The End Times

What if the Eschaton turns out to be more of an Eschat-off?

After the Flood

I yielded to some uncharacteristically intense prompting from friends and started watching Station Eleven recently. I don’t really know where it goes or whether I’ll end up liking it, but I can already understand the appeal. A swift and immensely lethal pandemic has left a remnant of humanity piecing together a new world amid the wreckage of the old. It’s an old, old story that bears a funhouse-mirror resemblance to certain recent, and hypothetically imminent, global events, allowing creators and audience alike to imagine a scenario of change and rupture so drastic that, in effect, anything is possible. Two episodes deep, in Station Eleven, the primary effect of the pandemic seems to have been creating the conditions for a polyamorous DIY performing-arts scene.

Whatever it is in stories of endings, or “apocalypses” in the current usage, that attracts people across eras and languages and genres works abundantly on me. I reviewed a book on this mode of storytelling six years ago and concluded, in part, that the book wasn’t quite doomy enough (I would take some of this review back but it has a really good kicker, though I say it myself). There is an undeniable thrill to watching personal, cultural, or historical fears take an unexpected or sublimated form. The spiritual danger of the apocalyptic style lies in its tendency toward wish fulfillment. What if the flood actually makes human flourishing more possible than it currently is? What if the break is not just terrible but, in some sense, purifying? What if, going further, it takes the form of a just punishment?

Actual history does not, after all, give us many examples of these kinds of ruptures. A high-toned HBO series about the Black Death wouldn’t feel anything like Station Eleven. It took a century for that disease to carry off roughly a third of Europe’s population, after centuries of recurring outbreaks in the Mediterranean world, and while that nightmarish fourteenth century provided the conditions for major change (including a flourishing of eschatological and apocalyptic literature!) over the decades that followed, it all unfolded rather haltingly and gradually. Political upheaval doesn’t clean any slates; as people have been pointing out at least since de Tocqueville, the ancien regime lives on into and often beyond the revolution in many and various ways.¹ People wondered at the obstinacy of institutions and political configurations through the first truly worldwide pandemic in a hundred years, but that’s just the human story in a nutshell: the forces of continuity and resilience, for better and for worse, are always present, and usually dominant.

So maybe we turn on a show about a brain-melting catastrophe to indulge both fears and fantasies. The world after the Eschaton can look suspiciously like the world we imagine before the Fall. One sees this even in politics, as some strains on both left and right adopt a disturbed and disturbing archaeo-futurism. I don’t know why people on the right gravitate to visions of European pagans, steppe warriors, and khanates while people on the left favor a fascination with American indigeneity, but they strike me as versions of the same daydream: the bad world that is will be swept away and replaced by a refurbished version of the good world that was.² The problem, apart from all the corpses bridging the nearer and farther shore, is that people won’t willingly do it.

Advent for People Who Know the Score

The Bible is sometimes held up as the instigator of this eschatological style of storytelling, and while I don’t think that’s quite right, it’s true enough that our tradition offers ample sources for imagining all kinds of endings and new beginnings. We get a lot of them during Advent. Jesus calls back to the “days of Noah,” when everyone was eating and drinking, marrying and being given in marriage, just chilling and doing normal stuff until the Flood came and took them all by surprise. John the Baptist brandishes a rhetorical axe at the root of the religious establishment, shouting about “the wrath to come.” Isaiah gives us the wolf and the lamb lying together, the swords and the ploughshares, the child playing over the hole of the asp. Reading through the lectionary for this season a few weeks ago, I was struck by how relatively modest some of the prophetic images of the Messianic reign really were. The Anointed One will act as a judge or arbiter among the nations, who will seek him out as one would a suzerain. His wise counsel and just rulings will make war obsolete. There are points where the plain meaning of the words suggests something much closer to a well-functioning League of Nations than to “heaven,” conventionally understood.

Of course, “what if human history were less bad?” is a perfectly good question to ask and on which to focus one’s hope, especially if one’s own nation is a decidedly minor player in a region dominated by trans-national empires. And it is perfectly legitimate to find in these images of a harmonious world a type or anticipation of a still-greater reconciliation and renewal of all things. Still, it’s not a very easy set of aspirations to read, much less to preach. When you amplify these images from Isaiah through the end-of-the-world urgency of the Old Testament apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, and the New Testament, you get some weird results. What, exactly, are we waiting for? How will we know it’s happened? What, if anything, is our agency in making it happen?

For mainline Protestants like me, one option for answering (or at least dealing with) these questions was apocalyptic or eschatological theology. We didn’t mean this in the End-Times, Rapture-Ready sense the terms might suggest. Oh heavens no. We did this by finding the ends (that’s the eschata in eschatology) to which the promises and threats of Scripture concern themselves in social, economic, or historic terms. The world’s end may be the highway underpass, the coastal village falling into the sea, or the moment of reconciliation between old enemies. The revealing or unveiling (the literal meaning of “apocalypse”) in the Scripture is not of the future but of present realities. The immanent processes of history—violence, inequality, ecological abuse, institutional failure—were the targets to be exposed, warned of, and brought to the light of divine justice.

