Craig C. Hill: The end of the world - again

Rumors of this world's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Consider the example of William Miller, a Baptist farmer from New York who was convinced that Christ would return to earth in the early 1840s. With the assistance of Boston preacher Joshua Himes, Miller persuaded tens of thousands of Christians that the "day of the Lord" was at hand. Some followers even quit jobs and sold property in anticipation of the Second Coming. What came instead was the so-called Great Disappointment, and with it the discrediting of William Miller. Within a short time, however, Miller's shoes were filled by others who reinterpreted the texts, reworked the math, and issued new and equally assured predictions.

The first End Times best seller was not Volume 1 of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series; nor was it Hal Lindsey's 1970s blockbuster The Late Great Planet Earth. That distinction belongs instead to William E. Blackstone's 1878 book Jesus Is Coming, which was published in three editions and 47 languages. Since that time, waves of Last Days enthusiasm have swept regularly over portions of American Christianity. The current peak in interest is attributable to several factors, not least the effective use of mass media on the part of a handful of self-described fundamentalist "prophecy scholars."

Despite the staggering sales figures for Left Behind books and related merchandise –– a new movie is due out next week –– most Christians are not caught up in End Times fever. In fact, in many churches the subject is hardly mentioned. In a way, that is unfortunate, because the Bible's apocalyptic passages do have vital lessons to teach modern believers, even those who are not fundamentalists and who view with skepticism the text-twisting and date-setting tendencies of many popular writers.

Ancient apocalypses were written primarily in times of distress and dislocation. The vision they convey is at once a testimony of faith, a call to endurance, and a critique of present reality. That last point is often missed. One's dreams for the future are to an extent the photonegative of one's dissatisfactions with the present. The author of Revelation saw the Roman Empire as a demonic beast, the embodiment of evil, whose destiny was destruction. Against a background of persecution and oppression, the book asserts the counterclaims of God's reign, characterized by justice and peace.

It has been said that to know only one thing is to know nothing. In this case, to interpret a text apart from its context is usually to misinterpret it. It is obvious that America's prophecy pundits know the Bible well on one level. What is less obvious is their knowledge of the Bible's historical, literary, and theological contexts.

For example, very few such authors acknowledge that Revelation is predated by a number of similar books. Many ideas in these apocalyptic texts were themselves imported from other sources, including ancient political prophecies about a coming golden age that would be preceded by a period of tribulation. That their writers borrowed concepts from Persian, Babylonian, Canaanite and other sources ought neither to surprise nor to alarm us. What matters is that they used these symbols to say something theologically distinctive and important about the nature of the universe and the meaningfulness of human history. The essential point is that, despite all contrary appearances, God and not evil is the final reality.

It is helpful to compare Genesis and Revelation, the first and last books of the Bible. The opening chapters of Genesis may be characterized as theology projected onto the past. The author used a typical ancient Near Eastern creation account, complete with watery chaos, to express several core theological convictions. If Israel's God is God, then creation is good, humans are made in God's image, and so on.

Similarly, in words and concepts familiar to its time, the Book of Revelation gives us theology projected onto the future. Both Genesis and Revelation can express theological truth about human origins and human destiny without being literal descriptions of either the world's seven-day beginning or its seven-year ending.

At worst, belief in God's ultimate victory becomes an excuse for escapism. If Christ is about to return, there may be little incentive for believers to shoulder the heavy load of social and political responsibility. Belief that the Second Coming must be preceded by deteriorating conditions greatly compounds the problem. To such a mindset, bad news is good news.

As both a Christian and a biblical studies professor, I do not think that the answer is to rid ourselves of hope. At best, belief in God's coming reign empowers believers to live with purpose and to embrace values higher than those of the marketplace. Such a vision also can equip us to change the present in conformity to the hoped-for future, to "live into" the promised peaceable kingdom. Of all the sayings of Jesus about the future, perhaps the most timely is this: "Blessed are those servants whom the master will find at work when he arrives" (Matthew 24:46).

Dr. Craig C. Hill is professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., and the author of In God's Time: The Bible and the Future (Eerdmans). See www.InGodsTime.com.