It All Depends on What You Mean by “Apocalyptic Religion”

I like a good gag. I think this one is pretty funny and makes a reasonable point–to a degree.

Har! Fundamentalism lampooned. Yuks all around. Fish in barrel shot.

However, I also like clarity, overthinking stuff, being a buzzkill, and exploding the simplistic pieties of that other species of Fundamentalist: evangelical atheists.

Because, of course, two obvious objections immediately arise. First, it is not merely believers in apocalyptic religion who think the world is ending. So does everybody competent in the Sciences. There is, indeed, no doubt the world is ending. The only question is when. Each of us will die and the world will end for us. Whatever humans do or don’t do, the sun will die as a red giant and consume the earth along with the other inner planets. The universe itself will perish either via heat death or the Big Crunch. Creation has, just as Paul said, been subjected to frustration and that is true whether you are a Christian or an atheist. Yet makers of memes like the one above never rashly charge cosmologists with being constitutionally unable to seek “Real World Solutions” due to their conviction that the world will end.

Beyond this, however, is the further problem that the only form of “apocalyptic religion” most post-moderns know of is the incredibly recent, short-sighted, historically ignorant, and biblically illiterate kind filling the minds and imaginations of fundamentalist consumers of speculation such as THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH, 88 REASONS WHY CHRIST IS RETURNING IN 1988, and the whole LEFT BEHIND franchise. Both the consumers of such junk and their pop atheist critics live in remarkably similar mental worlds where this stuff is supposedly what all Christians have ever thought while the vastly more nuanced extent of the larger Christian tradition is simply non-existent for them.

So. for instance, the entire world of mental categories present to the minds of New Testament writers and readers–in which words like “apocalypse” were freighted, not with conceptions of nuclear war, but with images of a semitic bride unveiling herself to her husband in tender love, beauty and glory on their wedding night–simply do not exist for nearly any post-modern readers.

More than this, however, is simply a wholesale ignorance of the fact that the main body of the Christian tradition has never believed that the fact history has an end point at some unknown future day means not finding “real world solutions” to problems or using one’s noggin to plan ahead. One can merely look at that most archetypal of medieval architecture, the cathedral, to understand this. These are structures built to last, complete with oak groves planted by builders who understood that beams would require replacements in seven centuries or so.

Indeed, the entire Christian project–which is inherently apocalyptic from the get-go given that Jesus himself lards his preaching with declarations that he will return on Judgement Day and that the entire world will be transformed and renewed in a New Heaven and New Earth–is also constantly likened to a building which is being built to last. That is why the Church, for its entire history, has been the mother of “real world solutions”, fostering the growth of the sciences, preserving literature from antiquity, building schools, inventing hospitals and orphanages, founding teaching orders, and creating things like Parliament and Magna Carta. An entire civilization grew up with the twin convictions that the world would end and that till that happened, it was a fine thing for Hildegard of Bingen to work on her music and medicines, Albert the Great to study natural sciences, lens grinders to invent glasses for poor vision, and the priest Copernicus to theorize that the earth went around the sun. The Dominicans, so far from having their head in apocalyptic mushroom clouds, created the oldest extant democratic institution in the world, the Dominican Order, nearly six centuries before the American founding.

In short, Christian faith, while always being “apocalyptic” has not typically been a short-sighted Americanist sect believing that a threat to white, conservative, American privilege means The End Is Nigh or that a rise in gas prices or the popularity of the Beatles is Great Sign of Antichrist signaling for Christians to turn into idiots and await the Rapture.

Most Christians, through most of history have been quietly doing what Paul said to do in this, the very first document ever written by a Christian writer that we possess:

But concerning love of the brethren you have no need to have any one write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another; and indeed you do love all the brethren throughout Macedonia. But we exhort you, brethren, to do so more and more, to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we charged you; so that you may command the respect of outsiders, and be dependent on nobody. (1 Th 4:9–12)

Doing what Paul demands requires lots of “real world solution” thinking in spades. And that is why this particular apocalyptic religion has so successfully been able create and transform so many cultures and civilizations. Indeed, its enormous capacity for real world solutions has often spawned the absolute opposite complaint from a completely different class of critic who sniff that they “don’t believe in organized religion” and that all these structures and systems by which Catholics have created thousands of Real World Solution for problems around the world have quenched the Spirit and snuffed out True Spirituality which must always be spontaneous and untrammeled by mere “head knowledge” (meaning thought and planning).

You may well object to the way in which this has played out in history. You are welcome to do so. Christian crimes as well as accomplishments are a clear part of history. What is not, however, a clear part of history is the documentably false contention that Christian belief, cognizant of the End though it has always been, is bereft of a capacity to generate “real world solutions” for problems. You cannot charge a person with being an incompetent dreamer with his head in the clouds while simultaneously arraigning him as the architect of a world-spanning system of control. Both cannot be true. Neither need be true.

And before the former falsehood is abandoned in order to leap to the latter as the new cudgel with which to beat the gospel, permit me to again suggest that you read DOMINION by Tom Holland, which makes an extremely powerful case for the fact that the criteria by which nearly every allegedly “post-Christian” critic of the Church judges its failures are, themselves, deeply Christian.