Trauma and the End of the World
Reflections on the Lectionary for May 18th
There are many kinds of spiritual trauma—many ways people have been hurt by religion, and many different kinds of scars left by churches and religious leaders and communities. But one of the most common of these traumas is the trauma of the end of the world.
For a couple of generations now, large swaths of American Christianity have gone all-in on apocalypse and divine vengeance, making God’s wrath a centerpiece of what it means to believe and belong. Hackish “prophets” like Hal Lindsey and authors like Tim LaHaye—along with church leaders looking to leverage fear to win souls—led many people to understand God as a ticking time bomb. In the way of thinking set forth by Lindsey and LaHaye and others, the world is temporary, and all of history points towards the world’s destruction in God’s vindictive hands. The Bible, in their view, is a riddle that needs solving, and if you solve it their way, it reveals God’s plan to kill and to damn nearly everyone, while saving an elect few—but perhaps not saving them until they too have passed through trials of suffering and persecution.
I can remember hearing and believing these kinds of messages as a teenager. During the first Gulf War, the Christian right cast that geopolitical conflict (which was arguably a petro-war) as a theological battle against the forces of evil, and the message coming from many Christian leaders was that the Gulf War was a showdown between angels and demons, light and dark, good and evil. At the same time, pervasive paranoia surrounded seemingly unremarkable everyday things—barcodes, governments, vaccines, and school science curricula, understanding all of those things to be secretly insidious parts of Satan’s plot. Everything pointed toward a conspiracy of Satan’s forces against God’s people; everything could be turned into evidence that evil was quickly taking over the world. So much of the Christianity I encountered as a teenager was designed to make me afraid and suspicious of the world, and the danger was always immediate and acute. If you died tonight, do you know where you would go, the question always went, but also, when they come for the Christians, will you stand up for God? The spiritual trauma of those experiences is real. I feel it myself sometimes (though I have thoroughly left that theological world behind), and I see it all the time in students and congregants and even in strangers. When you have spent years being told that the world is evil and God is angry and everything is about to be destroyed, it’s hard to shake that feeling of hostile surveillance by the forces of Satan and the impending wrath of a furious God.
The bad news is that many of us carry around that kind of trauma from religious upbringings in the throes of apocalyptic fear. Even if we left those religious contexts behind, we might still feel ourselves reacting to world news with anxiety and we might still associate God not with love, but with dangerous and unmerciful judgement. We live in the expectation that the world is about to go sideways, and we live in anticipation of God’s wrath, even if we don’t mean to.
The good news is that another way is possible, and that another way might actually be more in keeping with Christian theology, Christian tradition, and Christian scriptures. The good news is that the wrathful God and impending doom that so many of us grew up with aren’t fully representative of longer and broader trends in Christian eschatological thinking. The theological resources of Christianity have often pondered the end of the world and they have often contemplated God’s wrath, but the particular ways these things described in the last couple of generations of American Christianity are really an anomaly, historically speaking. For those of us who grew up in fear of being “left behind” in a rapture or caught up in a worldwide conspiracy against the faithful, we might assume that the Christianity that shaped us is universal and ancient. But it’s really a byproduct of 19th and 20th century evangelical paranoia, and there are other and healthier ways to think about things.
If you grew up in that kind of fear-mongering environment like I did, and you have landed in a church setting where the lectionary has an important role like I have, then you might have noticed that the stuff you grew up hearing about—the rapture, the tribulation, the last judgement, the destruction of the world—don’t show up very often in the lectionary. That’s not because those passages are being hidden from you; it’s not really a product of selection bias. Instead, you’re not seeing those passages in the lectionary because those passages largely don’t exist, or they exist only such scattered and fragmentary ways that they would be impossible to reproduce in something like a lectionary. The word “rapture,” for example, while central to the ideas of evangelical Christian eschatology, does not appear in the Bible. There are a couple of passages that sort of describe something like “the rapture,” most notably 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, but it takes a lot of hermeneutical gymnastics to twist those passages into something like “the rapture” as it looks in evangelical thought. If you look at someone who’s arguing that these ideas of rapture and tribulation appear in the Bible, you’ll notice that their scriptural citations are all over the place—a sentence from Revelation here, a clause from Jeremiah there, maybe a verse or two from 2 John or Daniel. The Bible doesn’t make a sustained argument for the ideas that these folks claim are clear in scripture, so they have to cherry-pick from all over the place and splice them together to make them say what they want them to say.
