    So, for most of May Christianity has been in the news. Or rather, a tiny splinter of Christianity has. The leader of a tiny religious organization predicted the Rapture on May 21, and there was lots of news coverage.

    It was all actually very standard: a strange fringe belief held by a small minority of Christians dominated the news, mainstream Christians were left out of the discussion entirely, there was a lot of joking and teasing about the strangeness of the strange belief (I'll admit to doing some), and then there was the inevitable complaint that the teasing amounted to persecuting of Christians. To this I say: no one likes being teased but, hey, it's not the end of the world.

    The belief in the Rapture, which holds that a tiny minority of God's favorites will be taken directly to Heaven before the difficulties of the End Times (presumably so they don't have to suffer for their faith or do anything to help other people during a time of terrible suffering) is a new idea that's emerged over the past century or so. It was entirely unknown to any Christians for eighteen or nineteen centuries and is still completely foreign to the beliefs of most Christian groups. And yes, the people who espouse this belief all claim to derive it directly from the Bible, in a plain-and-open reading which somehow no one else (including St. Jerome) was smart enough to see for nearly two thousand years. I guess the rest of us must not be reading the text, um, directly enough.

    If I seem grouchy, it's not so much the belief in the Rapture that's annoying me but the habit that many small, divisive and extremist groups have of referring to themselves simply as "Christian" as though they were the main body of believers rather than a very, very small sub-group with thirty parishioners in Wichita. When you're that small and special, you need a special name. At least the Branch Davidians admitted they were a branch, and not the whole tree. On the other hand, the fringe preacher in Minnesota who denounced Barack Obama as an unbeliever while giving the legislature's daily prayer had built up to his attack by talking about universal Christianity that went beyond denominations. One minute he's talking about not being divided up into Lutherans and Calivinists and "Wesleyans," and then, BAM! he's throwing the President of the United States out of the universal body of Christianity. It's an old move by now, and I'm tired of it.

    My branch of Christianity isn't expecting or predicting the end of the world, let alone trying to hurry it along. And the truth is, I'm not hoping for it. It's a flawed and problematic world, full of suffering, but it's God's world too and I like it. I'm more than happy to let God set the schedule for Armageddon, and I'm in no rush.

    But I understand why some of my fellow-Christians feel differently. One of the tough things for American Christians in the 21st century is that we have a very marginal place in Christianity's grand narrative. We're much, much too late to have been there at the beginning, or any of the beginnings. We're not the founders, or the forerunners; that part of the story is taken. And we don't play the role of the persecuted martyrs, who became heroes and heroines by suffering for their faith. Some of us actually stoop to making up imaginary affronts, trying to share some of those martyrs' glory. But really, we have it incredibly soft in this country. We're not going to have to face the lions, ever. None of us are famous and glorious Christians.

    Longing for the end of the world, waiting impatiently for it to arrive, is longing for a better, more prominent role in the Christian story. If you can't be there at the beginning, you can be there at the end. A big part in the last chapter is like having a big part in the first. Some Americans hope for the world to end so that Jesus will save them, not simply from their sins, but from their ordinariness. It's not enough to be an ordinary Christian, somewhere in the long middle of a millennia-long history. Some people want, need, a special role in the main story.

    I understand exactly how they feel; the people waiting for the world to end are wrestling with one of the subtlest and most daunting challenges of Christianity itself: the excruciating humility it takes to accept God's love. The beautiful thing about Christianity is that God loves you, whatever your flaws. What's appalling about that is what makes you special is your membership in the human race, your identity as God's child. God doesn't love you because you're smart or pretty or funny, because you can jump especially high or are extra good at carrying a tune. God loves you because God loves you, and loves every one else for the same reason. That is very hard to take.

    So we see a lot of people who profess themselves Christians, loudly, but who are driven by a need to be more than merely God's beloved. They need to be God's special beloved, the favorites, loved and chosen above others. You see this need expressed in many different ways: in the longing for the End Times, and opportunity it holds to take center stage; in the insistent declarations of persecution and tribulation by people who get religious holidays off with pay; in the Washington "Family" and its obsession with divine "anointment" of leaders; and by the belief in a very selective company of the saved (something that does come from traditional mainstream Calvinism), while the vast majority of the human race is damned. The Rapture belief combines the first and last of these; only a tiny minority get Raptured, while the rest are left behind for punishment by a God who only loves a few very special children.

    In short, they believe in Nightclub Heaven, with a guest list and a velvet rope. I believe in festival-seating heaven. It's an old split among Christianity.

