It’s the end of the world!!!
Well, actually, it’s not. But here’s a collection of several somewhat recent posts and articles pertaining to The End Times, the Last Days, and various other apocalypseseseses.
• Scot McKnight, “The Relevance of the Book of Revelation”
Revelation is best used when one is doing analysis of culture and society and is best put down when one wants to know what will happen in the future. In other words, Revelation is potent political theology and not speculative eschatology.
• Hännah Ettinger, “A Primer of Terrible Christian Apocalypse Movies”
So, Nicolas Cage in the new Left Behind? It could get worse. But believe me, my generation of church kids are going to be watching this from RedBox and we’re going to be playing some serious drinking games. …
• Adam Kotsko, “History’s Greatest Monster: Antiochus Epiphanes and the Devil”
Politically, this led to the Maccabean insurgency and the subsequent repeated waves of Jewish militancy that really only ended with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Theologically, we can see the Book of Daniel as an attempt to expand the old schema in a way that can make sense of Antiochus’s gratuitous evil as part of God’s plan — and it seems that the only way that is possible is by making Antiochus’s qualitatively different evil the last step before God’s qualitatively different apocalyptic intervention, symbolized by the resurrection of the dead. Paradoxically, then, when the earthly ruler becomes intolerably evil, his status is somehow “promoted.” He is no longer simply God’s unwitting pawn, he is God’s adversary — and yet still somehow his servant insofar as he has a role to play in the divine plan.
(See also Kotsko on “The definitive interpretation of Revelation” and “The birth pangs of apocalyptic.” Good stuff.)
• Is That in the Bible? “The Mark of the Beast Demystified”
One of the great things about higher criticism of the Bible is its ability to provide real insight as to what the stranger passages of the Bible were meant to convey to their intended readers — who were not us, by the way. But before taking a look at the actual text and context of Revelation, let’s amuse ourselves with a look at what the best and brightest of the modern-day prophets say the mark of the beast is about. …
• Kurt Willems, “Why the Rapture Isn’t Biblical, and Why It Matters”
Rapture invites us to escape this world: the last thing that Jesus would have ever taught. “On earth as in heaven” is what he said, not “in heaven away from the earth.” Our world’s future is hopeful.
• Jürgen Moltmann, in Ethics of Hope
A religious escapism is coming to the fore especially in the present spread of a vague Gnostic religiosity of redemption. The person who surrenders himself to this religiosity feels at home in ‘the world beyond’ and on earth sees himself merely as a guest. So it is only by the way he is concerned about the fate of life on this earth. His soul is going to heaven, that is the main thing. In the body and on this earth, it was no more than a gust, so the fate of this hostelry really has nothing to do with him. Religious practices lauding an indifference to life are offered under many high-sounding names. A Western form of Buddhism has many adherents but has little to do with original Indian Buddhism. American pop-apocalyptic offers an especially dramatic escapism. Before the great afflictions at the end of the world, true believers will be ‘raptured’ — snatched away to heaven, so that they can then build the new world with Christ at his Second Coming. All unbelievers unfortunately belong to the “Left Behind,” the people who are not “caught up” and who will perish in the downfall of the world (Left Behind is the title of an American book series read by millions). Whether people throw themselves into the pleasures of the present or flee into the next world because they either cannot or will not withstand the threats, they destroy the love for life and put themselves at the services of terror and the annihilation of the world. Today life itself is in acute danger because in one way or the other it is no longer loved but is delivered over to the forces of destruction.
• Caitlin Dickson, “Agenda 21: The UN Conspiracy That Just Won’t Die”
As recently as 2012, the SPLC writes, the Republican National Committee’s platform included the line, “We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.”
Several anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi groups have also jumped on the anti-Agenda 21 bandwagon, seizing the opportunity to blame the controversial document on none other than the Jews.
“Anti-Semitism is basically a conspiracy theory,” the American Jewish Committee’s Ken Stern told the SPLC. He explains how neo-Nazis have linked Agenda 21 to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a falsified document that is alleged to reveal a secret Jewish plot to take over the world.
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