End Times

[Chris OConnor]

I'm so nervous. Right before Thanksgiving too. I HATE when the world ends before a major holiday.

[Robert Tulip]

It's a potent mix - being sure you understand secret knowledge that most others don't, and a sense of apocalyptic urgency about allegiance to values.

This problem of alleged “secret knowledge” has made end times thinking the domain of crackpots. All concepts of “the end of the world” that are not based squarely on scientific knowledge are rubbish. And yet, there is enough within science alone to justify an interest in this topic, from the perspective of the risk of human extinction. An excellent scientific paper https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ols_method I just read explains that with climate change, there is a real risk of the ocean Thermohaline Circulation being disrupted by the addition of polar meltwater, as has often happened in the past. And that poses a major risk of the deep ocean becoming stratified, which would basically be curtains for us, since when that happened at the Permian Extinction 95% of marine species and 70% of land species went extinct.

The climate apocalypse is the real risk of the end of the world. The interesting thing though about religious visions is that they can have an unconscious distorted concept of the actual risk, and so do have some symbolic merit, even if the actual claims from literal scripture are stupid. Where the religious symbolism is most interesting is with the scientific hypothesis that the original meaning of ‘the end of the world’ was based on the astronomical shift from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius interpreted as the second coming of Jesus Christ.

("Apocalypse" means "revelation").

Yes, in ancient Greek, but the two words have developed different nuance in English. Apocalypse is now closer to disaster, while revelation retains more of its positive content of enlightenment.

No wonder people keep getting sucked into it like Pizzagate on the internet.

Going back to your “potent mixture” phrase, I think the proper agenda in this material should be to take an entirely scientific view. We should aim to see the alleged ‘secret knowledge’ as information which in fact is readily accessible to objective research, like the Permian Extinction and, to a more conflicted extent, the Zodiac Ages.

The problem here is that these world-affecting topics remain largely unknown because people don’t want to know about them since they are so scary. Within the creationist tradition, people prefer the crackpot idea of divine intervention as somehow more comforting than science. The risks of extinction and social transformation are seen as too big to study dispassionately, so instead these perceptions bubble up through the popular subconscious in symbolic form.

Apocalyptic belief seems to have emerged among the Jews over the loss of independence to "rational" Hellenists of the Antiochus branch. (Apologies to Robert, who understands an entirely different strand of this tradition, but I am happy to think they mixed together freely).

Well yes, I would quibble with your term “over” which asserts that the visions of Jewish apocalyptic literature were caused by the Hellenistic conquests rather than just seeing the emergence of those visions in correlation with the secular politics.

Yes, Jewish national identity was a big driver of apocalyptic thinking during the emergence of the common era under Greece and Rome. But I also believe we should not discount a deeper religious motivation for such literature, a movement led by Platonic Gnostic astronomer-priests who understood the cosmology of fall and redemption on world-historical scale, intermixing the narrowly Jewish traditions with all the other mythologies extending from India to Rome in order to create the Noble Lie of Jesus Christ.

The New Testament presents an ambiguous vision of apocalyptics, mixing together the immediate politics of the day with a larger vision on a longer time scale. We also must take into account that the intense political censorship under Christendom meant the original apocalyptic visions were suppressed. They exist only in fragments and symbols which provide an archaeological ‘foot of Hercules’ with tantalising clues as to the size and nature of the whole.

These Hellenists were, of course, people who believed their ways were the true and reasonable ways, and therefore forbade circumcision, for example.

The Greek cult of logic is at the root of the secular dismissal of mythology. The cult of reason ironically has developed its own myths, its own unquestioned assumptions about core meaning, such as laicity, progress and the myth of the individual.

The claimed rationality of Western Logic, with its shallow mockery of mythology, has been central to the inability to investigate and psychoanalyse the apocalyptic genre and its symbols.

Enough Jews could see how empire worked to realize they were never going to be rivals to Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece or Rome, and some of them concluded that God was getting ready to move in and take over when the Jews managed to be righteous enough.

This phrase “God was getting ready to move in and take over” to me typifies the instinctive mockery and disdain that modern culture has for apocalyptics. I prefer instead to explore how the writers of apocalyptics were dealing in symbolic language, that was not understood by the masses, meaning that rather than the simplistic magic of an intervention by God, we should use the heuristic that all such language emerged from a high Platonic Noble Lie, a sophisticated vision of reality that was presented in veiled form for a mass audience.

