A History of the End of the World

conversion and undertaking his life’s work of explaining the prophetic meanings that he found in the Bible. The so- called Scofield Reference Bible, an edition of the King James Version to which Scofield added his own marginal annotations, was first published in 1909 and ultimately sold more than 10 million copies before it was revised and republished later in the century. So influential was Scofield, observes Paul Boyer, that many evangelical Christians “had difficulty remembering precisely where they had acquired a particular idea: from the sacred text itself, or from Scofield’s notes.”⁶⁷

Between Moody and Scofield, in fact, the newfangled idea of the Rapture and the various other theological innovations of John Nelson Darby achieved the status of received truth in the early years of the twentieth century: “My hope is built on nothing less,” went one parody of a gospel song, “than Scofield’s notes and Moody Press.”⁶⁸ And Christian fundamentalism of the kind espoused by men like Moody and Scofield defined the skirmish line in a culture war against what they regarded as the minions of Satan at work in America—“the ultimate antidote for all infidelity,” according to Reuben A. Torrey (1856–1928), superintendent of the Moody Bible Institute and a far-ranging revivalist preacher, “and the impregnable bulwark against liberalism and false cults,” by which he meant all of the unwelcome phenomena of the modern world.⁶⁹

“I don’t find any place where God says the world is to grow better and better,” insisted Moody himself. “I find that the earth is to grow worse and worse.”⁷⁰

What the rest of the world celebrated as the march of civilization, the fundamentalists condemned as the secret workings of a diabolical conspiracy. “Satan has organized the world of unbelieving mankind upon his cosmic principles of force, greed, selfishness, ambition and pleasure,” ranted Scofield in his annotations to the book of Revelation in The Scofield Reference Bible. “[T]he present world-system…is imposing and powerful with armies and fleets; is often outwardly religious, scientific, cultured, and elegant; but, seething with national and commercial rivalries and ambitions, is upheld in any real crisis only by armed force, and is dominated by Satanic principles.”⁷¹

Just as the author of Revelation detested the buying and selling of goods in the Roman marketplace and distrusted the pagan guilds that a Christian craftsman might be tempted to join, for example, some Christian fundamentalists in America decried the “congested wealth” of big business—“a whirlpool of mad and maddening excess,” according to one evangelical preacher⁷²—and saw union labels on factory goods as “the mark of the beast.” And, just as John was deeply offended by the pleasures of Roman civilization, the fundamentalists denounced the entertainments and diversions of popular culture in modern America. The Reverend Torrey, for example, was willing to concede that “dancing was not a sin—as long as men and women did not do it together,” but certain fashionable dances, including the fox-trot, the shimmy, and the Charleston, were regarded as “nothing less than obscene.”⁷³

“Many of the couples performing these dances should have a marriage license before stepping out on the ballroom floor,” complained one outraged Christian observer, “and if they had a marriage license, there would be no excuse for committing such acts in public.”⁷⁴

Still, the Protestant fundamentalists in America always looked on the sunny side of doomsday. Back in the Old World, an ardent Catholic reader of Revelation like the French nun Therese of Lisieux thrilled at the prospect of the Tribulation: “When thinking of the torments which will be the lot of Christians at the time of Anti-Christ, I feel my heart leap with joy and I would that these torments be reserved for me.”⁷⁵ But here in America, some Christians preferred to believe that they would be spared all such torments when they were first “raptured” to heaven and then restored to earth to reign over the millennial kingdom alongside the King of Kings.

“Let us remember one thing,” John Darby had announced back in the mid–nineteenth century, “we Christians are sheltered from the approaching storm.”⁷⁶ And Reuben Torrey affirmed the same reassuring message in the opening years of the twentieth century: “The storm will be brief,” he declared, “and beyond the storm there is a golden day, such as philosophers and poets never dreamed of.”⁷⁷

Curiously, and even rather touchingly, some of the apocalyptic enthusiasts who were delighted at the prospect of watching the Tribulation from on high were also troubled by the fate that would surely befall those benighted souls who still clung to what John calls “the synagogue of Satan.” Attentive readers of Revelation were reassured that 144,000 male virgins from the tribes of Israel would be “sealed” in the end-times, but what about the rest of the Jewish people? Here, too, John Darby offered a startling new way to understand the story of Revelation and, especially, the special fate that was reserved for the Jewish people in the end-times.

