The History of the End of the World

good evening and welcome to our history theology and philosophy lecture series my name is john hemer and i serve as the meetup coordinator by background i'm a historian map maker and theologian and i serve as pastor of uh the toronto community of christ uh who's play whose location here in the city is toronto center place we always begin uh our lecture series and other events with our mission which is to invite everyone into community to continually learn and grow to abolish poverty and and needless suffering to promote peace and justice and to live life meaningfully together um as always we thank you for your contributions um we are right now and having been raising money to buy new computers so that we can um better stream since we have so much more streaming capacity if you would like to help out with that drive you can go to centerplace.ca and there are buttons there for donations your gifts are tax deductible in the united states and canada thank you let me announce our upcoming lectures it's actually a sequence of lectures the next three tuesdays where our focus is going to be on the book of mormon and so if you're not interested in the book of mormon i'm just going to apologize that we're good that we're doing this but for those of you who are interested and want to take a little bit of a a deeper dive into a topic the next three tuesdays we're going to talk about first the book of mormon's 19th century context and understanding how this what seems like now quite a weird and odd narrative how it actually fits very snugly without any troubles into the time period when it emerged when it was published the next week we're going to look at the book of mormon authorship um and different claims that people have made about that specifically whether it requires a conspiracy or or for example supernatural intervention or what the text itself tells us about its author and then in the last week october 20th i'm going to look at given what we have learned about then the text if it's not an ancient document uh and as we go through it um what did its stories mean what do they what they tell us about both the 19th century and the context in which it emerged but also what can those narratives tell us or be of use for us today and so that'll be a series and so hopefully you'll find that um an interesting deep dive um so we realized that we're up against a pretty important and probably high rated uh television event in about an hour and so we understand that um anyway a lot of you are going to probably going to watch this and so as a result of that we're gonna try to keep this lecture um anyway we're gonna keep it to within the nine o'clock and i'm gonna be you know watching the time frame as we count down and so anyway that's uh we'll just mention that that means we might not have very much q a speaking of us politics our topic tonight is a history of the end of the world so um apocalypticism so i think that there's kind of like an ongoing obsession um with the world's end and destruction and that's frankly if we look at it it's been ongoing for thousands of years um nowadays we have even more ways than ever about how to imagine uh the world's end of course there's always been the idea of a divine apocalypse of god destroying the world but we also now of course have nuclear apocalypse um we are very aware uh in this time of kovit of the idea of a plague and or a super virus that kills everyone off asteroid hitting the planet uh maybe artificial intelligence uh taking over and deciding uh frankenstein like that they want to kill all their makers off aliens coming and killing everybody uh now in in fiction too superhero super villains destroying the world and of course um new favorite zombie apocalypse so um definitely um the ideas of the apocalypse i mean they're still very much with us they were also very very strong when i was growing up and so in the 1980s i was a teenager and this was a time of a heightened sense of cold war brinksmanship between the united states and the soviet union and there was as i recall a movie uh called the day after that i watched with my family that also had kind of a very significant stirring effect not only on us but on lots of people and as people contemplated what it would be like in the fall in the aftermath of it of i think would have been a relatively limited nuclear conflict but nevertheless still amazingly destructive nuclear conflict and so the kind of day after the day after um here's a picture of me and my uh sisters and uh brother at uh in the next year uh my dad um went and bought backpacks and camping survival supplies that we kept in the garage that you know we use in the event of a nuclear war when nuclear war is coming my parents also even bought a farm way out beyond the suburban ring and kind of made sort of tentative plans that we would all kind of hike that way if in the six in the situation of like in the uh um the day after where cars stopped working all this kind of thing in the event that our hometown where we lived there in minneapolis had gotten nuked there was a lot of that in that very same year so this is um norads war room at least as fictionally portrayed in another movie from that year war games uh which was very uh influential so the idea of a actual secular apocalypse caused by a showdown between the cold war superpowers we had a combo with that though so on the one hand there was this idea of the of the superpower conflict on the other hand um i was raised in a mormon household and there was also a sense that well maybe nuclear war is god's plan for the end of the world and so in our family reagan-era nuclear brinksmanship was built onto kind of a pre-existing mormon ideas about the apocalypse and so mormon leaders were teaching that our time is the latter days in other words we are living in the last few days anyway of the before the end of the world and as of the 1970s when i you know was a kid it was pretty well anticipated that the end of the world was 20 