Election Day 2032 (Projected)

Climate change and—for me, at least—the swoon that Euro-American democracies seemed to go into in the last decade made this all seem very obvious and urgent. When I wrote a book in the middle of the last decade, I titled its introduction “The Estate Sale at the End of the World.” Many of us have been breathing an atmosphere of crisis for a long time. It has been easy enough to telescope the vast, indeterminate gap between the manger and the thunderous return of the Son of Man into our own era, which has promised such horrid terrors and offered such desperate hope.

I would defend all this, if I had to. At least I would defend it against an eschatology that is fixated on signs and signals, and prefers escape from history to responsibility for it. But I suspect, somewhere along the way, that we Christians fed our end-times expectations into our interpretation of secular history, and now when we try to understand that history we are entirely too apt to see it in eschatological terms. This gives our idle (or monstrous) fantasies their veneer of hard-nosed realism. A mighty judgment is coming for your gas-burning cars and your pornography and your historical crimes and your woke Marxism, and when only a third portion remains on the Earth in a sustainable hunter-gatherer utopia or a remnant is raptured away from the tribulations of the evil one, you’ll finally understand.

Apocalypse Later

A few weeks ago, I had to preach on Jesus’s warning that the temple would be thrown down with not one stone left upon another. He goes on to say that there would be wars and plagues and persecutions, as well as false messiahs. And not for the first time, I was struck with the realization, both comforting and queasy, that this had all already come to pass. The shocking prophecy had come true, and yet the world had not ended. Rabbinic Judaism and orthodox Christianity both emerged from the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. I’m not sure if either can really be imagined apart from that event. The persecutions were real, but the communities did persevere. Ideas of the mode of God’s presence in the world and in the sacred community evolved in unanticipated ways. In a phrase we are fond of, the Messianic age, or the Kingdom of God, is “already and not yet.” I wonder if we might not say of the Eschaton, instead, that it is “always and never.” The night is far gone, Paul tells the Christians of Rome, and the day is near. I love that line even if I can’t quite picture what moment of the diurnal cycle he had in mind. It would seem to have both the qualities of night and day rather than the qualities of neither.

Untold millions have eaten and drunk, married and been given in marriage, been born and laid to rest in that pause when the night is gone but the day has not yet arrived. It seems to be a capacious moment. They witnessed crimes and disasters beyond human telling. It is spiritually and actuarially unlikely that we will prove to be more specially cursed than they.

As we spin back into Advent, this time I am wondering whether the doomerism I have embraced or at least entertained, whether with respect to climate, COVID, or democracy, has impeded rather than empowered the adaptations we will need to make to endure. I think we can say with some justification that doomerism in those areas has been an inadequate heuristic for explaining events over the last few years. And it's telling that doomer sentiment correlates across these areas, just as hysteria about COVID mitigation measures, "woke ideology," and renewable energy policies correlate among different people. That's not to say that things are good, or ever will be, relative to a world with a stable climate, settled institutions of self-government, and one less destructive respiratory virus. It’s just to say that the kind of definitive judgment we have either dreaded or hoped for isn’t certain, or maybe even likely, to happen.³

Another truism in my circles is the distinction between "hope," which is good and righteous, and "optimism," which is dumb. But I'm starting to wonder whether this has not been counterproductive, too. What if adapting—or enduring, to use the Biblical idiom—requires a measure of optimism? As a pessimist by nature, I am loath to acknowledge this possibility. I would prefer to feed on nothing but undefended hope and the habits of a relatively stable and privileged place in the world until I die and don't have to be responsible for things any more. But if I'm not going to try to convince people that the mechanistically inevitable and necessary outcome of our present age is human death on an unprecedented scale and the unwinding of all technological development back to a pre-agricultural state (which no one should! that's a horrible vision), I should think about possibilities less drastic and more frustrating, within which our choices and ingenuity will make a real difference.

One thing I appreciate about my faith, and about Advent in particular, is the way it locates us both within and outside of the contingency of historical time. Resolving this tension or paradox one way or the other—escaping from history or dissolving our faith into it, orienting ourselves toward an imminent end or pushing all ends into a meaninglessly distant future—is a persistent temptation. I’ve spent plenty of time and effort trying to escape from this paradox myself. So this year, I’m going to try harder to give the contingency of human life its due. We are, in all probability, stuck here with each other amid events that will connect past, present, and future in an ever-shifting but probably recognizable stream. If living in tents and performing Hamlet outdoors, as the Traveling Symphony does in Station Eleven, is a good thing to do, we can just as well do it now. If there are technological challenges to be solved and political crises to be grasped, we may as well put our shoulders to that work now. It’s time to wake from sleep, Paul tells the church in Rome. That’s most certainly true, especially if the only day we will see in this life has already broken.

Thank you for reading The Parish Bulletin! Please share this post if you found it interesting, and disagree with me in the comments if I’ve said something wrong.

1. If you’re in the market for a show that handles the minutiae of regime change unusually well, I can recommend Andor. Its portrait of the Empire consolidating gradually through bureaucratic inertia is totally unlike what the Star Wars movies do.

2. The role of anti-Christian polemic on both sides of this trend is fascinating in itself. Christianity can be blamed both for undermining the harsh, warlike vigor of pagan Europe and for authorizing the rape and conquest of the New World. I see a lot of ingenuity among Christians as they try to both make the advent of Christianity its own kind of Fall and to imagine a useable Christianity that is tough and cruel (“based”) or gentle and pantheistic.

3. I’m still doomer-curious about nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence, however.