The Ultimate Solution – The God Of Armageddon

December 2, 1984
Lakeland

From pre-Christian times there have been those who prophesied that the world would end in God-directed fire from the heavens, a few would be transported to heavenly bliss and most persons cast into Hell, where amid fire and brimstone they would suffer horrible torture forever. Armageddon, a plain in northern Palestine, was to be the battle-site. Indeed, armies had clashed at Armageddon several times in the history of the Jews. In all my years of conducting Sunday services, I have never before dealt with the subject. [CJW note: Not only did I take the notion as irrelevant, even absurd, but also I could not accept a situation where millions of my fellow citizens truly believed such a riotous fantasy. But I guess I was wrong.]

Several circumstances motivate a critical look at the background and present application of this “final solution” of the human enterprise. Recently, the President of the U.S. was quoted as saying he believed in Armageddon, although he was vague about specifics, later commenting that he did not say that Armageddon was arriving soon. Then, too, the surge in the numbers of those who seem to accept this fundamentalist eschatology is an aspect of our times that requires commentary. Attitudes of acquiescence toward the everlasting torture of most men, women, and children in the world surely deserve a critical look. The belief that human history is pre-ordained to end in a holocaust initiated by God invites examination both theologically and ethically. Then, too, I have been stimulated by a cassette of a conference on this subject loaned by Dale Matthias to Al Esk, who loaned it to me. That report is one of the resources I have drawn upon in preparing this presentation.

Background: Those of you who were among the Wednesday night group earlier this year may remember that we discussed the scripture of Revelation. Revelation is part of the apocalyptic (reveal) literature which flourished in Palestine in the period 165 BCE to 120 CE. The Jewish people had been in subjugation and oppressed for centuries. Assyrians, Persians, Greeks under Alexander, Romans, had successively ruled and oppressed the people of Israel. When would Yahveh redeem his chosen people? When would the Messiah come to free his people and crush the powerful enemies? Other than the successful but short-lived revolt of Judas Maccabeus, there was no earthly hope. Triumph only could come supernaturally with the arrival of the Messiah. The book of Daniel expresses the hope in vivid imagery. Persian/Zoroastrian religion plainly influenced this hope an expectation. In Zoroastrian religion, the universe is the battleground between good and evil – Ahura Mazda and Ahriman.

The Jewish messianic hope became recast in the early Christian beliefs and writings. The surviving disciples believed Jesus was coming again soon to redeem the world. During the persecutions of Nero and, a little later, Domitian, the early Christians also felt that the only answer to Roman power and oppression was the second coming of Jesus with his cosmic avenging angels to overthrow the tyrant emperor and punish not only the oppressors, but also unbelievers, in eternal fire. But Jesus did not come again.

Furthermore, because persecution of Christians was intermittent, not persistent, the church grew. The fiery visions of the author of Revelation became a minor part of the message and growth of the Christian church. Creed and sacrament became the major teachings of the Church. Christ was present in the sacrament of the mass, and the Holy Spirit was among the faithful. The Messiah had come in ritual forms and in spirit.

But the minor strain of the belief in a fiery Second Coming has persisted, though never a prevailing emphasis since the 2nd or 3rd centuries, at least. In every century there have been those who prophesied the Second Coming was at hand. Using numerology and fantastic interpretations, the number 666, the Harlot of Babylon, were prophecies of the end of all things in the fiery holocaust. Of course the mystic names and numbers the author of Revelation used were secret code names for the Romans. They were code names to protect the Christians from discovery in the time of Domitian (96 CE), when there was a time of persecution. Babylon was Rome, the Harlot of Babylon was the Roman Empire, and 666 was probably the numerical value of the name Nero Caesar. The author of Revelation was of his own time, writing to fellow Christians in his own time, not to any subsequent centuries or problems.

Nevertheless this minor note of belief in an Armageddon climax to all history was advanced by a few persistently. The “signs” were continually re-interpreted. Distinctions were made between human time and divine time. Occasionally important dates stirred great numbers of people. It has been written that on the eve of the year 1000, the churches were full of believers expecting the end. But the world did not end.

And so it went, many predictions, but the world did not end. In 1843, followers of William Miller sold all their earthly goods and gathered on a hill awaiting the fulfillment of Miller’s precise prediction, but the world did not end. Charles Russell, one of the founders of Jehovah’s Witnesses, predicted in 1907 that the world would end in 1914, but it did not.

In spite of the unbroken record of failed prophecies, still the predictions of terrible death and punishment continue. Hal Lindsey, a contemporary predictor, has sold millions of copies of his vision of the end of things, THE LATE, GREAT PLANET EARTH. Nowadays, the Babylon of Revelation is not Rome, but interpreted to be the Soviet Union. Still other fundamentalists strongly support the nation of Israel as a condition of the expected end. Why? At least one of the reasons is the visionary prediction that Jesus will not come again until the Jews are re-established in Jerusalem, whereupon that event 1/3rd of the Jews will convert to Christianity and be transported in the rapture, and 2/3rds eternally punished in Hell, along with the rest of us.

