A History of the End of the World

The conventional apology for such rhetorical excess is that Revelation consists of morale-boosting propaganda by and for the victims of oppression and persecution—“the messages addressed by ancient apocalyptic seers to those engulfed by suffering and overwhelmed by dread.”⁴⁸ That is why, for example, one modern theologian insists that Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, a stirring manifesto of the American civil rights movement, reflects “experiences and hopes similar to the theology of Revelation.”⁴⁹ More recently, however, some courageous scholars have suggested that the author of Revelation was probably not himself at risk of torture and death at the time and in the place where he lived and worked. Indeed, as it turns out, the rhetoric of Revelation is no less compelling to those who imagine themselves to be persecuted than it is to those who actually are persecuted.

“When thinking of the torments which will be the lot of Christians at the time of Anti-Christ,” mused Therese of Lisieux, a nun in nineteenth-century France, shortly before her death from illness at the age of twenty-four, “I feel my heart leap with joy and I would that these torments be reserved for me.”⁵⁰

But it is also true that Revelation, now and then, moves some of its more excitable readers to act out their own fantasies of revenge and martyrdom. “Assurance that the end is nigh,” observes one contemporary scholar, “often brings with it profoundly dangerous baggage.”⁵¹ A young man named Vernon Howell, for example, joined an apocalyptic sect called the Branch Davidians, dubbed himself “David Koresh” in a coded reference to two messianic figures of the Hebrew Bible, and led his followers into martyrdom in a standoff with federal law-enforcement agents, all because he was convinced that God had revealed to him that the battle of Armageddon was destined to start in Waco, Texas. Koresh, too, is an unremarkable example of a very old phenomenon, and we shall see how the apocalyptic idea has worked on unstable minds over the last twenty centuries.

Some of the recent readings of Revelation would be laughable if they were not so creepy. Contemporary traffickers in end-of-the-world prophecy have resorted to the ancient biblical text to find explanations for various phenomena of our anxiety-ridden age, both real and imagined, including alien abduction, UFOs, nuclear proliferation, the Kennedy assassination, the sexual revolution, the digital revolution, the AIDS epidemic, and much else besides—“an example of Americans’ insatiable appetite for the unusual, spectacular and exotic,” as one scholar proposes.⁵² And Revelation, which imagines the existence of a vast conspiracy of princes, powers, and principalities in ser vice to Satan, feeds even the most outlandish paranoid fantasies about the hidden workings of the world in which we live.

Above all, Revelation is now—and has always been—a potent rhetorical weapon in a certain kind of culture war, a war of contesting values and aspirations, that has been waged throughout human history. The author of Revelation, as we shall see, condemns any Christian who partakes of the pleasures and rewards of classical civilization at the peak of its enduring achievements in art, letters, and philosophy. When Savonarola called upon his parishioners to cast their paintings and pretty things on the Bonfire of the Vanities—and to thereby turn Florence into the “New Jerusalem” that is promised in Revelation—he was fighting a culture war against what he called paganism and we call the Renaissance. And modern readers of Revelation who inject the Bible into the rancorous public debate over the role of religion in American democracy are fighting the same war all over again.

“It’s not a shooting war, but it is a war,” declared one recent appointee to a federal judgeship, a religious fundamentalist whose nomination sparked a crisis in Congress. “These are perilous times for people of faith, not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.”⁵³

So the book of Revelation cannot be dismissed as a biblical oddity that belongs only to professional theologians, media-savvy preachers, and a few religious crackpots. The fact is that Revelation has come to be regarded by certain men and women in positions of power and influence as a source of inspiration, if not a divine handbook, for the conduct of war, diplomacy, and statecraft in the real world. When Ronald Reagan moved into a house whose street number was 666, he insisted on changing the address to a less satanic number, and he readily interpreted an otherwise unremarkable coup in Libya as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy:

“That’s a sign that the day of Armageddon isn’t far off,” he declared. “Everything’s falling into place. It can’t be long now.”⁵⁴

Such beliefs are especially alarming in a man with the power to inflict a nuclear Armageddon on the enemy he dubbed “the evil empire,” yet another oblique reference to the book of Revelation. Yet Reagan is hardly the only American politician to hold such beliefs. All occupants of the White House since Reagan—and many of their most trusted counselors and confidantes—have declared themselves to be “born again,” a phrase that identifies them with a strain of religious fundamentalism that assumes the accuracy and inevitability of biblical prophecy, including the end-time prophecies of Revelation. Such literalism in the reading of the Bible was regarded as a problem by the earliest Christian authorities in late antiquity, and it is no less problematic in the culture war that is being fought in American today.

Indeed, as we shall shortly see, Revelation has served as a “language arsenal” in a great many of the social, cultural, and political conflicts in Western history.⁵⁵ Again and again, Revelation has stirred some dangerous men and women to act out their own private apocalypses. Above all, the moral calculus of Revelation— the demonization of one’s enemies, the sanctification of revenge taking, and the notion that history must end in catastrophe—can be detected in some of the worst atrocities and excesses of every age, including our own.

For all of these reasons, the rest of us ignore the book of Revelation only at our impoverishment and, more to the point, at our own peril.

2. Spooky Knowledge and Last Things

What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth

Apocalypse” is derived from the Greek word that means “unveiling,” and “Revelation” is its Latin equivalent. Both words suggest the disclosure of something that has been kept secret. Both carry the sense that the secret being revealed is not merely arcane but also deeply mysterious and perhaps even dangerous—“spooky knowledge,” as pop philosopher Alan Watts laughingly puts it.¹ And nothing else in the scriptures of Judaism or Christianity is quite so spooky as the book of Revelation.

Yet, as it turns out, Revelation is hardly unique among the writings in which men and women have set down their spiritual imaginings. Seers, shamans, and self-appointed prophets, in every age and all over the world, have claimed to hear voices and see visions, sometimes with divine assistance, sometimes by means of mystical incantations or magical potions, and sometimes using only their own powerful insight. The oracle at ancient Delphi, who may have begun to babble her words of prophecy after inhaling hallucinogenic vapors rising from a fissure beneath her hillside shrine, has something in common with the contemporary computer scientist who used a microprocessor to decipher what he dubbed the “Bible Code.”

The original author of Revelation, as we shall see, stands squarely in the same tradition. He was surely a gifted poet and a powerful preacher, and some of his readers may be willing to regard him as an authentic visionary who heard voices and saw sights from on high. But the book of Revelation did not spring from his forehead as something fresh and fully formed. A kind of theological and scriptural DNA can be extracted from the text of Revelation, and its bloodlines can be traced back to far older and even stranger texts that were regarded as sacred long before the author of Revelation was inspired to speak out loud about his visions of the end of the world.

The author, for example, was hardly the first human being who claimed to see mystical visions, nor was he the first whose claims were greeted with skepticism by the guardians of religious law and order. Organized religion has always been troubled by any mere mortal—and especially any mortal who has not been duly ordained as a rabbi, priest, imam, or minister—who insists that he or she has come into contact with God. The Hebrew Bible includes a passage that rules out any direct encounter between a human being and the deity: “Man shall not see me, and live,” decrees God in the book of Exodus.² Now and then, God may choose to communicate with a human being, of course, but only in oblique ways: “If there be a prophet among you, I, the Lord, do make