    If I ever go to Heaven, that will be terrific. Eternal life with God is more than enough. I don't need VIP seating. I'll gratefully take standing room, the 600-millionth-odd saved soul from the left. And I hope everyone else gets in, too. I don't need God to love me more than other people. How can you love your fellow human beings without wanting what is best for them?

    I'm all too competitive and ambitious in my daily secular life; I spend approximately forty percent of my working hours trying to distinguish myself from others and further my personal career. But I don't see the life of faith as a continuation of those secular values. Christianity is not about pride. And jockeying to be the brightest light in heaven, Christian tradition tells us, is a very, very bad idea.

    In the end, the division between big-tent-heaven Christians like myself and VIP Room Christians is a question of how we imagine God. For me, believing in God and salvation cannot be separated from believing in that God's unique talent for wooing us to the right path. You gotta have faith in the shepherd. And a shepherd this good doesn't lose much of the flock.

    Nor do I have any interest in serving a God who wants to elevate me and cast down most of the rest of the human race for punishment. That plan is not worthy of the God I was raised to believe in, and it doesn't much resemble the teachings in the Gospel.

    I'm not so different from the people longing for the Rapture. I also hear whispers in my heart, too often, telling me that I am better than other people, or that I should be rewarded and those people should be punished. I've heard that. But I also know one thing: that ain't Jesus talking.

    Comments

    I have to say this every single time I come across the subject.

    Just for my own mental health.

    I have heard those who claim omens are telling me it is the end of the world every single waking hour of my existence on this planet.

    I worked in the education library at the University of Minnesota for six years for a buck an hour.

    And prior to these tech scanners, we would have to sit and look at all books going out of the library.

    So naturally I read every single New Yorker cartoon from the 1930's and one of my favorites was the guy in robes carrying the sign that said:

    THE END IS NEAR.

    Now I am an old man. I have bouts of the gout, bouts of the flu, bouts of the undiagnosed....

    And when I am amidst these terrible plagues upon my individual being I am sure i am about to die.

    I know it!

    The atom bomb was going to kill me, the Asian flu was going to kill me, the smog was going to kill me....

    And my mums who is still alive today, with all of the whiskey she drank and all of the cigs she smoked....

    But I KNOW I am going to die every single time i am sick. ahahhhahahahahaha

    So I am sorry, but I give no credence whatsoever to those who claim special knowledge of omens.

    the end


    So I am sorry, but I give no credence whatsoever to those who claim special knowledge of omens. 

    Maybe you could explain “what special knowledge"  is”

    Most people don’t know the “accurate knowledge”

    Remember the scripture that goes like this

    “This means everlasting life, those taking in ACCURATE knowledge of you, the only true god, and of the one you sent forth”

    Even the disciples with Jesus on the Mount, asked “WHEN will be the conclusion of the system of things?”

    He told them what signs (omens?), to look for. And when you see these signs act upon the information you were given.  another scripture says when you see thse signs  “Lift up your heads for your deliverance is near”

    Get up you downtodden, come out of your funk, come out of your hoprless despair.reinvigorate yourselves. you are not beaten yet.  

    I could relate many more examples, not because I have some “special knowledge”.

     I can do so, because I seek  ACCURATE KNOWLEDGE, “ask and you shall receive” or this scripture “ask anything in my name and my father will hear you” 

    "Come take lifes water free"

    With this ACCURATE knowledge I become prepared to “RUN THE RACE”, I can see “the road that is narrow; leading to everlasting life and the few who find it, while broad and spacious is the road to death.

    Not a special knowledge, just accurate knowledge.

    I can be a special as Abel, who came and offered the best things, as a gift offering, and was approved by god. Giving my best “Loving my God with my whole heart, my whole mind, my whole soul”

    The reward…. a relationship with the Most high of the Universe  

    That does not mean I escape trials or tribulation.  I am reminded “The student is not greater than the teacher” or “The servant is not greater than the master” “They persecuted me they’ll persecute you” 

    Modern day Christians still have to contend with the lion

    For the “Lion roams about; looking to devour someone” it means he’s looking for loyal servants. The rest he’s viewed as already dead.  

    When we don’t keep the day of reckoning on our minds, that’s when we succumb, thinking we have time, when in reality we may be out of time, we have become to lax. We left the race or we become to weighed down.  

    Try preaching  the love of Christ in a time of WAR, and you’ll begin to understand what the apostles went through and concluded " For a certainty …….nothing will separate the love”

    Unprepared, to tired, to easy to say we can put off doing the work, the Apostles might have given up. If they had been convinced there was no URGENCY  The enemy convincing his prey, there is no end, you don’t need to look for signs, you have time to focus on another road.