Such is a (too brief) summary of this religion of fantastic visions. There are questions to be raised. To raise questions is not intolerance, but rather the obligation to think critically about ideas that affect the tense, sensitive issues that [in turn] affect every person in the world. Do you remember the Peanuts cartoon, in which Sally and Linus are walking to school:

Sally: I would have made a good evangelist. You know that kid who sits behind me at school? I convinced him that my religion is better than his religion.

Linus: How'd you do that?

Sally: I hit him with my lunch box.

[Editor’s note: the cartoon appears to be dated 12-6, but it is not clear, and the copyright year is unreadable. A search of the comics.com archive for this date did not turn up the cartoon. If anyone can find a hyperlink to it, please post in the comments section.]

I am not seeking to dissuade believers in the Second Coming from their faith and heavenly expectations. And if I so intended, I would not hit them with a lunchbox, or use any other variety of co-ercion.

Nevertheless, there are questions to be raised. If there is a burst of belief in our time that human history will end in a divinely launched, gory Armageddon, why? Unlike the early Christians of the intermittent Roman persecution, we are not persecuted, imprisoned, executed by our government. We are citizens with the right to vote, the right to speak, the right to attempt to influence the political cause of human events. If one may judge by the appearance of persons in the full auditoriums of fundamentalist preachers, the believers are not hopeless victims of tyranny, poverty, or oppression.

Of course, the Second Coming with all its horrors may be an abstraction to the believers with no authentic consciousness of its terror. Bertrand Russell told the story of the English vicar who terrified and agitated his congregation on a Sunday with vivid images of the Second Coming, which, he insisted, would be very soon. The members were quite frightened, but the following day when the observed the vicar planting trees in his garden, their fears abated because they surmised, correctly, that if the vicar was not concerned about his own predictions, they need not be, either.

But to the extent that this belief is not just a doctrinal or rhetorical abstraction to encourage conversions, whip up enthusiasm, what sort of deep anger exists that believers should accept the torture in hell forever of most other persons, including their own friends and members of their families? We look with horror, with rage, at Hitler and his “Final Solution” to exterminate the Jews and how he succeeded with 6 million. Yet, if believers in the Second Coming mean what they say, there are those who accept with faith that the God they worship will execute a final solution of all those who do not hold their particular Christian belief. Such a God makes Hitler a minor-league [manager of] genocide. Why is there such an acceptance of genocide for all but their fellow-believers? I don’t know the answer to that. As I quoted Graham Greene a couple of weeks ago, “there are dark caves of the unconscious.”

Then, too, there is the apparent acquiescence in a current application that the book of Revelation points to nuclear war as the trigger of Armageddon, with the Soviet Union as protagonist. The horror of this interpretation is that it represents acceptance of nuclear war as a part of God’s pre-ordained plan. Is it ever considered what kind of God this must be who would plan and implement a holocaust to end all holocausts? Could any act be more evil than vaporizing, burning, almost all the people on earth except a handful of God’s favorites?

It was against such a theology of a God who was really a devil that Universalists rebelled more than 200 years ago. If men and women were the children of God, could God, if he were God, condemn any child of his to suffer eternally? Such a god was neither just nor merciful. Universalists asserted that God was too good to act so inhumanely. So – no hell. How could there be if God was good? God was love – no hell.

Most Christians do not believe in a God who would commit such savage cruelty on the innocent. Most who hold with a Second Coming think of it in a transforming spirit of peace and justice. Many Christians, I know, co-opt the generous, humanistic vision of the Hebrew prophet Micah (Chapter 4, 1/5):

“But in the last days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and people shall flow unto it. And many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it. For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever.”

If you hold that the Bible is prophetic of human events, choose Micah.

One thing more, not only do I reject a cruel, unjust God, but also [I believe that] human history is in human hands.

(Let me re-read a sentence) David Saville Muzzey, “When the truth began to dawn on man (sic) that he was the maker of the religions which had both tormented and consoled him, a revolution in human thought was announced.”

Thus, I believe history is in our hands, not in the vision of the unknown author of Revelation. If there is to be continuing improvement in the human condition it will be because of human minds, human effort, human caring, human ethics. If there is nuclear war, it will occur because men and women allowed it to happen. No other answer seems historical, reasonable, caring, universal, ethical.

As Mark Antony affirmed, “Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch of the Rang’d empire fall! Here is my space.” (Act I, Sc. 1, ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA)

Human history is in human hands.