The End Is Not Yet

Standing Firm in Apocalyptic Times

John W. de Gruchy, Ashley Moyse, Scott A. Kirkland, Ashley John Moyse, Ashley Moyse, Scott A. Kirkland

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506431574
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506438504
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The title of this book comes from Matthew‘s Gospel: "You will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. . . . There will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs." (24:6-8). This locates The End Is Not Yet within popular religious rhetoric about the "end time" and more sophisticated theological discourse on eschatology or Christian hope for a better world premised on faith in God. But is such faith still justified? And if so, how are we to describe and embody it in the life of the world? The framework of the book is the current global historical context with a particular focus on the West, and especially the political and social issues that have been highlighted by the election of Donald Trump. Among these are totalitarianism and democracy, right-wing nationalism, apocalypticism and patriotism, globalization and economic injustice, terrorism and warmongering, and political and prophetic leadership.

I

The Times in Which We Live

1

Is This the End?

Have there ever been people in history who in their time, like us, had so little ground under their feet, people to whom every possible alternative open to them at the time appeared equally unbearable, senseless, and contrary to life? Have there ever been those who like us looked for the source of their strength beyond all those available alternatives?

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer^[1]

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand . . .

—W. B. Yeats^[2]

Chinua Achebe, the distinguished Nigerian author, died the day I began writing this chapter. His novel, Things Fall Apart, written sixty years ago, calls to mind W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.” Its opening lines have since become an overused mantra, yet few others capture so well the cultural despair of these days in relation to the themes of this book. The center is not holding, the left is faltering, and the right is in ascendency. We fear both the anarchy let loose and the militarist solutions looming in response. Good leaders lack conviction, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Yeats wrote against the background of the struggle for Irish independence shortly after the First World War; Achebe, as the winds of decolonization swept through sub-Saharan Africa.^[3] I write as a South African twenty-two years after the end of Apartheid and twenty after the Constitution of the new democratic South Africa was signed into law by Nelson Mandela. Back then the Cold War was over, democracy was spreading across the world, and globalization was moving into top gear. Future prospects seemed bright as more affluent nations adopted New Millennium goals for uplifting those that were poor. The center was holding. Dreams of a new world were coming true. That seems a long time ago.

Apocalyptic Times

Before his death Jesus told his disciples he would return soon to usher in God’s kingdom or, better, God’s reign of justice and peace on earth. Ever since, many Christians have tried to determine whether current wars and natural disasters are signs of Jesus’s imminent second advent. Time and again they have been disappointed, but speculation has not ceased and, in times of crisis, expectations rise to new levels. In such times, countless sermons refer to current “wars and rumors of war” and “famines and earthquakes in various places,” as proof that the “end times” are approaching. This is the stuff on which fundamentalist predictive prophecy thrives, but is this the prophetic word we need to hear?

It is easy to dismiss apocalyptic views as the beliefs of a few fundamentalist cranks on the fringes of Christianity. But the texts from which they draw their inspiration are embedded in the Bible, and many literally accept their authority in interpreting historical events. The fact is, Christianity gestated in an apocalyptic milieu, and apocalyptic movements have regularly surfaced during its history. The Book of Revelation, which was written to encourage Christians to persevere in hope in such times, ends with the confident acclamation of the risen Christ: “Surely, I am coming soon!” The responsive cry, “Amen. Come Lord Jesus!”^[4] still echoes when Christians celebrate the Eucharist. Belief in the Second Coming is part of our creed, a symbol of hope that in the end, as Julian of Norwich envisioned in fourteenth-century war-torn England, “all shall be well.”^[5]

Although many major Christian thinkers up to the fourth century believed that Christ would soon return to establish his reign of a thousand years, or the millennium, referred to in the Apocalypse of St. John,^[6] Christians soon began to accept that the end was not imminent. Therefore they had to rethink their response to Jesus’s promise of an early return. So less apocalyptic ways of understanding the “end times” began to develop. From the fourth century, some began to equate the Catholic Church itself with the coming kingdom of God, a conviction that underlies the medieval notion of the Holy Roman Empire as “Christendom.”

Within Christendom, millenarian movements were soon regarded as a threat to the state. Apocalyptic ideas, such as the dispensationalist views proclaimed by the Franciscan friar Joachim de Fiore in twelfth-century Florence, or those reforming movements that depicted the pope as the anti-Christ referred to in the Book of Revelation, were forcefully suppressed. Despite this, they regularly erupted into the public arena in times of social and political unrest, as they did in England during the Civil War in the seventeenth century, and through much of the nineteenth century in the United States. In the process, two distinct understandings of the “end times” emerged: premillennial and postmillennial.