years in the future 20 30 years in the future and and actually that's pretty norm that's for semi-apocalypticists that's kind of normal you have a sense that it's going to be in your lifetime but like later and so as a result of that um in the 70s and 80s our family and lots of mormons regularly had a a year supply of food that be stored in the basement would often be we'd eat through the stuff you like so it'd often be a whole bunch of stuff that you didn't want to eat for a year but i guess uh in the event you'd be pretty good and in fact actually i talked to my mom so my mom continues to keep a bunch of food storage and uh and so for the first four months or so of covid she didn't even have to go to the store at all because they were just eating from down in the year supply so for mormonism mormonism grows out of this 19th century millenarianism that kind of has been relatively de-emphasized today so back then when mormonism got founded in the 1830s the latter-day saint movement really believed a very literal second coming of christ was absolutely imminent um members believed that the center place of god's kingdom the new jerusalem would be built on the earth in a literal way and it would be built in jackson county missouri so in other words right around kansas city um and so it was very immediate very literal early member uh uh important members martin harris he was a guy who was the financier of the book of mormon uh when it was first published he was so confident that the world was going to end within two or three years so he was betting if it didn't end within two or three years he wagered he'll let the person in the in the tavern that he was betting they could have his hand cut off uh he ended up reneging on that bet but in any event as members then attempted to go and build the new jerusalem in missouri they kind of offended the local settlers uh kind of frontiers guys who were not keen on all of these kind of hokie uh end of the world predictions and they were actually driven out of the county at gunpoint nevertheless that location uh uh ended up being very important still for my denomination for community of christ so the denomination here center place and toronto shares that same origin in the latter distinct movement with the utah mormon church and so although we no longer uh generally individual members complete what they like but anyway we no longer envision a literal apocalypse nevertheless the temple headquarters in independence is actually built on that very traditional site of the center place in jackson county also in jackson county members of the church in the 70s and 80s got together for example to make a kind of a utopia as they were gathering to build kind of like the um again a kind of a new jerusalem based on um i feel like this looks like the dharma initiative but in other words they're trying to have uh communitarian and shared housing things in common so that you can try to build um an idea of a of a just and equitable society utah mormons too continue to have beliefs in this and they tend to be more more literal so beliefs in a millennium in the utah lds church are far more literal anyway than in community of christ many mormons viewed that the construction of a temple in jackson county would have been a sign that the end is nigh and so when um the lds church has a different idea of temples when they built a temple in that kansas city metropolitan area they really built it across the river as far away from as possible from the traditional site to prevent potentially a lot of people speculating to prevent their own members from starting to panic that the end of the world was about to happen nevertheless enthusiasm among mormons preppers people who are preparing uh for the end of the world sometimes gets overzealous and so um lds leaders even have cautioned against storing too much food in other words don't don't get too nuts about this thing folks that doesn't stop people all right so there's evolving attitudes towards this end religious and secular both within um my particular religious tradition but also in society in general and in other other churches and religions so i want to talk a little bit tonight about apocalypses and apocalypticism and go through kind of a little bit of a history of apocalypticism look at the literary and religious genre of the apocalypses i want to look at the book of revelation from the christian new testament in particular i want to look at how that text is specifically misunderstood today we'll mention a little bit about doomsday cults and i want to talk finally about uh this ongoing popularity of imagining the end so just to define some of our terms the word apocalypse and the word revelation nowadays apocalypse has come to mean um cataclysmic destruction sort of the end of the world that's not what the word um initially meant that's not where it comes from in the original greek when that word was being applied to uh books like the book of revelation that are called apocalypses rather in greek there the idea it meant to disclose as in to disclose information in the same way that revelation in a way also means that same thing which is to reveal information so there is information that hasn't been known before and this is a book that is disclosing that information or revealing that information so that's the original idea of it but because a lot of these involve disclosing ideas about destruction of the world that's where we make this the modern understanding of the term so revelation is indirect information a prophet composes and discloses in response to inspiration um i'm going to argue and not direct information from god so so we can't so despite how um people literally understand text um the reality is is that uh i'm gonna make this theological argument um that god doesn't actually speak in human words uh like it and prophets aren't just like a dictaphone rather um people are the people are who composes these texts uh and whether you want to call that inspiration or however if you're