Seeing the Apocalypse
L31
Isa. 64:1-9a
Ps. 80:1-7
1 Cor. 1:1-9
Mk. 13: (24-32) 33-7
Your eyes do not collect sense data and then simply download it to your brain. Scientists now understand that this is a feedback system. To see these flowers, sense data enters a lower part of the brain called the primary visual cortex which determines the shape of the flowers. A higher region then recognizes their colors. Then an even higher part of the brain decides what kind of flowers these are and accesses other facts that you already know about flowers.
Scientists point out that there are ten times as many nerve fibers carrying information from the higher to the lower regions of the brain as in the opposite direction. What you already know is a large part of what makes it possible for you to see new things. The way that the brain works from the top down also explains why placebos like sugar pills or nocebos such as witch doctor curses have actual physiological effects.
It shows how hypnotism works to some degree in eighty percent of the adult population. Psychologists have long been aware of what they call the Stroop Effect. Researchers will show a subject cards with color words printed on them. The only problem is that the color of the ink does not match the word described (for instance, the word purple will be printed in green ink). If you can read the word this causes a measurable delay in recognizing the color.
10-15% of adults are highly hypnotizable and 20% are resistant to hypnosis. Scientists have hypnotized people in this first group to experience the printed word as gibberish. Afterwards when tested they showed no hesitation in recognizing the colors of the ink. They were in effect immune to the Stroop Effect. By working on their higher mind scientists changed the way they physiologically perceived the world.
This is one way that prayer and meditation, religious or philosophical beliefs affect our experience of the world. The awareness of this effect that prior beliefs have on perception is part of what people call postmodernism. People who describe themselves as postmodern often emphasize that this is an age of competing world pictures. They are less likely to propose what they call “grand narratives” (other than postmodernism) for understanding human experience, knowledge and history.
This month in a lecture at Harvard College the writer Salman Rushdie (1947- ) spoke about some of the challenges that novelists face in this cultural situation. He compared our time with nineteenth century Britain. Jane Austen’s novels do not include supernatural elements or radical shifts in perspective. (These novels focus so intensely on local life that they barely even mention the Napoleonic Wars which were happening at the time.) In that era there were few South Asians or Africans in Britain so there was more of a consensus on how the world was.
Rushdie says that this type of realism, “depended on the writer and reader having a shared description of what the world was like, a shared worldview. But today, reality is highly contested. There's a real debate about the simple nature of what is the case, and in that context, the realism of the 19th century novel is not workable. It seems like a fiction."
I think that reality has always been contested. However today we are more likely to accept a broader range of possible pictures of the world. In part this is because of a new respect for the limits of scientific knowledge and the technology and cultural exchange that exposes us to more people with values that differ from our own.
Sermons from my childhood justified Christian faith in a world of encroaching secularism. They proved that faith in God is reasonable. In many respects the situation today is more complicated. As Christians we need to know more than why our faith is compatible with modern knowledge. But we also have to understand how we differ from Christian fundamentalists. Nowhere is Christian reality more “contested” than when it comes to apocalypticism, to biblical prophecies depicting the end of time. This morning I want to explore where these ideas come from and their influence on how Christians understand their place in a complex modern world.
1. The Bible should really be regarded as a library of books with many different authors who wrote at different times rather than as a single genre. I wince when I hear “the Bible says” (especially when I say it). Authors in the Bible at times have conflicting points of view, they use different kinds of literary genres to reach very different audiences in different historical and cultural contexts.
The Bible isn’t chiefly about prophecies concerning the end of the world. However, there is a biblical genre called apocalyptic which uses colorful symbols and allegory to describe mystical visions of future conflict. These accounts rely on the idea that God works on a massive historical scale and that through symbols a reader can discern the specific details of God’s project.
In today’s gospel Jesus himself says, “about that day or hour [when the world ends] no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mk. 13). Despite this Christians have presumed to know quite a bit about the end. Mostly they cite the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation and today’s chapter from Mark.
The book of Ezekiel comes out of the experience of Israel in the sixth century B.C. war between Babylon and Egypt. Political leaders forced to take sides in the conflict and were defeated by the Babylonians and exiled. Daniel’s book forecasts the future defeat of all Israel’s enemies as they invade the holy land. It describes the stench of dead bodies which it took seven months to bury.
The book of Daniel has had a far greater effect on the ultimate shape of this genre. This was written in the second century B.C. and addresses the political situation after Alexander the Great’s world empire had been divided into massive kingdoms. In this situation the king in Syria plundered the temple in Jerusalem, appointed his own Greek-influenced priests and established Greek cultural practices (like the gymnasium) in Israel. By the year 167 B.C. Antiochus more openly tried to destroy Judaism by forcing Jews to take part in pagan rituals and by setting up a statue of Zeus in the Temple.