    Yeah!  the other road that is spacious and full, leading to death.  Didn’t you see the sign?   

    If I look for signs, portents, omens it is hardly my interpretation that brings me harm, the harm comes from being inattentive.

    The servant saying, “The master returns, and I’m off doing other things.” Why didn’t someone alert me?

    “Stay awake, for you do not know…… It will come as a thief in the night”.

    It is the relationship that is “special” and all because of ACCURATE knowledge.


    There are many Christians working to deliver aid and comfort to flood and hurricane victims. The stories of those Christians will not be given the prominence of the story of the nutjob who repeatedly predicts the end of the world and is repeatedly found to be wrong.

    The public perception of Christians aided by a bias in press coverage of the actions of Christians becomes the image of the nutjob.


    Although the folks who actually believed that the world was coming to an end were a tiny group, there is a rather sizeable group out there who propelled the Left Behind series of novels to #1 bestsellers.  I live in a community where these latter group of people make a good portion of the population.  A lot of the jokes directed at the small group of people who actually thought it was going to happen were really being directed at all those people who think that indeed there will be a rapture someday.  In part because that belieft in one's specialness spills over into how they interact in the social and work spheres with the ones who are seen as the left behinders (if there is such a term).  It can be very annoying and frustrating, especially when is in no position to tell them how one really feels about their attitudes.  So having the fanatics one can joke about was a way to let off some built up steam.


    Doc, as a non-Christian, I have a little trouble with the parsing of VIP versus Big Tent Christians. While today's popular conception of the Rapture may be a relatively new one, it seems to me that Christianity has always been a VIP religion, body and soul. From the very beginning, faith in Jesus has been a requirement for salvation . Under the reign of the Catholic Church, excommunication was one of the greatest penalties. Luther and Calvin created new VIP clubs in the 1500s, spawning a century of war, and the religion continues to splinter into holier-than-thou sects.

    It's only in the past half-century that your Big Tent notion of non-Christian salvation has become popular. I welcome it, but I suspect that Harold Camping's nutty rapture prophesy is much more typical of the 2,000 year-old Christian tradition than your tolerant ideology.


    The same major changes have happened with Civil Rights, women's rights and even more recently Gay rights. The change should be acknowledged and celebrated. Obviously not everyone shares in the enlightenment. There is alaways a tribal tendency to vew the "other" is subhuman because it raises your status within the tribe, especially a tribe of the uninformed and rigid.

    If someone in Camping's group pointed out Camping's past end of the world error, that person would immediatley nobe a longer trusted member of Camping's group. There will still be people who will be following the false prophet on October 21st, but importantly, the overwhelming majoriy of Christians won't.


    Sorry to replay to this so late; I posted while traveling.

    Actually, it is not true that all Christians everywhere have believed that non-Christians cannot be saved (although I will not excuse the bigotry of many Christians over the millennia). And it is certainly not a recent idea. One of the Church Fathers, Origen, taught in the 2nd century CE that a loving and omnipotent God would ultimately save everyone, including the fallen angels. In Origen's theology, history does not end with the casting of the damned into Hell, but with Satan's repentance.

    In more recent history, there have long been various Christian doctrines outlining the ways in which just and good-willed non-Christians can be saved. Some of those doctrines were outlined, with cartoon illustrations, in the ultra-conservative Baltimore Catechism my ultra-conservative parish visited upon us in my childhood. Believe me, there is not a single idea in that book that dates from after 1960, or really much after 1860. But it was clear that the salvation of non-Christians was expected. (C. S. Lewis's theologically retrograde Narnia books likewise illustrate this idea for small children, specifically implying the salvation of good-hearted Muslims.)

    Nor does Camping limit the damned to non-Christians. Like certain strands of Christian belief, but more so, he believes that the majority of Christians will be damned. And he's not just talking about hypocrites and closet atheists. He believes that most good, sincere, and benevolent Christians will be damned to hell forever, by the God they love and worship, because they don't happen to be exactly the sub-sub-sub-sub-type of Christian that Camping is.

    And the Rapture idea, the notion that God's special favorites get a free pass to skip the end of the world, is a very new and deeply suspect idea. That it's caught on with Tim LaHaye's vast readership doesn't make it old, or orthodox, let alone a good example of Christian charity.

     


    I don't follow Paul so I won't enumerate the many ways one could argue against indulging in the desire to know the date "when the world ends" within the established tradition.

    What I have learned in the call to practice something new is that I know very little. 

    The most compelling aspect of the end of days idea for me is how it makes the problem of evil a matter of time itself. It is odd how something that was designed to inculcate humility has given rise to so much arrogance. Or even. Your results may vary.


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