Don’t get me wrong—there are plenty of passages in the Bible, from cover to cover, where God’s wrath is central and divine judgement looms powerfully. I’m not saying that evangelical Christians invented that. But I am saying that many of the particulars that so many of us were taught were scriptural are, in fact, mostly made up. And the passages about divine judgement that we do find in the Bible—passages like Mark 13 and its parallels in Matthew and Luke, or scenes of destruction from Ezekiel or Daniel, or the book of Revelation—those passages present a more nuanced and even hopeful vision of divine judgement than we might expect.
Take the passage in the lectionary this week, for example: Revelation 21:1-6. If you’re looking for divine wrath and violence, then Revelation has plenty of it to go around. The book is full of blood and fire and suffering, and the whole drama is cast as a cosmic clash between God and the forces of evil, or even between God and the world itself. Much has been written about Revelation as protest literature—as the kind of thing that was produced by people on the underside of imperial power, and the kind of book that imagines what it might look like if God were to forcefully take the side of the oppressed. (Maybe that’s why Revelation looks so strange to so many Americans: if you’re on top of the social order, you might not want to hear about the social order being overturned). But even if you carve out an understanding of Revelation as protest literature, there’s still an awful lot of divine anger and violence in there. Revelation is still pretty scary, and it still tells the story of the end of the world. Right?
Maybe. Revelation certainly does fantasize about the world’s undoing—which, again, makes some sense if it was written by people who wanted to see the world undone. But that’s not all that Revelation does. So much of evangelical Christian eschatology assumes that the world must end, finally and definitively, so that we can all go to live in either heaven or hell. But Revelation does not really play things out that way. In Revelation, the world isn’t ended, but the world is remade. Maybe it’s a distinction without a difference, since in either case this world is ended, even if it’s replaced by a new one. But if you read the hopeful parts of Revelation, especially the latter chapters, you begin to get a sense of how the book thinks about God. God, in Revelation, isn’t a burn-it-all nihilist like so many evangelicals make God out to be, but God is (still) in the business of creation. In Revelation, the world is being re-created.
Look at the passage from Revelation 21:1-6. This passage comes near the end of the book, after a lot of destruction and unmaking, and after God has thrown down many of the oppressive structures of the world (like exploitative economic systems and powerful empires, to name a couple of prominent examples from the text). What comes next isn’t a last judgement in heaven on a cloud somewhere, as popular imagination might have it, but instead a new world. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more,” it says in 21:1. (I would like to lodge a protest at this point; I would quite miss the sea). “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,” the text continues. “See,” God says in 21:5, “I am making all things new.”
I think this is really cool. There’s a lot we could say about how Revelation here is recapitulating some of the themes of Genesis and thinking about divine creation as an act of healing. But what I love about this passage is when it comes time to remake the world, the world is remade in a city. The world is remade in human terms, with human structures and patterns, because (contrary to much Christian theology) the world and humans are meant to go together. The problem with the world isn’t the world, the problem with the world is that it has been corrupted by greed and oppression, and Revelation 21:1-6 imagines what the world would be like without those things. Who of us hasn’t imagined that?
In this way, Revelation is participating in the prophetic tradition laid down by people like Isaiah and Jeremiah. The books bearing those prophets’ names speak into the midst of suffering and loss, and they invite people to dream and imagine together about what the world would look like if it were remade and re-created with God’s justice in mind. For the Hebrew prophets, the suffering and loss were usually a result of foreign imperial violence—the Assyrians or the Babylonians storming the gates and inflicting death and suffering on everyone. For Revelation, the suffering and loss are similarly the result of imperial politics and power, though it seems to take a different shape. The violence in Revelation isn’t between nations, with God promising a restoration; in Revelation, God inflicts the violence on the aggressor nation, and then God restores the world as—perhaps—it ought to have been all along. Revelation anticipates the violence of empires and extractive economic systems, and it imagines God taking action to interrupt those forms of violence and remake the world so that the vulnerable are protected from the strong. Revelation still imagines a lot of violence, but it’s violence carried out by a God intent on justice. It makes for a compelling and conflicted read.
Even if we are simultaneously compelled and conflicted about the divine violence found in Revelation, I think it’s important to notice the difference between what Revelation does and says, and what mainstream evangelical thought says about what Revelation does and says. While many of us grew up with if you died tonight, do you know where you would go and when they come for the Christians, will you stand up for God, those are not really the questions Revelation asks. Instead, Revelation asks: what would the world look like if the old things passed away, and the world was remade so that suffering and death and violence had no place? What would it look like if the thirsty were given something to drink from the spring of the water of life? To me, that’s a much more comforting set of questions.