"He Will Be There": Expecting Apocalypse

 This song lyric channels my place of first memories that I left at age three but often visited before the Rural Electrification Administration strung power lines. It's my Eden, my Rosebud, my tie to the 19th-century--a log house (since moved to a house museum) on a hill surrounded by National Forest. Water came from a well, oil lamps projected circles on board ceilings, and we huddled before a stone fireplace on winter nights. Galaxies of lightning bugs swarmed, and owls and bobwhites spoke from the windy silence of the woods. That world is already gone. Today, coyotes would make short work of the chickens I once shelled corn to, and giant lumber-company machines have cleared the old forest and planted loblolly pine. That 1940s world, already gone, seemed a fit place to imagine everything ending.

               HE WILL BE THERE

When the last dog chews the last bone

On the front porch, he'll be there.

Yes, his eyes are on the sparrow.

Hear him counting every hair.

When the last grasshopper flies

And the final twilight dies

As you tell your latest lies,

He will be there.

When the last frog eats the last nymph

On the millpond, he'll be there.

Yes, he knows your aching belly

And he feels your lonesome stare.

When the last wren leaves the nest

And the purple leaves the west,

I don't care if you've confessed.

He will be there.

Though you cannot know the hour

Nor the day, he will be there

When the rabbits' ears are turning

Toward a churning in the air.

When the lost sheep won't be found

And you cannot hear a sound,

On a flat piece of the ground

He will be there.

If you see flood waters rising

Round your home place, he'll be there.

He is lying in the bottoms.

He is sighing on the air.

When the lightning bugs go dark

And lead pencils will not mark,

At the gangplank of the ark,

He will be there.

We take odd comfort in imagining everything ending, rather than just our dying and life going on without us. "Apres moi, le deluge," Louis XV is supposed to have said, but even being King of France didn't make it true. He was shoved into a tomb, and Louis XVI reigned dry-shod. The early Christians imagined that they were the last generation. The author of the gospel of Mark quotes Jesus as saying, "This generation will not pass away until all of these things have taken place" (Mark 13:30). The "things" referenced include Jesus' return "in clouds with great power and glory," sending his angels to "gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven" (Mark 13:26-27). 

This prophecy was copied almost word-for-word in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, but that generation Jesus passed away and, two millennia later, the Second Coming still hasn't happened. Those desperate to defend the Bible's inerrancy wriggle this way and that to escape the contradiction, following the time-worn tradition that, if a scripture seems to be nonsense, we're reading it wrong (of course, this doesn't apply to other people's scriptures). Preterists argue that the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE approximated the prophecy--close enough for scriptural work--while others quibble over the term this generation, arguing that, what wasn't true of this "this" must mean some other "this," maybe that "this," and Millennialists of every generation from the apostles' to ours have lined up to award their own generation the honor.

But the obvious explanation is that early Christians really believed they were the last generation, that the author of Mark wrote that belief, that other synoptic gospels copied him, and that they were all wrong. This doesn't discredit the New Testament. Errors creep into the best of books, and Mark was written forty years after Jesus, long before sound recording or shorthand. All "quotations" are reconstructions modified by repetition as in the classic game Telephone. Good historical evidence suggests that Jesus lived, was crucified, and taught roughly what he's said to have taught, but individual quotations may be seen the lens of decades of missionary expansion. It seems clear that early Christians believed the end of the world as they knew it was at hand, a view Paul expresses in 1 Thessalonians 4:15 but begins to hedge in later letters. 

The Second Epistle of Peter, which most historians date decades after Mark, addresses the danger to faith posed by belief in an imminent Second Coming. "In the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and indulging their own lusts and saying, 'Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!'" (2 Peter 3:3-4). Besides, "with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like one day" (2 Peter 3:8). From this fuzzy construction of time, author of 2 Peter concludes that, even if generations have died since the Second Coming was promised to "this generation," his readers may somehow still be the at the end time and had better remain morally upright so they won't be surprised when "the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed" (2:25). 

Postponed expectations of an End Time are mocked by Porphyry of Tyre, the last great pagan critic of Christianity almost two hundred years later in Against the Christians. Porphyry edited the works of Plotinus and wrote an introduction to philosophy that was used in the Christian middle ages, but his critique of Christianity was so devastating that the Emperor Theodosius II ordered all copies burned, and the book exists today only in quotations from  attacks on it. Porphyry wrote that the Second Coming describes a ridiculous God who has so botched up the world that he needs to "patch up holes in a wall of his own creation" (Hoffman, p. 49).  Regarding Paul's expectation of the Parousia in his own generation, Porphyry scoffed: "It is now three hundred years since he said this, and nobody--not Paul, not anybody else--has been caught up in the air. It is high time to let Paul's confusions rest in peace" (Hoffman, p. 52).

Seventeen centuries later, it does seem time to give Paul a rest, but hope springs eternal, fueled by a egoist yen to be "this generation." In every generation people imagine that they are the last. Wikipedia's "List of Dates Predicted for Apocalyptic Events" tabulates over two hundred end-date predictions since Paul's time--including Martin Luther's (before 1600), John Wesley's (1836), Jerry Falwell's (1999), and Pat Robertson's (1982 and 2007). These predictions are so clustered in recent years that it's obvious there were many more in centuries with less thorough reporting. There's a suspicious pattern here: most predicted dates are within the predictor's life expectancy. The attraction, it seems, is believing that, when we die as individuals, the world (as we know it) will end with us, rather than just for us. Mr. Ego seems to be misbehaving as usual, yearning to be the center of the universe to the end. It's like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid charging out wounded with guns blazing as if to take the entire Bolivian army down with them. 

Reference

Hoffman, R. Joseph. Porphyry's Against the Christians: The Literary Remains. Prometheus Books, 1994.