Daniel’s book describes prophecies of these events that Daniel made during the much earlier reign of king Nebuchadnezzar. The king dreams of a statue with a gold head, chest and arms of silver, stomach and upper legs of brass, legs of iron and feet of clay. A stone shatters the feet and grows to dominate the world. Daniel explains that the statue represents kingdoms, each with less glory. The stone represents a kingdom that shall not be destroyed. Daniel also has dreams of beasts with human features combined with those of lions, leopards and eagles with lots of horns arising out of the sea. These too are kingdoms but Daniel’s description of this prophecy is more complicated and less clear. Ultimately he prophecies that the temple shall be cleansed of its desecration and God’s kingdom established after a terrible battle at the “time of the end.”
A man named John wrote the New Testament Book of Revelation during the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitian (81-96 A.D.) from exile off the coast of Asia minor. After letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor, John describes eighteen wildly symbolic visions. These include terrifying disasters, plagues and warfare. The sea turns to blood, water is poisoned, horrifying locusts attack. People are forced to worship a beast with seven heads and ten horns. Kings who have fornicated with the Whore of Babylon wage war against the Lamb of God. Then Satan is defeated and sealed in a pit for a thousand years – the millennium. During this time Christ reigns on earth until he destroys Satan permanently in a final battle. Then God judges all the people who ever lived. Revelation ends with an image of eternal life in the New Jerusalem.
2. I believe that all these authors use symbolic language to describe their own historical situations. For John Babylon is the Roman Empire which demands total allegiance and crushes Christian dissent. Millions of Americans strongly disagree with this view. Although apocalyptic literature in the Bible has been applied to historical figures and events ranging from the fall of Rome through the Protestant Reformation to the recent invasion of Iraq, this way of seeing the world has particularly taken hold in America.
John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) was a premillenialist who believed that his was the age before Christ’s reign of a thousand years. He was a dispensationalist. This meant that he thought God deals differently with humanity in each age. One age of prophesied events ended with Jesus’ crucifixion. The next would begin with the rapture when true believers would rise up in the air to meet Jesus. After that, those left behind would face the seven year rule of the Antichrist and the Apostate Church during what he called the Tribulation. Then there would be the Battle of Armageddon, the millennium and the final defeat of Satan.
Probably no other belief so clearly distinguishes biblical fundamentalists from other Christians than this prophecy culture which coalesced in the last two hundred years. This kind of fundamentalist is deeply interested in the state of Israel because of Daniel’s concern with desecration of the temple in Jerusalem as a sign of the end time. For a century they believed that the northern invaders of Israel mentioned in the Old Testament referred to Russia. In the twentieth century they regarded the invention of nuclear weapons as a clear sign of how the world would soon be destroyed.
The belief in a coming Antichrist who would rule the world created a paranoid fear of centralization and authoritarianism. This is why American fundamentalists feel so suspicious of organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank and the European Union. It is why computerized banking, the Internet and bar codes seem like such clear signs that the rapture is near. Rock bands that embed satanic symbolism in their music and war in the Middle East only add to this fear that everything is coming apart.
Your eyes do not collect sense data and then simply download it to your brain. What you believe shapes what you see and know. In a democracy with the most powerful military in history a fervent, overly-confident apocalypticism has an effect on world history. These modern prophecies of the endtime demonstrate a remarkable simplicity, an extreme confidence in the ability of human beings to understand the way that God works in history. At the same time this prophetic view of the world makes human action for the sake of justice or the environment or to end poverty or any other true goodness seem largely futile. It functions to make the believer feel both superior to others and at the same time ultimately not responsible.
Christians like you and me also face the same sense of alienation in the face of a complex often dehumanizing society. But the people who I know in this church believe in a larger God. This God does not speak in code. He wants all people to understand his will for them, that we become his partners when we love kindness, do justice and act mercifully. Science is no threat to our God. The more we learn about ourselves, our planet and the universe the better capable we are to understand God. God loves us enough to take care of us. But ultimately the way he acts, the way he brings peace and healing is mysterious.
_____________________
Eighty to eighty-five percent of children under the age of twelve are even more susceptible to hypnosis. Sandra Blakeslee, “This is Your Brain Under Hypnosis,” New York Times, 11-22-2005.
Ken Gewertz, “Challenges of a Modern Story-Teller: Rushdie Speaks about the Novel, the Real World and the Difference between the Two,” Harvard University Gazette 11-10-2005 (http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2005/11.10/09-rushdie.html).
Other apocalyptic works include: II Enoch, IV Ezra, II Baruch, III Baruch. See NT era works like the Apocalypse of Peter. Biblical books also include sections that make use of this genre: I and II Thessalonians, I Corinthians, II Peter, I and II John.
This sermon has been deeply shaped by Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 87.