The entire prophetic tradition in the Old Testament emerged from the political strategic recognition that Israel as a tiny state between big empires could not achieve security from military power alone, but required diplomacy, reputation, social unity and shared vision, all of which could best be secured, so they thought, through the hierarchical patriarchal monotheism of the Yahwist cult.

Yet collaborators, such as the Herodians, kept selling out their revelation. It made for nasty demonization of enemies.

I prefer to think the authors had a longer term vision. They could see the politics of the day were so degraded that it would take a whole age for a coherent vision to emerge, and wanted to provide material that could prime the pump for the eventual arrival of the new heaven and new earth in the Age of Aquarius.

It also sounds somewhat reminiscent of our time (and maybe any time).

I am currently reading The Shaking of the Foundations by Paul Tillich. Full pdf is at http://media.sabda.org/alkitab-2/Religi ... ations.pdf

Picking up this old copy of Tillich's little collection of sermons that belonged to my wife's granddad was inspired partly by your recent mention of how Tillich has been forgotten but is central to the high enlightened tradition of American liberal Protestant identity. I like him for his existential ideas. He is absolutely brilliant, especially placing the Biblical vision against the real politics of the Second World War.

In his study of time, Tillich sees the eternal domain of divinity as encompassing the temporal domain of history. He says the prophet Isaiah “saw history as it is, but at the same time he looked beyond history to the ultimate power and meaning and majesty of being. He knew two orders of being: the human, political, historical order, and the divine, eternal order. Because he knew these two orders, he could speak as he did, moving continually between the depth of human nothingness and the great height of divine creativity.”

For Tillich’s use of divine order I would substitute geology, seeing geological time as the real encompassing physical framework for historical events, and then seeing the million year aeons of geology enfolded within the billion year aeons of astronomy.

So rather than assuming the Bible writers had narrow immediate political goals in mind with their opaque language, I prefer to assume they took a broad sweep of history against the stable order of the earth and cosmos. This is an order that we can now understand quite well using science, even if the knowledge we can now obtain can be frightening.

Does nuclear armament determine what is just?

No it does not, but nor should we accept the fervent opposite line of the peace movement that messianic politics should focus on nuclear disarmament. I see nuclear weapons as a second order security problem, despite its surface focus and danger, because they also have a stabilising function of deterring war.

Are we all just bullies on the playground, saying "Make me!" because we can?

Maybe not all of us, but probably Trump and Kim.

All will be revealed.

And this is the beauty of the flow of time, that the future will reveal the inner causal tendencies hidden in the present and past. Tillich mentions Watts’ wonderful comment "Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away." Apocalyptics, in its high rational ideal form, seeks to discern the structure of time, seeing the deep causal factors in character, destiny and fate.

[Chris OConnor]

So when is the next date for the world to end? I want to prepare.

[Robert Tulip]

So when is the next date for the world to end? I want to prepare.

German film makers made a documentary about Harold Camping's 2011 prediction - listen or read about it at http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/pro ... ef/9175868

My view is that the concept discussed as the end of the world actually references the transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, and will take place gradually over the next century.

[Litwitlou]

Matthew 24

[30] And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.
[31] And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.
[32] Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh:
[33] So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors.
[34] Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.
[35] Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
[36] But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.


2 Peter 3-

But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.


I was taught no one could foretell the end of the world. Jesus says exactly that in Matthew, Chapter 24. Shouldn't Christians believe the words of Jesus? Of course, this would take all the fun out of it. So when anyone foretells the end of days or the Second Coming, I'm sure no such thing will happen on the day foretold.

[Robert Tulip]

I was taught no one could foretell the end of the world.

Hi Litwitlou, welcome to booktalk.

That attitude, seeing "the end of the world" as a legitimate religious concept, is dangerous. Religious analysis only makes sense as metaphor for scientific reality. Any talk of supernatural intervention is just imaginative nonsense.

What makes sense in foretelling the future is to study reality in scientific terms. The most interesting current hypothesis on the end of the world, in my view, is that climate change could stratify the ocean, causing a repeat of the Permian Great Dying. We already have the triggers in place for such a tipping point, so it might happen tomorrow, or it might not happen for a century. But if we keep piling carbon into the air we will get what Marvin famously called an earth-shattering kaboom.

