Putting the End of the World in Perspective

Doom sayers never give up.

Just when we thought we were over Hal Lindsey's too-loudly-trumpeted revelations of coming world catastrophe, we were greeted with the "Left Behind" series of Tim La Haye and Jerry Jenkins, now into ten volumes and counting. Surely even the most faithful followers of this series must find it more than occasionally monotonous. After all, how many ways can there be to scare people into getting ready for the rapture? As for tendentiousness, though, these books do not come even close to the rest of the high end, repent-now-or-else literature gobbling up precious shelf space in bookstores everywhere.

You don't have to be an apocalypse oriented Christian to play the end time lottery these days. Even highly respectable astrophysicists are weighing in, by reminding us that human destiny is inextricably tied to the eventual and certain death of the sun around which our planet revolves. A lot of social scientists are getting with the program, too, with their warnings that there will be no habitable environments anywhere once the world's superpowers finish unleashing their nuclear arsenals on each other.

What I find especially troubling about all three of these perspectives is their failure to address the fundamental question which underlies and motivates all human efforts to understand and accept mortality: is there any transcendent purpose for our lives on earth, and for the historical process itself? For astrophysics and the social sciences, there is no meaning to the question itself. Human experience may reflect a glorious nanosecond in the longer history of matter, energy, and living things, but only that. Whether we are done in by the sun or by our own meanness of spirit, it will still be as if we had never existed at all.

For apocalyptic Christians, by contrast, there is definitely a meaning to the question, but the meaning is mostly negative. Briefly stated, their answer to the question about the purpose for what will happen to the human race is this: Because most people have failed to become the kinds of men and women that they should be, God has decided to cut his losses, open heaven to a pious few, and wring down the curtain on everybody else and on the planet that supports them as well. God's purpose for doing all this seems to me to reduce to little more than satiating his own disappointment, frustration, and anger with us.

What a God! Good parents don't give up on their children, even those they can't seem to do anything with. Would a good God do any less, even with an admittedly indifferent and recalcitrant humanity? Whatever happened to the covenant with Noah, anyway?

To Christians caught up in apocalyptic kinds of thinking, then, the future really looks no better than it does to scientists focusing on the outer edge of the universe, or peering into the miasma of the human spirit's destructiveness. The "end" of everything can mean only the final moment of a temporal sequence, beyond which things on earth simply are no more. From the perspective of the Christian tradition as a whole, however, the "end" of things means something quite different. It means the fullness of life. It means human beings' coming to completeness. When the world comes to its end, in this sense of the word, human history stands at its true beginning. The really big thing to contemplate about the end-time is that it will break in on us not with the cooling off of the sun or the heating up of our leaders, but with our living toward one another as Christ lived toward and died for us.

Certainly, in the midst of uncertainty, danger, and calamity, most of us would like at least a hint or two about when the bad times will be over, and what life will be like from that point on. What we most need in such situations, however, is assurance that there is some larger purpose (telos) to the bad times, whether the bad times plague us for only a little while, or go on indefinitely. When the greatest teachers of the church wrote about the end of the world, they wrote about "end" in this latter sense: what the world will be like when all of God's creatures put their whole trust in him, obey him joyfully, and give unceasing praise for the life and world he has given us.

In the words of an old catechism, to the question, "What is the chief end of man?," the correct answer was and is, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." This is, quite literally, the end which has no end.

The Lessons of 9/11

Jesus once chided the Pharisees and Sadducees for their inability to discern "the signs of the times." (Matthew 16:3) Somewhat abruptly, he then went on his way. Matthew gives no hint of what these religious leaders thought and felt about Jesus' chastisement. My own hunch is that some of them stayed angry long enough to make sure that no one would ever again do to them what Jesus had just done to them. And the way they sought to pull it off was by jumping into every tragedy with a definitive explanation of why it happened, sometimes even before the "why?" question could be asked.

Pharisees and Sadducees like these are still around. Last year, following the 9/11 attacks, they made their presence known immediately and gracelessly, imperiously shoving aside our cries of terror, disbelief, confusion, grief, and anger with truly appalling "discernments" of what we were supposed to take away from the overwhelming tragedy unfolding before us. Surely the most outrageous were these:

1. God is punishing America for the immorality its liberals have unleashed on us.
2. The certain damnation of those who died in the conflagrations before giving their lives to Christ should be a warning to all.
3. Muslims the world over must be brought to account for their hate-filled religion and hearts. And
4. The final battle with Satan is now fully launched; the end of the world is near.

No one I know who said any of these things has been open to much discussion about the pronouncements. Even so, perhaps there may be one or two somewhere willing to consider at least these rejoinders:

1. It is hardly likely that all who died in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania as a result of terrorist attacks were less moral than the rest of us who survived.
2. Salvation and damnation are matters for God alone; no human being has the right to claim "certain" knowledge of anything pertaining to either.
3. Most Muslims the world over are at least as outraged by the desecration of their religion as non-Muslims are. And
4. Inside traders of so-called religious secrets are even more contemptible than their counterparts on Wall Street; religious prophets of the end of the world have a track record whose errancy is without parallel in any other sphere of human experience.

The way that Jesus saw through his antagonists' disingenuous requests for help in discerning the signs of the times must have been truly galling, as were his concluding words to them, that the only sign they will have is "the sign of the prophet Jonah." At least, it would have been had they remembered that Jonah is sign of the power and scope of repentance. Even if reluctantly, Jonah went to Ninevah as God demanded, and there preached the necessity of repentance. To his shock and amazement, the Ninevites listened, and repented. And so should we, if we are at all inclined to gloss over the real lesson of 9/11 because we find it too hard to confront. (cf. Jonah, chapt. 3)


9/11 most especially forces us to deal with the awesomeness of God's great gift of freedom to human beings, the power to act on the basis of deliberation and choice, and on the basis of instinct and whim. We cannot have freedom in the first sense without also having it in the second. We are not truly free until we choose the first use over the second. The implications are staggering. We are not free to be responsible unless we have the power to be irresponsible. We are not free to trust in God unless we have the power to reject his will and his way entirely. We are not free to create unless we have the power to destroy. We are not free to love unless we have the power to hate. Could God have eliminated all of these very dangerous possibilities inherent in human freedom? Of course. Would we then still bear within ourselves a measure of his own glorious freedom? Of course not. Is freedom, then, worth the price? Yes, thanks be to God.

So: what does this all have to do with gleaning the lesson of 9/11? Simply this: 9/11 is the work of a few human beings who used a divine gift for demonic purposes, and the work of no one else. 9/11 calls us to genuine repentance of every misguided effort to put the blame anywhere else. It reminds us that freedom misused can be catastrophically destructive, even as freedom used as God intends can overcome every evil that its very existence makes possible.