Premillennialists expect Christ to return to inaugurate his reign on earth before the final judgment of the world. Many fundamentalists who espouse this view are also “dispensationalists,” believing that God acts in ways that are particular to seven distinct historical epochs, beginning with the age of “Adam before the Fall” and ending with the millennium. According to them, we live today in the “age of grace,” which extends from Pentecost to the return of Christ when he will redeem his followers from the world before the catastrophic “end time.”

Postmillennialists, by contrast, believe that God is at work establishing his kingdom in the world through his Spirit active in the missionary activity of the church. If premillennialists are somewhat pessimistic, believing that the world will get worse before the end, postmillennialists are hopeful that the world will get better through revivals, missionary outreach, and social action. This is similar to the position of some fundamentalists who wish to build a theocratic rather than a just secular society; but it was also the basis for the “social gospel” in America, the idea that the kingdom of God could and should be extended by working for justice and peace.

The idea that the world might come to an end, whether soon or in the distant future, is not only the view of Christians, it is also a view expressed from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other, though understood differently. Following the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989, and the seeming victory of liberal democracy and global capitalism, the neoconservative American Francis Fukuyama argued that the “end of history” had arrived.^[7] That is not the same as saying that the end of the world has arrived, but certainly Fukuyama meant the end of history as we know it. Fukuyama could not have been more wrong. Starting at the same historic moment, the Slovenian neo-Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek has more recently taken a very different and more sobering position. Hope for a more just world has collapsed, he says, and “the noble struggle for freedom and justice has turned out to be little more than a craving for bananas and pornography.”^[8] Then there are those who, like the economist James Rickards, in the light of the current financial crises, proclaim that “this is the end.” And because governing elites will not surrender privilege without a fight, there “will be,” he says, “blood in the streets, not metaphorically but literally. Neofascism will emerge, order responding to disorder, with liberty lost.”^[9]

But the notion that the end of the world is approaching also has the support of scientists who warn us about the ecological disasters we face. This does not carry with it the hopeful vision of a “new earth” as depicted in the Book of Revelation, but either way, the liberal belief in inevitable progress, a core conviction of modernity, now appears untenable. As Satyajit Das reminds us, the recession that followed the banking collapse in 2007 demonstrated “that perpetual growth and progress is an illusion.”^[10] This does not mean that development is unnecessary, but progress as we have come to understand it is not sustainable in a world where energy, food, and water are increasingly scarce commodities. Present-day demographics, escalating violence, the beating of war drums, the fight against terrorism, financial turbulence, natural disaster, and environmental decay are producing a cumulative effect that is frighteningly apocalyptic in size and scope. Whether as an “act of God” or one of human stupidity, or a combination of both, the end could come at any moment.

Sermons about the end times do not need, then, to create a receptive audience; their modern audience has been brought up on movies, computer war games, and media reports that have made the fulfillment of their prophecies virtual reality. Such is the uncertain and fearful context in which we live. The “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”^[11]—plague, war, famine, and death—have returned in our time with frightening intensity. Only now, in Žižek’s words, they are the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biological revolution, imbalances within the capitalist system, and struggles over resources along with the “explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.”^[12]

Before going further I need to clarify the nature of apocalyptic literature, such as the Revelation of St. John.^[13] It is not a predictive text about what will literally happen in historical time, but an attempt to understand the present time as a battleground between the powers of good and evil, between God and Satan, with a firm anticipation that God will ultimately be the victor and the world will be transformed for the better. The whole point of John’s Apocalypse is to assure believers that evil will not triumph, and to exhort them to persevere and remain faithful.

Apocalyptic literature, in other words, is highly symbolic, and therefore the attempt to read into the Book of Revelation historical events of the past or present indicates a misunderstanding of the genre. To speak of the apocalyptic times in which we live does not mean that certain prophecies in the Bible are literally coming true, even if many allusions are frighteningly realistic. In these times in which we live the struggle between good and evil, between justice and oppression, between truth and lies, is becoming intense, thus demanding great vigilance and faithfulness on the part of those seeking to be faithful disciples of Jesus. But the language and symbols used are metaphorical. When taken as though they refer to historical people and events, we end up with an ideology, apocalypticism, something akin to what Bonhoeffer called “ethical fanaticism.”^[14]

Apocalypticism is not simply the pervas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Additional Praise for The End Is Not Yet
• Dispatches: Turning Points in Theology and Global Crises
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Remember the End
• The Times in Which We Live
• The People We Need to Become
• Postscript: Awaiting the Second Advent
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Subjects