Cynics Unlimited

“It’s the end of the world as we know it,” go the lyrics of a song by the rock group REM.  Indeed, the end of the world seems to be a recurring theme these days.  Just recently the international newswires reported on a Russian doomsday sect that hid in a cave awaiting the impending apocalypse.  Eleven years earlier the California-based cult Heaven’s Gate made headlines when its members, fearing the Earth would be “recycled” along with all its inhabitants, sought to escape this fate by committing suicide en masse.  But millennialism (the belief that the world will soon end) is not the exclusive domain of religious extremists: various secular authorities have forecast global destruction caused by overpopulation and nuclear war among other things.  What therefore is behind such thinking and how should we interpret it?

Christian millennialists tend to base their views on two parts of the Bible: the Gospels and the Book of Revelation.  In the former Jesus states that when He comes again “Heaven and earth shall pass away” (Matthew 24:35).  This will be preceded by “wars and rumours of wars… famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes” (Matthew 24: 6-7).  In Revelation the Apostle John describes a scenario whereby the forces of Satan and those of Christ fight one another in the Battle of Armageddon, following which the wicked are thrown into a lake of fire (Revelation 20:15).  John then sees a “new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and first earth were passed away” (Revelation 21:1).  Many Christian doomsayers believe that after the Earth is destroyed Christ will reign over it for a thousand years, from Revelation 20:4′s “they [the just] lived and reigned with Christ for a thousand years.”

A well-known millennialist religion is the Jehovah Witnesses.  They basically centre their entire existence around the Battle of Armageddon, which they feel will take place sooner rather than later and after which the true believers (i.e. the Jehovah Witnesses) will inhabit an earthly paradise.  Over the years the Witnesses have set several specific points in time for the apocalypse, among them 1910, 1914 and 1975. When these prophecies fail to materialize, the dates are merely pushed forward.  For example, in 1975 some Witnesses were disappointed when the Vietnam War drew to a close, as they had viewed it as a sign of the Earth’s final hour and the return of Jesus Christ.  On a more humorous note, author Faye Resnick – a chronicler of the O.J. Simpson case – wrote in her book The Diary of a Private Life Interrupted that her parents’ embrace of the Jehovah Witness faith motivated her to lose her virginity in her teens because she wanted to have that experience before the end came.

One denomination that began as a millennialist group but later moved away from that position is the Seventh Day Adventist Church.  Their founder, a former Baptist preacher named William Miller, had predicted that Christ would return to Earth in 1844.  When this did not happen, Adventists became disinclined to make further such predictions.  For instance, unlike some other fundamentalists the Seventh Day Adventists declined to declare the AIDS epidemic a signal of the end times.

The Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and mainline Protestant (Lutheran, Anglican, etcetera) Churches – the so-called liturgical churches – officially reject millennialism.  They go by the premise that it is not for humankind to know when Jesus will come again or when the present world will end.  However, some individual members or subgroups within these denominations do look to an immediate apocalypse.  The above-mentioned Russian doomsday sect was a breakaway faction of the Orthodox Church.  A Catholic friend told me of an aunt and uncle of his who stored food, candles and other supplies in their basement in the event of Armageddon.  Nonetheless, it is safe to say that the majority of Catholics, Orthodox and traditional Protestants do not see the Earth’s final hour as occurring anytime soon.  Fundamentalist Protestant denominations like the Baptists and Pentecostals take a sort of middle position between that of the liturgical churches and, say, the Jehovah Witnesses.  Many of their members believe in an upcoming Rapture but do not place it at the centre of their theology.

As I stated previously, not all millennial philosophies have been religious.  One famous doomsday tract was the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, an atheist.  He claimed that the rising human population would bring about a series of global catastrophes.  His imagery of these disasters rivalled that of the Book of Revelation. For example, Ehrlich said that all ocean life would become extinct from DDT poisoning, that thousands would die in smog disasters in major American cities, and that by 2000 England would no longer exist (a prediction that seems almost humorous to me as a Canadian paying taxes to Good Queen Liz).  When these cataclysmic events failed to occur, he followed in the footsteps of the Jehovah Witnesses: he simply postponed them.  Obviously Ehrlich’s lack of religious faith did not stop him from embarking on a fire and brimstone-style tirade.

How should we view the millennial movement?  I personally have always referred to Jesus’ statement that only the Father knows when the present Earth will pass away (Matthew 24:36).  It therefore strikes me as rather blasphemous to purport to know the exact time the world will end when Jesus Himself makes no such claim.  I also have a problem with the millennialist doctrine that the reign of Christ, which in my church’s doctrine is happening right now, amounts to literally one thousand years.  St. Peter in his Epistle warns against trying to foretell Judgement Day by human standards of time.  “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (II Peter 3:8),” he explains.  Finally, the great Doctor of the Church St. Augustine writes in City of God that “it is in vain, therefore, that we try to reckon and put a limit to the number of years that remain for this world, since we hear from the mouth of Truth that it is not for us to know this.”  From a purely rationalistic perspective, if a stockbroker advised me to invest in ventures that continually lost money, I would do well to change stockbrokers.  Given their poor track record, it might be worth taking prophets of gloom and doom, whether secular or religious, with a cattle saltlick.