The order of end-time events can vary, but in general they share the view that the Messiah’s return will follow the restoration of Israel as a kind of Jewish theocracy.
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| Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast |
Ever since it was announced, the opening of the U.S. Embassy in
Jerusalem has been fraught with controversy. Its opening this week
prompted a wave of violence in which at least 50 Palestinian
protesters were killed by Israeli soldiers. So it might be surprising
to learn that some evangelical Christians are not only supporting, they
are celebrating, this event.
Robert Jeffress, the Baptist pastor
chosen to pray during the blessing of the embassy on Monday, praised
President Trump as someone who “stands on the right side of you, O God,
when it comes to Israel.” And the man known for his discriminatory views
of Mormons and Muslims described Israel as blessing the world by
pointing it to God “through the message of her prophets, the Scriptures,
and the Messiah.”
Jeffress’ prayers weren’t troubling only
because of his history of bigotry; they were steeped in a particular
kind of right-wing Christian theology that believes that the institution
of an embassy in Jerusalem will bring about violence and destruction on
a cosmic scale. Known as premillennial dispensationalists, this subset
of evangelicals reads the embassy as an important and necessary step to
the bringing about of the Apocalypse.
The Apocalypse
is broadly thought of as the end of the world and, to most people, its a
time associated with destruction, judgment, the overthrowing of
temporal powers, the return of the Messiah, the end of the world as we
know it, and the beginning of a period of blissful eternal existence.
Though
many texts in the Bible discuss the “Day of the Lord” and a coming time
of judgement, the primary source text for this kind of perspective is
the book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament. Often
erroneously credited to the author of the Gospel of John, Revelation or
“the Apocalypse of John” is an example of what scholars call
“apocalyptic literature,” a genre of ancient literature filled with
coded symbols and predictions about the future. Revelation was likely
written at the end of the first century during the reign of the Roman
emperor Domitian. But because it is written in symbolically coded
prophecy, Christians have been treating Revelation as a timetable for
the end of the world ever since it was written.
Beginning in the 16th
century, English puritans began to develop a view of human history in
which time is divided into various “dispensations” (periods of time,
each of which is illustrative of a particular period of the divine
plan). The final period of human history, before the Last Judgment, is
called the “millennial kingdom,” a 1,000-year period in which Christl
reigns. This period is described in Revelation 20:1-8, and some early
Christians, too, subscribed to the view that there would be a millennium
of earthly reign before a final catastrophe.
The
theological heirs to these puritanical Christians are those
evangelicals who, like Jeffress, believe that the book of Revelation
(with some supplements from the book of Daniel, Ezekiel, and 1
Thessalonians) provides a template for the end of the world. A central
component of their theology is that true Christians will be spared any
further suffering because they will be “raptured,” or taken up to
heaven, before the final horrors begin. It’s everyone else who will
suffer. If all of this sounds somewhat fringe, it’s worth bearing in
mind that the apocalyptically styled Left Behind series that was published in the 1990s sold more than 80 million copies.
The specific order of end-time events can vary from preacher to
preacher and group to group, but in general they share the view that the
return of the Messiah will follow the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple
in Jerusalem and the restoration of the state of Israel as a kind of
Jewish theocracy. As Dr. Greg Carey, professor of New Testament at
Lancaster Theological Seminary and the author of Apocalyptic Literature in the New Testament, told The Daily Beast, “Rapture teachers teach that the end times revolve around Israel and Jerusalem.”
The
problem is that things don’t go well for Israel or the Jews in
particular. Carey explained that their promotion of “unwavering loyalty
to the State of Israel” is tied to the fact that “they envision an
international assault against the nation of Israel” at the end of times.
The rebuilding of the temple is just “to prepare way for this final
conflict.”
The problem is that while this is a joyful event for
the small group of faithful Christians who are raptured, it spells
disaster for members of other religions. “None of this is good news for
the people who live in and around Jerusalem, who amount to pawns in this
end-time scenario. The suffering of Arab peoples is taken for granted,
while Jews take the brunt of this final ‘great tribulation.’” Carey
observed that Jeffress himself thinks that Jews will not be saved
without first converting to Christianity. The support of the state of
Israel, therefore, should not be misconstrued as unwavering support for
the religious rights of Jews; at the end of time Jews must convert or
die.
For Israeli Jews who don’t believe in these interpretations
of history, these end-time prophecies might seem irrelevant. Why worry
about the possibility of a divine genocide that takes place according to
a particular strain of Christian theology when you do not believe in
Christianity at all? If Christians are funding your existence with your
eventual destruction in mind, who cares? After all, there are far more
tangible enemies surrounding you on a universally-agreed upon
terrestrial plane and defense against those enemies is a more pressing
concern.
The unknown but nonetheless important threat here is,
what will happen if this particular group of Christians become convinced
that they do live in the end-times? The Bible describes the divinely
orchestrated genocide of most human beings. This group, according to
Jeffress, will include Mormons, Jews, Roman Catholics, Muslims, and the
LGBT community.
Not only are some people supporting political interventions on the
basis of their religious beliefs, they are actively trying to bring this
kind of violence about. And violence on this scale is not ethically
bothersome to them: if the world is divided into followers of God and
followers of the devil, there is no moral imperative to try to save
those who have aligned themselves with evil or failed to act as
militarized agents of God. The book of Revelation envisions judgment
upon all of those—children included—who do not follow God. While
rapture-believing Christians are vehemently opposed to abortion, the
fate of those children who are living at the time of the apocalypse is
less of a concern.
The biting irony here is that most academic
Bible scholars do not think that Revelation is a timetable for the end
of the world at all. Instead, they argue, this first-century document
was written as a response to the social marginalization experienced by a
small handful of Jesus followers living in first-century Asia Minor
(modern-day Turkey).
According to the work of Yale professor
Adela Yarbro Collins, the predictions made by Revelation served a
cathartic function for members of his community because it assured
people that there was a divine plan. In fact, most of the predictions
made in Revelation were assumed by its author to have already taken
place.
If all of this seems, well, deeply ethically troubling,
that’s a good thing. The apocalypse is a time in which the ordinary
ideals of mercy, forgiveness, and compassion are suspended in favour of
divine judgment and vengeance. People should worry about the new
“Christian ethics” of the Apocalypse, not because it will happen, but
rather because of the ways that some powerful individuals will behave if
they think the end times are upon us.
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