Isa. 64:1-9a
Ps. 80:1-7
1 Cor. 1:1-9
Mk. 13: (24-32) 33-7
Your eyes do not collect sense data and then simply download it to your brain. Scientists now understand that this is a feedback system. To see these flowers, sense data enters a lower part of the brain called the primary visual cortex which determines the shape of the flowers. A higher region then recognizes their colors. Then an even higher part of the brain decides what kind of flowers these are and accesses other facts that you already know about flowers.
Scientists point out that there are ten times as many nerve fibers carrying information from the higher to the lower regions of the brain as in the opposite direction. What you already know is a large part of what makes it possible for you to see new things. The way that the brain works from the top down also explains why placebos like sugar pills or nocebos such as witch doctor curses have actual physiological effects.
It shows how hypnotism works to some degree in eighty percent of the adult population. Psychologists have long been aware of what they call the Stroop Effect. Researchers will show a subject cards with color words printed on them. The only problem is that the color of the ink does not match the word described (for instance, the word purple will be printed in green ink). If you can read the word this causes a measurable delay in recognizing the color.
10-15% of adults are highly hypnotizable and 20% are resistant to hypnosis. Scientists have hypnotized people in this first group to experience the printed word as gibberish. Afterwards when tested they showed no hesitation in recognizing the colors of the ink. They were in effect immune to the Stroop Effect. By working on their higher mind scientists changed the way they physiologically perceived the world.
This is one way that prayer and meditation, religious or philosophical beliefs affect our experience of the world. The awareness of this effect that prior beliefs have on perception is part of what people call postmodernism. People who describe themselves as postmodern often emphasize that this is an age of competing world pictures. They are less likely to propose what they call “grand narratives” (other than postmodernism) for understanding human experience, knowledge and history.
This month in a lecture at Harvard College the writer Salman Rushdie (1947- ) spoke about some of the challenges that novelists face in this cultural situation. He compared our time with nineteenth century Britain. Jane Austen’s novels do not include supernatural elements or radical shifts in perspective. (These novels focus so intensely on local life that they barely even mention the Napoleonic Wars which were happening at the time.) In that era there were few South Asians or Africans in Britain so there was more of a consensus on how the world was.
Rushdie says that this type of realism, “depended on the writer and reader having a shared description of what the world was like, a shared worldview. But today, reality is highly contested. There's a real debate about the simple nature of what is the case, and in that context, the realism of the 19th century novel is not workable. It seems like a fiction."
I think that reality has always been contested. However today we are more likely to accept a broader range of possible pictures of the world. In part this is because of a new respect for the limits of scientific knowledge and the technology and cultural exchange that exposes us to more people with values that differ from our own.
Sermons from my childhood justified Christian faith in a world of encroaching secularism. They proved that faith in God is reasonable. In many respects the situation today is more complicated. As Christians we need to know more than why our faith is compatible with modern knowledge. But we also have to understand how we differ from Christian fundamentalists. Nowhere is Christian reality more “contested” than when it comes to apocalypticism, to biblical prophecies depicting the end of time. This morning I want to explore where these ideas come from and their influence on how Christians understand their place in a complex modern world.
1. The Bible should really be regarded as a library of books with many different authors who wrote at different times rather than as a single genre. I wince when I hear “the Bible says” (especially when I say it). Authors in the Bible at times have conflicting points of view, they use different kinds of literary genres to reach very different audiences in different historical and cultural contexts.
The Bible isn’t chiefly about prophecies concerning the end of the world. However, there is a biblical genre called apocalyptic which uses colorful symbols and allegory to describe mystical visions of future conflict. These accounts rely on the idea that God works on a massive historical scale and that through symbols a reader can discern the specific details of God’s project.
In today’s gospel Jesus himself says, “about that day or hour [when the world ends] no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mk. 13). Despite this Christians have presumed to know quite a bit about the end. Mostly they cite the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation and today’s chapter from Mark.
The book of Ezekiel comes out of the experience of Israel in the sixth century B.C. war between Babylon and Egypt. Political leaders forced to take sides in the conflict and were defeated by the Babylonians and exiled. Daniel’s book forecasts the future defeat of all Israel’s enemies as they invade the holy land. It describes the stench of dead bodies which it took seven months to bury.
The book of Daniel has had a far greater effect on the ultimate shape of this genre. This was written in the second century B.C. and addresses the political situation after Alexander the Great’s world empire had been divided into massive kingdoms. In this situation the king in Syria plundered the temple in Jerusalem, appointed his own Greek-influenced priests and established Greek cultural practices (like the gymnasium) in Israel. By the year 167 B.C. Antiochus more openly tried to destroy Judaism by forcing Jews to take part in pagan rituals and by setting up a statue of Zeus in the Temple.
