Apocalypse Now?

By John Elson

Wail, for the day of the Lord is near; as destruction from the Almighty it will come!

-- Isaiah 13: 6

To judge by what's selling in Christian bookstores these days, the war in the Persian Gulf is not about anything so mundane as liberating Kuwait or neutralizing the Butcher of Baghdad. Rather, the "mother of battles" (as Saddam Hussein likes to call it) is about the fulfillment of biblical prophecies regarding the imminence of Armageddon.

Consider the evidence. Zondervan, a leading U.S. publisher of Fundamentalist and Evangelical literature, has issued an updated version of John F. Walvoord's 1974 best seller, Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis, with an initial print order of -- get this -- 1 million copies. (Nine were reportedly ordered by the White House, whose previous occupant was a confessed believer in Armageddon theology.) Walvoord is chancellor of Dallas Theological Seminary, where Charles H. Dyer is associate professor of Bible exposition. Dyer's new book, The Rise of Babylon, which argues that Saddam's announced plan to build a replica of that ancient city is an omen of the Last Days, has sold 180,000 copies just in the past two weeks. Ratings are up for conservative televangelists who preach about impending apocalypse. Among them is the Rev. Jack Van Impe of Detroit, whose scriptural prophecies point to an Iraqi defeat but also to eventual world war in this decade between Russia and the West.

Armageddon is a serious game that any number can play. The electronic bulletin boards offered by such computer networks as CompuServe and Genie are stuffed with doomsday speculations. And one need not be born again to experience a frisson of apocalyptic concern. Also enjoying a new spasm of popularity is the 16th century astrologer Nostradamus, one of whose gnomic utterances predicts the arrival in 1999 of the "Great King of Terror" -- easily identifiable as Saddam, to those with vivid imaginations.

It is no great surprise that the gulf conflict would give rise to so much spiritual hand wringing. As TIME senior writer Otto Friedrich observed in his meditation on history, The End of the World, solemn predictions of earth's final days have accompanied natural and man-made catastrophes down through the ages, from the sack of Rome to the Nazi Holocaust. This century's military technology has given new power to those primordial fears and illusions, wrote Friedrich in his book. Thus the most chilling uncertainty of the gulf war is whether Saddam, in an act of cynical desperation, might launch a few surviving Scuds armed with biological, chemical or nuclear warheads.

Armageddon is a fine, thumping word, almost onomatopoeic in its evocation of finality. This metaphor for ultimate conflict probably gets its name from Mount Megiddo, a scraggly hill on a great plain in northern Israel where, as many conservative Protestants believe, a great battle will end history's most terrible war. According to scenarios drawn from prophetic passages in Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Revelation, a number of nations, including Babylon (read Iraq) and led by an evil Antichrist, will invade Israel during this conflict. But then the Son of God will return to halt the slaughter and, according to some visions, inaugurate a thousand-year era of peace before presiding at the Final Judgment.

Historians have proposed that this millenarian kingdom come is the ultimate (but unacknowledged) source of that now discredited Marxist paradise, the withering away of the state. Faith in Jesus' Second Coming has persisted through history, even though predictions about its timing have inevitably proved premature. The first Christians thought he would return to earth within their lifetime. As the Goths decimated imperial legions in the 4th century, St. Ambrose of Milan saw the Antichrist among the pagan invaders and proclaimed that the end of the world was nigh. A 12th century Cistercian abbot, Joachim of Flora, was quite precise: the Age of the Spirit, which he saw as the culmination of human history, would begin between A.D. 1200 and 1260. William Miller, the Baptist layman who founded the Adventist movement in America, was sure that the Second Coming would take place on March 21, 1843, and then, after recalculating, on Oct. 22, 1844. (Miller had the grace to confess his errors when the deadlines passed; the movement survived.)

To the nonbeliever, all such speculation is bootless. If God does not exist, there is no First Coming, much less a Second, and the end of the world is a - concept without meaning. Many mainstream Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians argue that millenarians like Walvoord and Dyer misuse scriptural prophecies about the final days. These are not detail-specific guides to beating some kind of celestial point spread but timeless alerts that humanity must be constantly vigilant against sin's allure. The temptation to seek clues to the Second Coming on CNN is easy to understand, since Saddam has proclaimed himself a successor to Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian King who enslaved the Israelites of old. That makes it deceptively easy for prophecy mongers to identify Iraq with Babylon. Somewhat awkwardly, it also undercuts a long- standing Protestant tradition that this symbol of corruption refers to the Church of Rome.

Ultimately, Christian critics of the millenarians can argue that they are guilty of two errors. One is emulating Abbot Joachim's egotistic heresy: falsely assuming that the age in which they live is unique. The other mistake -- an undertone in some of the Armageddon literature but overt in much of the computerized End Days babbling -- is to interpret events in the gulf with eschatological glee, as if the real message were "Hey, fellas, our troubles are almost over." No one has the right to that assumption. History unfurls as God's secret, wrote the French novelist Leon Bloy. But it is also man's destiny, from which there is no abdication.