A History of the End of the World Read Online Free Page B

her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine, and she shall be utterly burned with fire,” writes the author of Revelation, displaying not a hint of Christian charity but plenty of smug satisfaction at the scourging of his enemies. “Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets, for God hath avenged you on her.” 46 At the climax of his vision of the end of the world, the author of Revelation is seized with the uncompromising (and unseemly) desire to watch his enemies suffer and die.
    “Do unto her as she has done to your people,” he implores the sword-wielding Lamb of God. “She brewed a cup of terror for others, so give her twice as much as she gave out. She has lived in luxury and pleasure, so match it now with torments and sorrow.” 47
     
     
     
    The conventional apology for such rhetorical excess is that Revelation consists of morale-boosting propaganda by and for the victims of oppression and persecution—“the messages addressed by ancient apocalyptic seers to those engulfed by suffering and overwhelmed by dread.” 48 That is why, for example, one modern theologian insists that Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, a stirring manifesto of the American civil rights movement, reflects “experiences and hopes similar to the theology of Revelation.” 49 More recently, however, some courageous scholars have suggested that the author of Revelation was probably not himself at risk of torture and death at the time and in the place where he lived and worked. Indeed, as it turns out, the rhetoric of Revelation is no less compelling to those who imagine themselves to be persecuted than it is to those who actually are persecuted.
    “When thinking of the torments which will be the lot of Christians at the time of Anti-Christ,” mused Thérèse of Lisieux, a nun in nineteenth-century France, shortly before her death from illness at the age of twenty-four, “I feel my heart leap with joy and I would that these torments be reserved for me.” 50
    But it is also true that Revelation, now and then, moves some of its more excitable readers to act out their own fantasies of revenge and martyrdom. “Assurance that the end is nigh,” observes one contemporary scholar, “often brings with it profoundly dangerous baggage.” 51 A young man named Vernon Howell, for example, joined an apocalyptic sect called the Branch Davidians, dubbed himself “David Koresh” in a coded reference to two messianic figures of the Hebrew Bible, and led his followers into martyrdom in a standoff with federal law-enforcement agents, all because he was convinced that God had revealed to him that the battle of Armageddon was destined to start in Waco, Texas. Koresh, too, is an unremarkable example of a very old phenomenon, and we shall see how the apocalyptic idea has worked on unstable minds over the last twenty centuries.
    Some of the recent readings of Revelation would be laughable if they were not so creepy. Contemporary traffickers in end-of-the-world prophecy have resorted to the ancient biblical text to find explanations for various phenomena of our anxiety-ridden age, both real and imagined, including alien abduction, UFOs, nuclear proliferation, the Kennedy assassination, the sexual revolution, the digital revolution, the AIDS epidemic, and much else besides—“an example of Americans’ insatiable appetite for the unusual, spectacular and exotic,” as one scholar proposes. 52 And Revelation, which imagines the existence of a vast conspiracy of princes, powers, and principalities in ser vice to Satan, feeds even the most outlandish paranoid fantasies about the hidden workings of the world in which we live.
    Above all, Revelation is now—and has always been—a potent rhetorical weapon in a certain kind of culture war, a war of contesting values and aspirations, that has been waged throughout human history. The author of Revelation, as we shall see, condemns any Christian who