Daniel’s book describes prophecies of these events that Daniel made during the much earlier reign of king Nebuchadnezzar. The king dreams of a statue with a gold head, chest and arms of silver, stomach and upper legs of brass, legs of iron and feet of clay. A stone shatters the feet and grows to dominate the world. Daniel explains that the statue represents kingdoms, each with less glory. The stone represents a kingdom that shall not be destroyed. Daniel also has dreams of beasts with human features combined with those of lions, leopards and eagles with lots of horns arising out of the sea. These too are kingdoms but Daniel’s description of this prophecy is more complicated and less clear. Ultimately he prophecies that the temple shall be cleansed of its desecration and God’s kingdom established after a terrible battle at the “time of the end.”
A man named John wrote the New Testament Book of Revelation during the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitian (81-96 A.D.) from exile off the coast of Asia minor. After letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor, John describes eighteen wildly symbolic visions. These include terrifying disasters, plagues and warfare. The sea turns to blood, water is poisoned, horrifying locusts attack. People are forced to worship a beast with seven heads and ten horns. Kings who have fornicated with the Whore of Babylon wage war against the Lamb of God. Then Satan is defeated and sealed in a pit for a thousand years – the millennium. During this time Christ reigns on earth until he destroys Satan permanently in a final battle. Then God judges all the people who ever lived. Revelation ends with an image of eternal life in the New Jerusalem.
2. I believe that all these authors use symbolic language to describe their own historical situations. For John Babylon is the Roman Empire which demands total allegiance and crushes Christian dissent. Millions of Americans strongly disagree with this view. Although apocalyptic literature in the Bible has been applied to historical figures and events ranging from the fall of Rome through the Protestant Reformation to the recent invasion of Iraq, this way of seeing the world has particularly taken hold in America.
John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) was a premillenialist who believed that his was the age before Christ’s reign of a thousand years. He was a dispensationalist. This meant that he thought God deals differently with humanity in each age. One age of prophesied events ended with Jesus’ crucifixion. The next would begin with the rapture when true believers would rise up in the air to meet Jesus. After that, those left behind would face the seven year rule of the Antichrist and the Apostate Church during what he called the Tribulation. Then there would be the Battle of Armageddon, the millennium and the final defeat of Satan.
Probably no other belief so clearly distinguishes biblical fundamentalists from other Christians than this prophecy culture which coalesced in the last two hundred years. This kind of fundamentalist is deeply interested in the state of Israel because of Daniel’s concern with desecration of the temple in Jerusalem as a sign of the end time. For a century they believed that the northern invaders of Israel mentioned in the Old Testament referred to Russia. In the twentieth century they regarded the invention of nuclear weapons as a clear sign of how the world would soon be destroyed.
The belief in a coming Antichrist who would rule the world created a paranoid fear of centralization and authoritarianism. This is why American fundamentalists feel so suspicious of organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank and the European Union. It is why computerized banking, the Internet and bar codes seem like such clear signs that the rapture is near. Rock bands that embed satanic symbolism in their music and war in the Middle East only add to this fear that everything is coming apart.
Your eyes do not collect sense data and then simply download it to your brain. What you believe shapes what you see and know. In a democracy with the most powerful military in history a fervent, overly-confident apocalypticism has an effect on world history. These modern prophecies of the endtime demonstrate a remarkable simplicity, an extreme confidence in the ability of human beings to understand the way that God works in history. At the same time this prophetic view of the world makes human action for the sake of justice or the environment or to end poverty or any other true goodness seem largely futile. It functions to make the believer feel both superior to others and at the same time ultimately not responsible.
Christians like you and me also face the same sense of alienation in the face of a complex often dehumanizing society. But the people who I know in this church believe in a larger God. This God does not speak in code. He wants all people to understand his will for them, that we become his partners when we love kindness, do justice and act mercifully. Science is no threat to our God. The more we learn about ourselves, our planet and the universe the better capable we are to understand God. God loves us enough to take care of us. But ultimately the way he acts, the way he brings peace and healing is mysterious.
_____________________
Eighty to eighty-five percent of children under the age of twelve are even more susceptible to hypnosis. Sandra Blakeslee, “This is Your Brain Under Hypnosis,” New York Times, 11-22-2005.
Ken Gewertz, “Challenges of a Modern Story-Teller: Rushdie Speaks about the Novel, the Real World and the Difference between the Two,” Harvard University Gazette 11-10-2005 (http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2005/11.10/09-rushdie.html).
Other apocalyptic works include: II Enoch, IV Ezra, II Baruch, III Baruch. See NT era works like the Apocalypse of Peter. Biblical books also include sections that make use of this genre: I and II Thessalonians, I Corinthians, II Peter, I and II John.
This sermon has been deeply shaped by Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 87.
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