[Litwitlou]

I was taught no one could foretell the end of the world.

Hi Litwitlou, welcome to booktalk.

That attitude, seeing "the end of the world" as a legitimate religious concept, is dangerous. Religious analysis only makes sense as metaphor for scientific reality. Any talk of supernatural intervention is just imaginative nonsense.

But if we keep piling carbon into the air we will get what Marvin famously called an earth-shattering kaboom.

I thought we were discussing supernatural intervention and religious nonsense. My bad.

I was just citing what I was taught. I do not suffer from The God Delusion, as Richard Dawkins calls it. But it really bugs me that some Christians use the Bible to predict the end of the world when the Bible clearly states this event is unpredictable. Attempting to scientifically predict a "Dinosaur Killer" level global catastrophe is another story. If people in power continue to act as if Global Warming is a myth, they will kill us all.

And thanks for the welcome.

[Harry Marks]

This problem of alleged “secret knowledge” has made end times thinking the domain of crackpots. All concepts of “the end of the world” that are not based squarely on scientific knowledge are rubbish.

I have trouble figuring out when you will dismiss mythology as rubbish and when you will be intrigued by its depth psychology alter ego.

And yet, there is enough within science alone to justify an interest in this topic, from the perspective of the risk of human extinction. with climate change, there is a real risk of the ocean Thermohaline Circulation being disrupted by the addition of polar meltwater, as has often happened in the past. And that poses a major risk of the deep ocean becoming stratified, which would basically be curtains for us,

Yes, humans without crops would be a very nasty horror show all right.

The interesting thing though about religious visions is that they can have an unconscious distorted concept of the actual risk, and so do have some symbolic merit, even if the actual claims from literal scripture are stupid.

I believe the symbolic merit derives from psychological forces which are very powerful. To give an example, psychologists who are aware of the tendencies and even aware they are taking part in an experiment still tend to respond to these forces. Revenge, resistance, resentment of exploitation, jockeying for dominance, and many more. Belief that shalom will supplant strife is difficult and will generally draw on its own subconscious emotional forces or wither away.

Where the religious symbolism is most interesting is with the scientific hypothesis that the original meaning of ‘the end of the world’ was based on the astronomical shift from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius interpreted as the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Where this makes most sense to me is the idea that "heavenly things" involve an orderly pattern impervious to human efforts at domination. As such they participate in the eternal, and would make potent symbols on which subconscious forces could attach themselves. The assertion of power for "the people" and for justice would be potential examples.

The problem here is that these world-affecting topics remain largely unknown because people don’t want to know about them since they are so scary. Within the creationist tradition, people prefer the crackpot idea of divine intervention as somehow more comforting than science. The risks of extinction and social transformation are seen as too big to study dispassionately, so instead these perceptions bubble up through the popular subconscious in symbolic form.

You have an engineer's disdain for the crackpot. I tend to agree that it is foolish to bypass what we know on the basis of science, and even that it is not useful to take seriously declarations about supernatural intervention, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the deep currents that push those cultural patterns along. That would be sort of like not wanting to know about them because they are so scary.

Apocalyptic belief seems to have emerged among the Jews over the loss of independence to "rational" Hellenists of the Antiochus branch.

Well yes, I would quibble with your term “over” which asserts that the visions of Jewish apocalyptic literature were caused by the Hellenistic conquests rather than just seeing the emergence of those visions in correlation with the secular politics.

Fair enough. Apocalyptic visions seem to go back much farther, and the whole strand treating Cyrus as deliverer may be the source of much of the hopeful eschatology referenced by Tillich in your discussion below. I am not a careful student of the relevant scholarship, but I have a sense that the vision of complete takeover in the "Day of the Lord" is not older than the Hellenistic conquest, but I could very well be mistaken.

The New Testament presents an ambiguous vision of apocalyptics, mixing together the immediate politics of the day with a larger vision on a longer time scale.

Well, I think that is kind of how prophecy works. Eternal things are discerned to be at work in the current crisis, whatever it happens to be, and so instead of just scoping out rational options and weighing policy, the people are urged to see vital, meaningful forces which demand vital, meaningful response in the immediate social relations.

The cult of reason ironically has developed its own myths, its own unquestioned assumptions about core meaning, such as laicity, progress and the myth of the individual.