secular and you don't think of that however you want to say that these are born out of the immediate context and not uh not alien to the context that the prophet finds himself in and so i also want to mention a little bit about the word armageddon so we use armageddon as a synonym sometimes for the apocalypse or specifically the final battle that causes a future cataclysmic destruction but again as with um that's not the original meaning the original understanding of armageddon is actually the name of a of a past battle um it would be like um someone's approaching their waterloo it's not and it's not actually a future battle in that in the sense of whoever's going to you know have a waterloo where the word is coming from napoleon's uh uh last battle waterloo that we're remembering and same thing armageddon has that same original meaning and it's come to be applied to an idea of a future battle so where do we get this word armageddon so in the end of the first temple period this time period before the original destruction of jerusalem and the taking away of the ancient israelites into captivity in in babylon by the babylonians what the time period when the earliest parts of the hebrew bible were being composed at the time of one of these very important kings whose king when many of these texts are being written down king josiah this king is very praised by biblical authors as the greatest king since david in part because again they're writing when he's king however even though they predict great things for him un very unexpectedly in the text he is very ingloriously killed by a pharaoh of egypt pharaoh neko had a town called megiddo and so he went up apparently what we can just tell in the earliest text of this is that he went up essentially probably to meet the pharaoh who is going to fight with much greater against much greater kings um and probably is simply just killed at that point by pharaoh it's not really actually a battle um although it's so inconceivable that this um uh what should have been it should have been a glorious end to this guy and instead he has a very inglory ascent and so it's later upgraded into a tragic battle and remembered as a battle but where there's no real evidence that any battle even took place so megiddo here is where we getting the word armageddon so um what about the battle of armageddon in the future so i'm just going to mention that although the book of revelation includes a vision of the kings of the world assembling for battle at har magidu so that's where we're getting armageddon the author does not actually describe a physical battle instead the author of the book of revelations very clearly is sharing uh what's a vision and the vision is has a lot of imagery and the vision is of the lamb conquering with a sword that emerges out of his mouth and so rather than it being a nuclear missile or something like that what we're really talking about is something emerging from the mouth and so the imagery here is a sword which as an as an analogy for the word of god in other words armageddon in revelation is a fully metaphorical battle um that is being fought in the realm of ideas in the sense of people hearing the christian gospel and being converted to it not in the sense of any kind of big engagement where however you want to imagine it the russians the chinese and and the americans all get together in in israel and and duke it out or something like that that is not what is being described in any sense in the book all right so i want to look a little bit having gone through that little bit of context i want to look at the origin of the idea of histories and where do people first get the idea um that the world is about to is going to end and indeed that they are actually living at the end of the world both of those actually come up about the same time so one of the things that happens um as i'll just say when a society is pre-literate they aren't necessarily they're not getting to the situation where they have old books that are out of date rather they are transmitting information orally and they retell it all the time and even if it maintains its character in which it can for centuries uh and even longer it nevertheless is always um updated as the uh bards or or poets or or the people that are telling the um the oral tradition update it for the present time so it's understandable uh to the people that are around them and so as a result of that and as a result of that way of transmitting informations preliterate societies often envision themselves in an ongoing cycle of the eternal round and so everything is always happening and we're always in the same kind of a cycle as the year cycle and the day cycle these kind of internal rounds and so picturing history as a line a timeline and seeing yourself at or near one end is a much more natural consequence of writing history so as you start to write down what went before you begin to remember a more remote past which is farther and farther removed from where you were at and so you can kind of see now boy this book is really out of date they're talking about stuff i don't even know what they're talking about anymore and so that it doesn't happen as easily in an in a living oral tradition text is dead once it's written down so part of apocalypticism is a kind of thing is what i'll call temporal narcissism so this is so this is doctor who right so if you were a time lord with a tardis that could take you to any point in time and space does it make sense that so often you'd end up in late 20th and early 21st century britain you know when else would you go right so so because um obviously the show is filmed then that's when um people are continually that's where the doctor is continually going to right and same thing happens you know in star trek so and they're trying to save the 23rd century and and save the whales and things like that in the movie that takes place in the a movie that is uh is in the theaters in the year 1986 so so therefore the the crew in the 23rd century go back