What does it mean to long for the end times, for the apocalypse? And why is it that all cultures seem to have some variation of a story about the end of life and time? Definitions are perhaps in order here. An apocalypse, first and foremost, is a narrative of the world, both present and to come. It tells a story of both what we long for and therefore, what currently we do not. Apocalupsis means an “unveiling” or revelation. In that sense, eschatological expectation still awaits decisive moments of victory, even if already declared. We are longing for an end to the wickedness, evil, and grief of the world. We look for the promise of judgment, as well as the promise of the universe made new and renewed.
Bernard McGinn's definition of apocalypse is fairly typical and quite comprehensive:
“Apocalypse" is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, in so far as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, in so far as it involves another, supernatural world.
Thus, apocalypses reach both into the future and into the heavenlies. They bring together the future ahead of us and the eternal above and outside of us. They long for the merging of the two: the holy and everlasting realm comes to earth, touches down into the time-bound realm to remake it in the image of the eternal.
Of course, it is possible to treat apocalyptic longing as nothing but a species of sublimated and anthropological longing. Just as something that humans do to help make this pain-filled world a little more bearable. Frank Kermode, for example, notes how apocalyptic thought nearly always operates out of the “fiction of transition,” the belief that the writer’s own era is a period between the golden past and the coming restoration. The present era becomes a saeculum, an era in providential history, subject at present to “intemporal agony” as it awaits its salvation. Such a conception of the age as a period of transition lends also itself to a feeling of pent-up waiting. One is continually denied what has been promised. Apocalyptic endings, in this view, always end in anger and frustration.
But surely the answer for Christians is not a refusal of the ending or a transposition of it into nothing but a small meditation on our personal deaths, as important as that can be. We cannot privatize the apocalypse. We hold out hope for God to judge this world and make a new heaven and earth not just for ourselves but for all creation--humans, other species, the ecosystems themselves.
An apocalypse is a theodicy (i.e. an answer to the problem of evil) and, therefore, a meditation upon one large aspect of the educational project as well. An apocalypse answers the problem of evil by tying a description of the world’s evil to hope in God’s actions and trust in God’s justice. It suggests that the problem of evil is answered by the decisive, future answer that God will give—an eradication of all that offends. Likewise, it trusts that the end result will be so decisive, so embarrassingly bountiful, as in some way to compensate or reconfigure what has come before. An apocalypse, even in its stark ash and blood of destruction and judgment, is finally an epistemology of abundance. God will not leave us to ourselves, nor will he leave the evil of existence without a flood of good that promises to drown (baptize, if you will) and cleanse the sin-stained world.
Thus, apocalypse is also a word for justice. As Stephen O’Leary observes, “Evil is or will be justified and made sensible in the ultimate destiny of the cosmos." Experientially in the present, an apocalypse is a theodicy because it offers the resources to name and manage evil's ability to unhinge the rationality of our lives. Life makes sense again when we understand at least in part what the end will be to the story. But an apocalypse is not just an existential moment of deep and dependent awareness; it is also a socio-psychological response and one that can be defensive in nature. Apocalypse operates as a “resistance to the powers that be," as Paul Fiddes puts it. And because it often gives voice to the disenfranchised, it challenges the “imperial speech” that “all is well."
Apocalypse is a call to social action and community formation, to praise and repentance. In short, to worship.
No comments:
Post a Comment