Apocalypse or arbitrary number?

Alex Coolman

Move over Y2K bug, here comes the apocalypse.

As if it weren’t difficult enough to plan for New Year’s Eve, this year

the religiously minded have to cope with the additional concern that the

turn of the millennium will not simply see a few technical glitches, but

will be an event of a somewhat greater magnitude: the end of the world.

It may not appear to every interpreter of world affairs that the seven

trumpets of Revelation have been blowing, that the four horsemen have

been out riding around and that the seven seals have been opened,

signaling the advent of End Times.

But then again, it depends on who you ask.

As Jesus said of the second coming in Mark 14, “ye know not when the time

is.” But the year 2000 has a few things going for it, biblically

speaking, that make it a decent candidate for events of a truly

earthshaking nature.

The problem, said Steven Felder, a biblical scholar and and the religious

education coordinator for Saint Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church in

Corona del Mar, is that correlating the various and rather contradictory

statements in the Bible concerning the second coming with real-world

events can be pretty convoluted business.

The gospel of Mark is one place millenarians look for the chronology of

the last days, Felder said, but the text in the relevant passages, to say

the least, is not specific.

Mark speaks in metaphors, referring in Chapter 13 to “a parable of the

fig tree,” whose development will let humans know that “it [the

apocalypse] is nigh, even at the doors.”

Felder said some interpreters hold that the fig tree (which is supposed

to “putteth forth leaves” shortly before the end of the world) represents

the state of Israel. The reconstitution of Israel in 1948 should be

understood as the growth of the tree, in this view, and Mark’s assertion

in 13:30 that “this generation shall not pass away, till all these things

be done” suggests that the end of the world should come within one

generation of this political event.

How long is a generation? People who think about this sort of thing for a

living had at one point concluded that a generation was supposed to be 40

years long, Felder said. Which would have put the due date for the end of

the world somewhere around the end of Ronald Reagan’s administration.

“Now people are going, ‘Well, maybe we shouldn’t go by 40 years,”’ Felder

joked.

Other interpreters have decided that the end of the world will come

shortly after the turn of the century instead of shortly before.

John McClure, senior pastor of the Newport Vineyard Christian Fellowship,

has come to the conclusion -- which he is working up into a book -- that

the end of the world is scheduled for some time in the first 50 years of

the 21st century.

McClure, like many interpreters, worked with parallels between the book

of Revelation and contemporary politics to arrive at this schedule.

The start of the period of “tribulation,” which is supposed to precede

the End, for example, sounds to McClure remarkably like the 1945 bombing

of Hiroshima.

He suggests the false prophet of the apocalypse, the one that “wrought

miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the

mark of the beast,” in Revelation 19:20 is, ahem, the media and the

entertainment industry.And so on. The connections to be made in this kind

of interpretation always suffer from a bit of vagueness, but they get

more interesting as the number of seemingly fulfilled predictions rises.

Or perhaps they don’t. Mark Rogers, the pastor of the Prince of Peace

Lutheran Church, is taking a decidedly wait-and-see attitude on the odds

of the second coming happening on New Year’s Eve.”From a theological

standpoint, as far as feeling is God going to return at midnight, the

answer is no,” Rogers said. “From a biblical standpoint, it tells us that

nobody knows. We need to watch. The lord may come back tomorrow, or it

may be 10,000 years from now.”

Rogers said he hasn’t done much, sermon-wise, with the millennium,

despite the event’s potential to drum up a bit of righteous hysteria.

“I’m not big on coercion and throwing a whole lot of guilt on people,”

Rogers said. “We haven’t really played it up.”

For Rogers, year 2000-related hype about the resurrection sounds a little

too much like hype from decades gone by.

“I remember in the ‘70s it was a big fad thinking that God was going to

come back,” he said. “I remember thinking in the early ‘70s, ‘Lord, come

on. At least postpone until I get married.”’

Felder, though he has an intellectual enthusiasm for the different

theories concerning the second coming, is also fairly dubious about the

prospects for seeing the dawn of everlasting peace on Jan. 1.

“Most people now realize that the calendar is somewhat artificial,”

Felder said. “There’s nothing particularly magical about this particular

year.”

Instead of packing his bags for the next world, Felder spends his time

wondering what it means that people find the idea of the apocalypse so

attractive.

In his mind, the desire for cataclysmic change says a lot about the

pervasive ache for some sense of significance in late 20th century

culture.

“Even if you’re not in the Branch Davidian compound with David Koresh,

you still toy with this idea,” Felder said. “There’s people who have this

apocalyptic feeling because it’s hard to imagine that things will go on

and on as they are, even though we want them to.”