specifically to 1986 in order to do that because that's the time period we're in in other words this is our um temporal narcissism we're thinking about our moment because this is the moment we're in so in the same way apocalyptic authors saw themselves as time's end so you know tv and movie writers we maybe forgive them for using the settings here and now because frankly you don't have to build a whole city if you're going to have the crew and the enterprise walk around san francisco or have doctor who walk around london you can use the existing buildings instead of having to build whole sets by contrast the fact that the authors of apocalyptic texts saw themselves as living in the end of the world i'd say that that actually kind of betrays a a lack of temporal perspective so i mean the reality is we all kind of do this we are living uh now and we look back to the past uh and so then and everything therefore that occurs in all of history is before us and so therefore we are actually right here at what's the end so far and as far as we're concerned as like for example if you were a very famous and important apocalypticist for the middle ages joaquim of fiore who was living in the 12th century if you're living in the year 1180 the past is all behind you and it's only natural to observe that you're at the end of the timeline nevertheless history has continued it's almost a thousand years later now and we're now at the end of time there's no time in front of us but euro came a fiora as far as most of people are concerned in terms of perspective he might as well be living at the same time as jesus it's so long ago for most people that it's just very very long it's just all part of it of a long past so temporal narcissism so also another another origin of this is that early writers and thinkers prophets like isaiah they also envisioned a future paradise where things like swords would be beat into plowshares where the lion would lie down the light with the lamb however so even though they came up with that the idea that a new better world could only arise after the current world was violently destroyed is a little bit later development than isaiah um part of what happened is uh influence in abrahamic religions influence in judaism and later christianity by an earlier world religion zoroastrianism which was quite apocalyptic so zoroastrianism concerned itself between the cosmic struggle between good and evil it predicted a future triumph of good it included the idea of saviors the destruction of this world and the creation of an earthly paradise these were all ideas at the very heart of zoroastrianism the religion of the persian empire and all of these became very prominent ideas in second temple judaism which is to say the persian period when jerusalem was a city of the persian empire so as a result of this time period in this time period apocalyptic actually replaces that earlier prophetic tradition so we no longer have prophets like isaiah who are writing that but people are still writing bible like books they are now writing though a new kind of tradition of books that is what we kind of call the apocalyptic tradition so the earliest text of the bible god is actually envisioned in a less cosmic way speaking directly for example to literary prophets like moses as the idea of god though becomes more cosmic and remote in the second temple period writers attributed visions to angelic intermediaries and moreover they attributed their visions to ancient authorities and so instead of if you were a writer then in the second temple period instead of going out on the street and announcing that god had spoken to you directly and and say thus saith the lord as isaiah might have done in his time rather text has become more important and so instead of actually saying those prophecies out in poetry like isaiah would have done now a writer in the second temple period of prophet will write their text out they'll describe it as a vision that is received from an angel so in other words not from god directly but through an angelic intermediary and they will tend to tribute attribute their text to an ancient authority like daniel and enoch or adam or moses or abraham in order to have their text be considered worthy of being in the canon and so there's actually a vast literature and even though they had this strategy i've got a whole bunch of us here you know there's this text you know apocalyptic literature and this is just big volumes of these that are from this time period um it's uh like i say this is a it's mostly excluded from the bible even though it's attributed to figures like adam and da and zephaniah or anybody everyone so a to z um and so we have all of those apocalypses but they didn't make it in the canon a very few of those texts did make it into the hebrew bible especially prominent in terms of apocalyptic position predictions are the books of ezekiel and daniel and actually beyond the ones that i have in my volumes here many more are actually discovered in the dead sea scrolls so i'll just give you a little example of how these work from the book of daniel the book of daniel is attributed to a prophet in the babylonian period so uh the middle of the uh the sixth century bc but it's actually written in the middle of the second century bc so many hundreds of years later by somebody who has doesn't know very much about the babylonian period at all in the next daniel's visions are brought by the angel gabriel and they're very remarkably specific and accurate in terms of their predicting various historical events up to the year 167 bc and then after the year 164 they continue to be predictions that are more vague but those predictions all fail and so the fact that the author for example knew you know what would happen between 600 and 167 and then did not know what was going to happen after 164 we can tell when they were writing right so they're writing in that time period uh when the other events had happened so the author of the daniel um shares two central