Of all the ironies that have come to be attached to the book of Revelation, none is quite so strange as the love-hate relationship between its fundamentalist readers in America and the Jewish people. The author of Revelation, as we have seen, condemns his Jewish contemporaries for rejecting the messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth and suggests that Jews will spend eternity in the company of pagans and lukewarm Christians in a lake of fire. And yet some of the most ardent readers of Revelation in America proudly call themselves Zionists—and they are inspired to do so by their most cherished apocalyptic beliefs.

“Christian Zionism” sometimes seems like an oxymoron precisely because the Christian apocalyptic tradition has always carried an ugly stain of anti-Semitism. Starting in late antiquity, as we have seen, the folklore of the Apocalypse came to include the scandalous notion that the Antichrist will be a Jewish man sired by the Devil and a Jewish harlot in a Babylonian brothel. At best, some otherwise anti-Semitic readers of Revelation held out the faint hope that at least some Jews would spare themselves the fires of hell by belatedly embracing Jesus Christ as the Messiah.

Joachim of Fiore, author of a tract frankly titled Against the Jews, insists that the Jewish people will follow the Antichrist until the end of days, when a few of them will convert to Christianity at the last possible moment. The same idea was carried forward into Protestant theology by Martin Luther. If the Jews accept Jesus Christ, Luther allows in a tract of his own titled Against the Jews and Their Lies, “we will be glad to forgive them,” but if not, “we should not tolerate and suffer them.”⁷⁸

Apocalyptic legend and lore imagined that the Jewish people would return to the land of Israel at the end of days—but only with deadly consequences. For example, a text titled Christ and Antichrist, which dates back to the third century, insists that the Antichrist will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, call back the Jewish people from their places of exile, and then commence a new persecution of Christians that will end only “when Christ, heralded by Elijah and John the Baptist, comes again in glory.”⁷⁹ As the author of Revelation suggests, the blood of the defeated Jewish army of the Antichrist will rise to the height of a horse’s bridle in the streets of Jerusalem.

A much brighter picture was painted by the apocalyptic preachers of the New World. Increase Mather predicted in The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation Explained and Applied (1669) that the Jewish people would be “brought into their own land again” and that, once they returned to the site of ancient Israel, they would convert to Christianity and become “the most glorious nation in the world.”⁸⁰ One Presbyterian minister actually undertook to build dock houses and wharves in New Haven as a place of embarkation for the Jewish emigrants: “The return of the Jews to their own land,” he declared in 1800, “is certain.”

But, like the Rapture, the repatriation of the Jewish people took on a new degree of power and authority in the teachings of John Darby. He came away from his study of the Hebrew Bible with a new idea about the role of the Jewish people in the end-times, a notion that has been called one of the “most distinctive and controversial features” of his doctrine.⁸¹ To sum up Darby’s elaborate theory, he taught that God has devised one fate for the Jewish people and a different fate for the Christian church—but the two phases of the divine plan for the end of the world are interrelated, and so the final salvation of Christians depends on the destiny that God has assigned to the Jewish people.

Since Darby was convinced that all biblical prophecy must be fulfilled, including the prophecies in the Hebrew Bible that were addressed to the Israelites, he concluded that God will keep his promise to restore the land of Israel to the Chosen People and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem before bringing the world to an end. Indeed, the gathering of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland in Palestine came to be seen as both a sign and a necessary precondition of the Second Coming, the defeat of Satan, and the creation of the New Heaven and the New Earth. Thus did the Jewish people come to play an unwitting but decisive role in the end-times as imagined so vividly by the apocalyptic true believers in America.

By a fateful coincidence, the divine plan for the Jewish people in Darby’s scenario of the