And of course it is the myths we do not perceive to operate mythically which are the most potent sources of chaos and destruction. That's why there's a special place in hell [see what I did there?] for Rupert Murdoch and the exploitation of mass anxieties.

The claimed rationality of Western Logic, with its shallow mockery of mythology, has been central to the inability to investigate and psychoanalyse the apocalyptic genre and its symbols.

I have been doing some thinking about how to use "mythopoetic jiu-jitsu" to turn the force of mythic thinking away from the manipulation by folks in power. Jesus and the early Christians had some deep wisdom in that approach.

Any mythic system I am aware of has two primary components in practice: self-examination (the vertical dimension relating self to the eternal) and solidarity (the horizontal dimension seeing own welfare tied inextricably to that of others).

The universalization of solidarity depended heavily on the seriousness of the inward relation. When fear and aggression threaten to fracture that universalization, the "obey" half of "trust and obey" can be used to regenerate the "trust" half. Statements like "revenge is mine, says the Lord" have done this for a long time: focus the listener on good personal behavior with the assurance that solidarity will have care to spare for them if they follow it. The goal is not passive piety but re-direction of fears about solidarity, leaving space for rationality to move in and take control again.

This phrase “God was getting ready to move in and take over” to me typifies the instinctive mockery and disdain that modern culture has for apocalyptics. I prefer instead to explore how the writers of apocalyptics were dealing in symbolic language, that was not understood by the masses, meaning that rather than the simplistic magic of an intervention by God, we should use the heuristic that all such language emerged from a high Platonic Noble Lie, a sophisticated vision of reality that was presented in veiled form for a mass audience.

I am sure that a Platonic Noble Lie had some appeal in an age when it was absolutely guaranteed that some of the population could not spare the time to be educated and attend to public affairs. Today, by contrast, we have a democratic system in which the argument that a lie is useful will be recorded by some sting journalist and go viral on social media. There is no substitute for honest persuasion.

In that light, the disdain for the mythological needs to be reconsidered. I was witness to a small revelation of this disdain, one which may potentially have gotten Ronald Reagan elected and set us onto the path of denial and fragmentation where we find ourselves in extremis today. The sociology of intellectual superiority is an aggression, even, in mild form, an oppression, which only the elites can take responsibility for.

So, should I have used other phrasing besides "God was getting ready to move in and take over"? I am not sure. I think, from the perspective of religious people, it is not healthy to deny the wrong beliefs which led Jesus and Paul to declare apocalyptic urgency. Honesty of accepting facts can be integrated with faith. It is possible, for example, to point directly to the urgency as a representation of the nature of God's time, in which we critique ourselves, and see that being factually mistaken about it doesn't disqualify it from being spiritually effective, even spiritually "true" in the sense of accurately capturing the internal issues at stake.

The entire prophetic tradition in the Old Testament emerged from the political strategic recognition that Israel as a tiny state between big empires could not achieve security from military power alone, but required diplomacy, reputation, social unity and shared vision, all of which could best be secured, so they thought, through the hierarchical patriarchal monotheism of the Yahwist cult.

In his study of time, Tillich sees the eternal domain of divinity as encompassing the temporal domain of history. He says the prophet Isaiah “saw history as it is, but at the same time he looked beyond history to the ultimate power and meaning and majesty of being. He knew two orders of being: the human, political, historical order, and the divine, eternal order. Because he knew these two orders, he could speak as he did, moving continually between the depth of human nothingness and the great height of divine creativity.”

For Tillich’s use of divine order I would substitute geology, seeing geological time as the real encompassing physical framework for historical events,

Okay, you have certainly got me wanting to read more Tillich. He was looking at life under the Third Reich and seeing the faith of God's Chosen People in the age of empires as a helpful guide. Maintaining any honest connection to the divine, eternal order in a pathological social system is difficult.

It requires constant re-negotiation of the terms of compromise, figuring out how much to accept the injustice of the system in order to give space to the majesty of being. None of the many alternatives is entirely satisfactory, because salvation can never be wholly individual. If you don't have some "arc of history" basis for seeing progress, then you don't have the faith to do what Dr. King did, or Gandhi, and confront the injustice directly without first trying to use it to take power.

All will be revealed.

And this is the beauty of the flow of time, that the future will reveal the inner causal tendencies hidden in the present and past.
Apocalyptics, in its high rational ideal form, seeks to discern the structure of time, seeing the deep causal factors in character, destiny and fate.