characteristics of apocalyptic writers and these are one the belief that they themselves are um immediately living at the end times and two they're totally wrong in their predictions um and this is just quite normal people who have this idea they're not at the end of the times we can tell very well that even though the uh the author of daniel believes that what is happening right then in the second century bc was a signal that the world was ending in a very particularly short amount of time that is not the case so it proved not to be true because obviously it's now more than two thousand years later and that did not happen so a characteristic failure of apocalyptic precision prediction so ezekiel um had predicted the world's end in his own time and that that failed and so the author of daniel took uh reinterpreted the time frame uh mentioned in ezekiel so that the end of the world would occur you know in his day when daniel's prediction failed uh in other words so when the world didn't end it around in the second century bc uh the john the revelator the person who wrote the book of revelation he decided to reinterpret the time frame so that the end of the world would occur in his day so in other words the text is still important the idea that the world is ending is still important and so now he changes the math which very literally would have if interpreted literally would have meant uh it would have happened in the second century instead now it's changed so that uh the calculation can make sense that um that at the end around the year 100 a.d is going to work and so anyway the failure of the prophecy has resulted in ongoing recalculations so in other words john the revelator also believed that he was living in the end times here we are 1900 years later and people have to then reinterpret what he's saying so what happens when prophecies fail like that you'd think that if these apocalyptic writers the authors of ezekiel daniel of of the book of revelation when they make clear predictions that don't happen um shouldn't that make people say well well they were wrong then they're a false prophet or a failed prophet really that's not how it tends to work and so there is an amazing hubbub in the 1840s a guy named miller who led a group called the millerites they had done he'd done all the calculations and he determined that the world was going to end on 1843 later figured out okay no that wasn't right i guess it was 1844 um and they even went so far as to sell possessions they all gathered together on top of a hill and and and they were all in on this thing because they knew the world was going to end and then it did not end and so as a result of that they call that time period the great disappointment and you might think that well they just would say well miller really didn't know what he was talking about and and that would be that but that isn't what happened so you know although the military's believed that the world would end in 1844 the prophecy's failure didn't end the movement rather after the great disappointment all kinds of different successors to miller ended up reinterpreting his again his calculations and understanding what was going on and so all of these different movements then have emerged out of that early millerite disappointment and now there's still today 22 million members in different successor churches the largest of with which of the seventh-day adventists who have maybe 19 or 19 million members and so a lot of cases what happens is that just because there's a failure of prophecy doesn't mean that anybody is abandoning their original belief in part this is because of human nature and the sunk cost fallacy so here we have our little cartoon dance illustrating the sunk hospitality fallacy so a little dog here believes that he's buried his bone right here and he skips to digging and now he's dug such a big hole um you know the other dog is like you know i don't think your bone is down there he says but i'm so deep i can't stop now and so he keeps digging and digging even though he's very clearly digging the wrong place but he doesn't want to abandon this hole that he's spent so much effort in right and so this is the truism or aphorism in for a dime in for a dollar once you've already thrown a dime in even though you lost that dime you're going to continue to invest you know now you're going to invest a dollar because you're invested in frankly the failure and so some people do when prophecy fails leave but a lot of people or more maybe even are actually end up being stronger devotees or disciples so um i just want to uh you know make the case you know rather than rather than follow after the the sunk cost fallacy or in for a diamond for a dollar people should use the other aphorism and say don't throw good money after bad so once you've already lost the money it's lost you can't get it back so don't don't throw good money after bed all right so spectacular failure of apocalyptic prophecy is just as likely to result in increased loyalty of followers because of the sunk costs rather than their disillusionment uh apocalyptic doctrines can tend to function like conspiracy theories and so for example a besieged group like uh here the people's temple uh jonestown they believe they have us share a special knowledge that elite experts lacked and so that they all share together and that um gives them a strength identity and so they're actually able to like conspiracy theorists like the q anon folks they're able to feel strengthened even though they're bought into something that isn't the case in the same way that we have uh chronocentrism we also have um kind of textual centrism um people love to read ancient texts and they immediately think it's referring to them themselves right here and now but the reality is when you read the book of revelation it's not about you or your time the author of this and the author of all ancient texts is not speaking to our day they're not envisioning our day what they are doing is they're speaking to their own