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<DIV><FONT size=4>Although we Christians may have pensioned off apocalyptic
rhetoric, social scientists, AIDs researchers and a swarm of journalists and
commentators are employing it. They warn us that as the collapse of the earth's
ecosystems accelerates, our overstressed social structures will begin to pop
like rivets on the doomed Titanic. Consider the disintegration of nation-states,
the irreparable degradation of the environment and the reversion to tribal
savagery. We are sinking into an abyss.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>In fact, there are many places where biblically shaped
imagination can already discern the end of our world: precious rain forests, the
size of entire countries, gone forever in a few days; 50,000 bodies, many
headless and limbless, float into Lake Victoria as Christians kill Christians in
Rwanda; suburban kids in Reeboks and t-shirts methodically heat a teenager to
death on the steps of St. Cecilia's Church in Abingdon, Pennsylvania (dead at 16
on the steps of the church where he had been an altar boy).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4><A
href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n32_v114/ai_20016441/">http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n32_v114/ai_20016441/</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>James F. Kay, 1997</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>- - - - -</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>"There will always be a tomorrow," some must have begun to
say. "After all, there have been about 29,000 tomorrows since Jesus told us that
he would return for us." The once-taut church relaxed, settling down into the
everydayness of things.</DIV>
<DIV>But to live as if there will always be a tomorrow is to live like a fool.
One of the best-selling religious books of all time is a rather shoddy piece of
rehashed millennialism called <I>The late, Great Planet Earth. </I>Fifty million
people paid good money to read Hal Lindsey’s view of the end. It is not only
people like Lindsey or Jerry Falwell or James Watt who think about the end. With
the ecological crisis, the threat of nuclear war, and international monetary
problems, everyone is thinking in apocalyptic terms -- except the liberal,
contented church, which long ago made its peace with the present and trusted in
tomorrow.</DIV>
<DIV><></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>When I was serving a little church in rural Georgia, one of my members’
relatives died, and my wife and I went to the funeral as a show of support for
the family. It was held in a small, hot, crowded, independent Baptist country
church. They wheeled the coffin in and the preacher began to preach. He shouted,
fumed, flailed his arms.</DIV>
<DIV>
<P>"It’s too late for Joe," he screamed. "He might have wanted to do this or
that in life, but it’s too late for him now. He’s dead. It’s all over for him.
He might have wanted to straighten his life out, but he can’t now. It’s
over."</P>
<P>What a comfort this must be to the family, I thought. "But it ain’t too late
for you! People drop dead every day. So why wait? Now is the day for decision.
Now is the time to make your life count for something. Give your life to
Jesus!"</P>
<P>It was the worst thing I had ever heard. "Can you imagine a preacher doing
that kind of thing to a grieving family?" I asked my wife on the way home. "I’ve
never heard anything so manipulative, cheap and inappropriate. I would never
preach a sermon like that."</P>
<P>She agreed with me that it was tacky, manipulative, callous. "Of course," she
added, "the worst part of all is that it was true."</FONT></P></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4><A
href="http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1079">http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1079</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>William Willimon, 1986</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>- - - - -</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>...apocalypse. The word means "unveiling" -- specifically, the
unveiling of things to come. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4><></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>Apocalyptic has a foreshortened sense of time. It anticipates
a final war between the powers of Good and Evil. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4><></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>As the philosopher Gunther Anders put it, we move into an
apocalyptic mode when we no longer find ourselves asking "How shall we live?"
and ask instead, "Will we live?" The normal eschatological situation, which
gives life urgency by facing us with the inevitability of our own death, the
hunger for meaning, and the fear of suffering and loss, becomes apocalyptic when
it appears that there is no longer time for normal urgency. Time collapses. The
Time of the End becomes the End of Time... Anders wrote in the midst of the
nuclear terror in 1962....the miracle we got came about because people like the
physician Helen Caldicott refused to accept nuclear annihilation. But she did it
by forcing her hearers to visualize the consequences of their
inaction.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4><></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>If we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction, as
scientists tell us we are, our response has in no way been commensurate with the
danger. We Homo sapiens are witnessing the greatest annihilation of species in
the last 65 million years, and our children may live to witness ecocide with
their own eyes. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4><></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>Eschatology is a line stretching out to the distant, possibly
infinite, future. That is the horizon of hope, possibility and becoming.
Apocalyptic, on the other hand, is a detour, caused by an immediate crisis
threatening whole societies. Negative apocalyptic paralyzes us into inaction;
positive apocalyptic challenges us to transcend ourselves, opening to the
unexpected possibilities thrust upon us. Usually, when the crisis passes, normal
eschatology is reinstated. But in our day, the apocalyptic crisis may not
pass.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV><A href="http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2208"><FONT
size=4>http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2208</FONT></A></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>Walter Wink, 2001</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>- - - - -</FONT></DIV>
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