Character is the factor which converts fate to destiny. Character is the potential for transformation which sees, say, the accumulation of greenhouse gases, and decides to do what is needed to prevent the disaster "fated" by the causal relation. God's time is the time in which we reveal our character, and the destiny it implies.

[Harry Marks]

The only end time for any of us is when we die.
People forget that the bible is representing what happens in our minds/brains.
Theosis and apotheosis, in allegorical terms, are what end times are supposed to represent. Kind of like killing our own egos and being born again with a Christ mind.
The kind of thing these quotes speaks to.

Matthew 6:22 The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

John 14:23 Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.

Romans 8:29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

I have claimed to have pushed my apotheosis and it is quite close to mentally dying in the sense that preconceptions get killed and are replaced with a fuller conception of reality.
Ideas die, not people when we are reborn during our end times.
DL

Thanks for these. I like them very much.

I am not convinced that it makes sense to ever consider theosis and apotheosis to be finished processes. Like "sanctification" and "nirvana" and "satori" I think the seeking is what most of us are meant to focus on, and it might be better never to consider them achieved. When you talk about replacing ideas with a fuller conception of reality you point to a reason for this: our conception of reality never reaches completeness.

Also, by contrast with the gnostic tradition, I don't think Jesus gave coded instructions that "really" represented entirely spiritual matters. Rather I think that he was able to apprehend directly how spiritual forces would look in supernatural terms, and then used supernatural imagery to convey both personal and social spiritual realities. In the hands of those whose training enabled them to reverse engineer the supernatural imagery, this appears like encoded messages.

A simple example is his instruction to pray to "Abba". There is some dispute about whether it is well translated as "Daddy" as often alleged. However, it is clear it was a familiar form and as such stepped outside the formal relationship implied by the power claims of the priesthood. (This kind of "person as temple" thinking was growing in importance in a number of strands of Judaism at the time, and helped to make a way for synagogue Judaism in the diaspora that followed the destruction of the temple and the expulsion of the Jews). Jesus simply asserts that God is like that, and wants us to relate like that, to convey the social reality that only genuine, inner relation to God creates holiness, not outer, socially structured matters of ritual and performance. The social issue of avoiding empty piety takes precedence over the social issue of reinforcing each other's commitment.

To interpret this as "coding" is clunky and sociologically suspect. It is comprehensible by anyone.

Still, it is undeniable that a kind of dying occurs when we give up self-interested versions of the nature of reality and replace them with versions that center our systems of meaning in a just social context. Given that "End times" declarations about the supernatural were entirely bound to that assertion of justice, it makes sense to think of "end of the World" or "Day of the Lord" prophecies primarily as evocations of the revelation of injustice, a process which turns out to be much more immediate and tangible in internal spiritual contexts.

So, while I thank you for the connection you made here, I would urge you not to think of its symbolic operation in a mechanical way.

[Harry Marks]

Matthew 24
[34] Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.
[35] Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
[36] But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.

I was taught no one could foretell the end of the world.

I appreciate you pointing these out. As a liberal Christian, I get very tired of the authoritarians claiming supernatural accuracy and insight for scripture, in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary. In particular, it is easy to find people turning backflips to explain why "this generation" doesn't mean "this very generation" but rather "this other generation."

Shouldn't Christians believe the words of Jesus? Of course, this would take all the fun out of it.

Christians should spend more time figuring out how to behave lovingly toward, say, Kim Jong Un (our enemy) and Yemeni children dying of cholera (the least of these, our brethren). The words of Jesus about end times are probably not the words of Jesus but words put in his mouth by Gospel writers with some agenda to push. Yet I believe he was an apocalypticist, that is, I believe Jesus preached the coming "Day of the Lord" (like many other Jewish teachers of the time). I also believe he thought of his own Messiah-ship of peace as the opening act in that drama. (It turns out to be the strongest link between his preaching and that of Paul, except maybe the emphasis on love.) In a spiritual sense, he may have been right, but as a prediction of events, not so much.

The observation you make about "taking the fun out of it" is the most important one here. Most end-times talk, like the "Left Behind" series, is about feeling superior to others despite appearances. But the great reversal, where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, is also woven into both Jewish tradition and Christian scripture. We get to feel smug about our humiliatingly low status. It goes to the heart of the Christian message, as Nietzsche so clearly recognized.