community at the time that they're living they're writing for a very particular purpose they're writing to people in their own time period so even though apocalyptic authors are suffering from a lack of perspective and they falsely believe themselves to be living at the end times um they're writing to uh the the readers who read them now also have that same lack of perspective and they falsely imagine that the texts refer to the reader's time which is to say my time if i'm reading this right now when in fact they actually refer to the author's time so future history reading of revelation is not new for centuries people have been reading the book of revelation as if it was a future history and people who think this are often convinced the signs that they see in the book uh um report think to their point to the idea that their own times are the beginning of the end i've called this temporal narcissism or chronocentrism um this has been going on for a long time i've mentioned before joakima fiore who was in the 12th century he used the book of revelation to predict that the world would end around the year 1260 so he actually put it more than um you know more than 60 years after his death so he he was giving people a little bit of time in terms of his calculation as opposed to what some people sometimes do and so as a result of what he did though he did kind of a new thing with the text and in fact he actually identified um a vision in the text the seven-headed beast with historical figures beginning with king herod so in jesus's time uh and leading to saladin the leader of the muslim forces against the crusaders in joachim's own time and so in other words leading to saladin and then the antichrist who was already born in joakim's time but who would only um you know precipitate the end of the world uh by the year 1260. and so essentially he's identified it from his perspective and his place in history what these seven figures would have represented right and first and so again saladin being the contemporary who uh medieval christians at in joachim's time is is the most concerned with so um protestants at the time of the reformation then used images of level revelation to label the papacy as antichrist and so this is a um a 16th century uh a woodcut from martin luther's bible it's representing the the vision of the of babylon and you can see um the of babylon here is wearing a papal crown right and so um again it's updated for uh it's updating the text reading it to read in uh luther's own time and biases um you know and catholics gave as good as they got so come catholics in return identified luther as the antichrist and so in in both cases what they're doing is they're taking a first century text and they're reading their own 16th century issues into the text early modern thinkers like isaac newton you know so we think of him primarily because of all of his amazing work as a scientist he actually spent as much time or more studying the bible in order to predict the future as he did inventing things like calculus he should have spent more time on calculus and less time on on the bible because his reading of the book of revelation and his book on the book of revelation um is largely i would say a mess and isn't worth anything but in any event he argues that the text does everything from predict the conversion of constantine uh to the fall of constantinople so in other words all of these important events as isaac newton saw them at his point in history at the beginning of the 18th century so common modern ideas about the book of revelation actually have nothing to do with the actual text so you may have heard of something called the rapture there is no mention of the rapture in the text at all the word antichrist it does not appear in the text um and the author's intent uh in terms of what is actually in the text the author's intent is actually to convey a message of hope to his contemporaries and it's not meant to convey a message of fear to people in the far future the book of revelation is actually its own book and so this image of the rapture that you might have heard from modern fundamentalist christians it's drawn from other biblical texts so for example the 2nd thessalonians and some of the sayings from the sayings gospel q that are found in matthew and luke and are misinterpreted to be understood as this thing this rapture when christians are going to be taken up into the heavens at the right at the end times uh that is not in the book of revelation at all likewise the name antichrist actually comes from the letters first and second john which is often then conflated with the image of the beast in revelation but again they're not known those texts wouldn't be known to the author of revelation and they aren't aren't actually relevant in such revelation needs to be read on its own although revelation is generally misread as a future history this idea when the four horsemen are going to be loosed war famine pestilence and death they're going to be loosed on the earth and the reality is famine war pestilence and death already are loose on the earth the book of revelations is actually envisioning a world where they're going to be eliminated so this idea that they've been loosed on the earth that's something that happened in the way past we have death we have war we have pestilence they're all here with us the book of revelation is envisioning a time uh when they will be eliminated and so the core narrative actually of the book of revelation is the destruction of the beasts of injustice so although revelations is sometimes read as god sending these horror iffic monsters to destroy the world the text is actually about god quote destroying those who destroy the world and so the vision then is the vision of ending injustice not of god pouring out four horsemen onto earth those are already with us i'm also going to say that um one of the things that's kind of central to the text that doesn't get remembered very much at all by apocalypticists who are you know