I never did follow up to the thoughts back here on the book of Revelation. I didn’t have any more thoughts (collective sigh of relief from weary readers), until I followed up on Steven’s suggestion and went to check out the four-part series that was done on Our Life in Christ radio. Wow, what an excellent resource these guys are! Not only did they handily cover everything that I had managed to glean out of the Orthodox Study Bible and another book or two, but they had lots more to add.

I’ll leave it to others to go through the series themselves — link to the archive page HERE – but I was specifically keen to hear their rundown of the many times throughout the Church Age that there has been a strong consensus that the end times have come and the Second Coming is at hand.

I actually bought a lecture series from The Teaching Company about the history of apocalyptic thought just searching for that kind of information. I was sorely disappointed by the lectures — the professor was secular and seemed to only be able to think that things were done for political reasons. But I had an idea that it would be very telling to look at the history of the last two millennia through this lens — the hope and fear of the end times, the disappointment and adjustment when life goes on. Doesn’t it seem like the impact of that would have shaped the course of whole societies? You can find books out now about how salt changed history, or cod or spice. Why are we always so slow to credit religious trends of thought with impacting how we live?

I think that the anticipation (or fear or disappointment) concerning the end times still holds sway over all of us, including skeptics and agnostics. Being fallen, we aren’t often easy in our mind with a future we don’t know and can’t control. If we have done badly — and secular types are often more disgusted with humanity than religious people — we don’t want to live in suspense anymore. If the hammer is coming down, we’d just as soon it would happen.

Besides, look at how much trouble we’ve gotten into. Surely, God can’t take much more of this. In other words, the world should come to an end just because we can’t conceive of how it would keep going on.

We want something that we’ve gotten used to in the movies — a fadeout. We are looking for a dramatic device that just fades to black and lets us be the audience for once rather than the actors. And it should happen … when? When nuclear war breaks out? When Israel is wiped off the map again? (Both of these things are looking likely to happen in the next decade or two.) When we start cloning in earnest? When something catastrophic — either natural or man made — happens to the earth’s ecology?

These all sound like good times to cue the apocalypse. It seems like humanity couldn’t go on as humanity in the face of those kinds of changes.

But if I’d lived in other times, wouldn’t I have thought that about the fall of the Byzantine Empire? Or the Great Schism, or Protestant Reformation? Or the Bubonic Plague? Or WW I and II?

It seems like if you’re going to look at the history of apocalyptic thought throughout history, at least a part of the lesson has be that we seem to have a much more limited imagination than God does about what we can survive.

Worth thinking about as another year gets underway. And with a Democratic Congress, no less. (Kidding.) (Well, pretty much.)