wanting to get raptured and hoping that everybody who's not is going to have some horrible end that actually the text concludes with a very hopeful vision of a new jerusalem the new jerusalem is presented as this open city that has open gates in other words it's not a city with walls it's where everyone can come and go as 24 open gates and it's just and inclusive it's a just society where pain suffering and even death have been defeated ultimately it's a word picture of a just kingdom of god that is like what jesus describes when he says blessed are the poor so this idea of a fully just upside down inclusive uh new kingdom um when uh that will exist at some time in the future when uh war math pestilence plague have all been eliminated so to to sum up and i've gone maybe fast because i've been concerned that we um uh you know because we got the debate coming up here the apocalypse the in and politically politically is uh anyway to sum up uh apocalypses and apocalypse apocalypticism um i like this the end is thursday um you're better off if you're not like miller you don't actually say the exact date right you're better off saying it's near like um we thought when i was a kid that it was maybe 20 years off as opposed to continuously setting a date although again you don't always get in trouble for it you can always set a new date although um all biblical apocalyptic prophecies refer to times that have passed and have therefore frankly failed their ongoing reinterpretation and indeed misinterpretation is is continuing um unfortunately in the case of like smaller new religious community communities like jonestown the urgency that can be derived from immediate end times can dangerously empower leaders and so really crazy and bad things can happen when people's eternal priorities are are shifted to the point where everything has to happen now because of doomsday a doomsday clock that is ticking super fast nevertheless if current popular culture is any indication of the trend taking delight in the world's end will will be with us till the end of the world if you know if it comes in any of the number of ways that unfortunately uh we're facing with the various global problems that we're either facing or not actually facing because of widespread denial of the issues and so that is my take on uh apocalypses and apocalypticism on the history of the end of the world and so i did it in enough time that we can have some questions we have some time for questions i'm going to end we're going to try to end at 10 minutes before the hour so you have time to watch um you know get ready to watch the debate and find figure out how to get that on and so if there have been any questions or i'll invite any questions i know i went really fast and so if there's any need for clarification um we'll see if leandro has any i'm ready so emma gazarian asks was john the revelator john the disciple and and the answer to that is no so if we think very clearly although um although different people at different times in history have have made that claim or have wanted that to be the case or i believe that the case um in antiquity people even a lot of people were were pretty aware if um if you read greek which i do not but i have read uh authors who um anyway who have talked about this the greek of the book of revelation is is very strange and very very different than the greek that is used in the gospel according to john and so we can tell very clearly that these are our different authors the book of revelation i've heard described as being written in almost a kind of a street greek and so it's almost like uh like rapper or kind of greek or something like that you know this kind of a thing so it is using all kinds of crazy slang and other kinds of terms that is are very different uh from that so it's a regular what what we say is it's a john was a common name um uh what we can say is that this is a different christian prophet of the late first early second century late 1st century who is writing his own letters to the churches in anatolia that includes this this vision elizabeth bach says american pie uh seems to me to be about the end of the world i don't know much if anything about uh the rock and roll music in it uh the three men i admire most i mean i think this is if this is the song the three men i admire most the father son and holy ghost they took the train to the coast and this is what they said on his way to armageddon uh tom lehrer is so long mom i'm off to drop the bomb so i i wish elizabeth was here to sing that for us um and she says i have also also acquired a song called before the oceans rose where the speaker is a child about 2050 describing the world of his great grandfather yeah so there's some good um science fiction uh um history about uh this impending like after the calamity and um and i i remember some some uh kind of chilling stuff like when i was a kid too reading about like how um i don't know like people in the future who don't have this energy society who don't aren't living and they're living a much simpler life because of the collapse of uh the energy economy and things like that who were like skateboarding on the remains of an interstate highway or something like that because you know that that nobody makes those anymore because not all of this kind of cars and things like that don't exist in this in this simpler more primitive future um and other there's all kinds of other post-apocalyptic literature like the postman and things like that that are coming from that time um ron wagner says muslims also believe in an end time uh do jews so um so jews of the time of jesus very frequently did not ever not everyone there was all kinds of different sects but so for example um the the sect that is at qumran that created the dead sea scrolls they very well much believed in the in the end times and they um had their own apocalyptic texts including some of these popular apocalyptic texts i would say that because this is less some several of these kinds of uh features of second temple judaism that get uh focused into christianity are less into the text that made it into the hebrew bible and so there are in daniel they are in ezekiel to an extent but as a result of of these later apocalypses like this text that i have not making it into jewish scripture it's far less emphasized than it would be in in christianity or islam uh elizabeth also says there was a skit in beyond the fringe that parodies the millerites they wait for the end of the world it doesn't happen and then they say well see you tomorrow so i guess every week every every day they they go wait up on the hill for the end of the world and then when that doesn't happen they say see you tomorrow so yeah there's always those kind of silly it's hard for even a fervent believer to divorce themselves from their daily routine right so you you um you you still make your dentist appointment you know for next month even though you think the world is ending today right so um peter bennett's paul bennetts i'm sorry watching from uh uh olathe kansas uh just down the road from where the day after was filmed in lawrence yeah um i think we even had some church members who were extras in the film yeah it i remember it pretty vividly and i think i've only ever seen that movie when it aired on tv you know in the 80s like that and so might it could be it should be interesting to go back and re-watch that um and i i even kind of remember you know like again that kind of kansas setting that you're talking about as a result of that it just made a big imprint so that's really neat though that um anyway that you guys were right there and maybe even some of the church members were extras in the film uh johann kuslag says um dr strange love and on the beach were movies that i remember from my youth about the end of the world and were quite influential in my formative years yeah so um i haven't seen on the beach but i can just say doctor strangelove is i think one of the best movies of of all time and um and it's yeah very much you know very much a commentary on on this on kind of end of the end of the world and and you know the russians making their doomsday machine and device and and uh preemptive strike on that on behalf of a uh kind of a crazy conspiracy theorist general in the uh the u.s air force so yeah um that was definitely you know very much of of the era and the brinksmanship that was happening was very real i mean in a lot of cases people are not even aware sometimes where retrospectively we only find out how close uh the superpowers got to doing different things that would have been very devastating um jordy frames says buddy holly was uh uh uh john the rebel revelator um the teacher of papayas so um so there is this tradition and i'm trying to think of who writes that if it's eusebius who's writing about this um there is a sense that they have in um uh in ephesus in in anatolia that there are um connections between um john the johannine community between um the apostle john potentially and um and then later people papayas and other um uh other early church leaders but i think that the um i think that those recollections are late and they don't they aren't very well attested so i don't um think that we have anything um that scholars find to be a compelling connection especially between john the revelator and and uh and any any any other connection with him um and so this is a text that actually um some people i mean it got copied in because people thought might since it was john they thought it might be the same john as john the apostle actually what we can say is that um that none of the none of the texts that are attributed to john including the gospel of john the letters of john are actually by the historical figure the apostle john who we know as an actual actual historical figure because paul who is an actual historical figure met this person but none of the texts are likely at all or almost any chance of being by that actual historical figure there rather they're texts that are either written in um in attributed to that uh apostle or written in his name or in the case here of of john the revelator he doesn't actually make the claim that he is the apostle and doesn't the text in different places talks about the 12 and things like that and in no way does it indicate that uh that the author considers himself to be one of the twelve or is pretending to be one of the twelve or anything like that but um uh but people some people thought it was an early christians a lot of them reading the greek and knowing the greek um didn't agree and so this is actually why the book of revelation was the last book to be agreed upon for the canon of the christian new testament and especially in the greek east they were less likely to include it all the way up until like the fifth and sixth century so sometimes they would and sometimes they wouldn't so it um it's we don't have a lot of anything more about where it came from except for the internal evidence as you read the text itself so in writing his letter to the different churches in anatolia at the beginning of the book of revelation john describes uh himself he described himself as being on the island of patmos and and so on and so from clues in the text as with so many ancient texts um clues in the text are almost all we are able to do in terms of this characters the author's biography well folks i think we should probably wrap it up because we uh i want to watch the debate too and so i uh i know this went fast and i appreciate you sticking with us despite kind of an abbreviated timeline here and we will see you next week as we kind of start our dig deep into the our survey of the book of mormon you

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 15,359

Keywords: religious sudies, history, lecture, community of christ, john hamer, theology, book of revelation, end of the world, end of times, apocalypse, apocalipsis, armaggedon

Id: NoF9wiuhAkI

Length: 56min 51sec (3411 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020