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Michael Pizzulo is one of Australia's most powerful public servants. He's the Secretary of the Home Affairs Department, which oversees agencies like the Australian Federal Police, Border Force, the Criminal Intelligence Commission and even ASIO, the Aussie equivalent of Britain's MI5.
So when Pizzulo gives a speech that lists the 25 top risks facing us all over the next century, people sit up and pay attention. What follows is not ranked as a set of predictions or is it a priority order for policy? It represents a framework of risks which I have cast over a century to the year 2120, which might materialise and which therefore demand our close attention.
The prospect of great power war, which carries with it the prospect of nuclear war. The employment of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons outside of great power war. Cyber attacks, many of which are in reality cyber enabled espionage, but which could also entail catastrophic attacks on critical national infrastructure.
the subversion of our democratic institutions including our elections and the fragmentation of our social cohesion by way of foreign interference, political warfare and disinformation.
And that's just the first four. Pizzulo goes on to list uncontrolled mass migration, including mass human trafficking, terrorist attacks, adverse consequences of artificial intelligence, increased disaster and climate risk, including ecosystem collapse, disruption of energy supplies, major natural disasters, including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and geomagnetic storms and extreme weather events. Then, of course, global pandemics.
Now, this is an apocalyptic list to be sure. Indeed, in relation to ways in which humanity might become extinct, you will find arguable cases for the following scenarios, amongst others, a deliberately released humanity-killing synthetic virus, supervolcanic eruptions which block the sun, the Terminator AI threat, a nuclear apocalypse, and yes, the killer asteroid. Complacency is certainly not warranted in the face of this register.
Christianity has plenty to say about the future and what the end of the world will look like, though some think it says a lot more than others. Christians have in fact been accused of being so obsessed with end times that they stop caring about the world they're in right now. And sometimes that's true.
But apocalyptic Christians aren't the only ones dwelling on all this stuff. Plenty of us are more interested than ever, perhaps especially this year, in how the world will end. The stories we tell ourselves in culture are becoming increasingly apocalyptic. Why is that? I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
Thank you.
This episode is brought to you by Zondervan Academic, publishers of the collected essays of N.T. Wright, the ultimate nerdfest on the origins of Christianity. Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.
I've always kind of been partial to zombies. I don't know that I want zombies to actually be there at the end of the world, but I think zombies make for really interesting stories because they signify all kinds of interesting things. That's Alyssa Wilkinson, film and culture critic for Vox. That's Vox, not Fox.
She's also Associate Professor of English and Humanities at the King's College in New York City, where she's taught criticism, cinema studies and cultural theory for over a decade. And she's the co-author of How to Survive the Apocalypse, Zombies, Cylons, Faith and Politics at the End of the World. Now explain that to me as someone who's not totally into zombies. Try and win me over.
Well, I think the most interesting thing I ever read about zombies, besides the stuff, you know, that that I wrote is Chuck Klosterman, who's a novelist and a critic. He wrote an article for The New York Times maybe 10 years ago about how zombies were embodying our anxiety as modern people where they're.
specifically email. He was talking about email. He was saying, I can't conquer my email inbox. Every time I get rid of one, another one appears. And he said, you know, that's sort of like what zombies are. When they come at you, they just keep coming at you and they don't really have any ill will. They just, they have nothing, right? You just have to kill them off. And I always thought that was a really funny way to think about it. But, you know, in reality, the zombie genre of movie was invented to talk about our fear of the other and our
kind of anxieties during the Cold War. And then zombies have morphed over time to mean different things in different eras. And I find that really interesting. Apocalypse and zombies now seem synonymous, or at least they usually go together. But apocalypse is one of those words that comes from the Bible. Apocalypse is Greek for unveiling or a revelation.
The book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, was once called the Apocalypse of St. John because the opening line of the book of Revelation says, Apocalypse, Jesus Christ, to Dulo, out to Yane, a revelation from Jesus Christ to his servant, John. It's the original Western Apocalypse. It unveils the meaning and direction of history.
Since it was written, there have been many attempts to decipher the Book of Revelation as though it were a series of secret predictive codes that tell us about the timing of the end of the world. The book doesn't have any zombies, but it's got the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Seventh Seal, the Great Whore of Babylon, the Mark of the Beast, 666, the Battle of Armageddon, and much more. And these continue to resonate in our pop culture.
Richard Borkum is one of the most respected biblical scholars in the world today. I'm not sure he's seen X-Men Apocalypse, but among his 30 or so books is one on the book of Revelation, which he acknowledges is the Bible's weirdest book.
It's a sort of literature that people are very unfamiliar with nowadays, and that means that people find it very hard to read the Book of Revelation if they simply come to it fresh. The Book of Revelation is made up of a series of five visions, with an introduction or prologue and an epilogue inviting us to take all the content seriously. It's written by John Stamper.
sometime probably in the 90s AD, just 60 or so years after the death of Jesus. Traditionally, this has been seen as the John the Apostle, the son of Zebedee and the author of John's Gospel. And there's no doubt there are a lot of verbal idiosyncrasies that appear in both the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation.
Professor Borkham isn't so sure. He points out that John was the sixth most popular boy's name amongst Jews in the first century. So theories about who this John was are just that, they're theories.
The storyline of the book is not told in a linear way, which is part of why it's so difficult to read for us today. But it basically goes like this. It begins with seven actual letters to seven known churches in Asia Minor, or what we call Turkey. There's a brief letter to Ephesus, then to Smyrna, Pergamon, and so on. Some of these churches were beginning to experience persecution, bloody persecution in some cases.
And the letters urge believers to stay true to Christ, even being willing to give up their lives for him if they have to.
And with that introduction, John goes on to describe visions he's received as he's taken up into heaven, and the visions focus on how history will unfold to its glorious climax. There's a great scroll in heaven that contains the secret of history, and only one person can be found who's worthy to reveal its contents. It's a lamb who's been slain. It's obviously Jesus.
And that's a key to the whole show. Despite the violent imagery that follows, the point is that the tyrannies of Rome are going to be overthrown by a slain lamb and his people who are willing to die in faithfulness to the lamb. And so as the seals of the scroll are broken...
catastrophes come on the earth. There's horses and swords and blood and trumpets and fire. All the common images of Roman warfare are here turned against tyranny itself.
Then there's a dragon, a beast out of the sea, another beast on the land, all wreaking havoc on the world and on the people of God in particular. Until angels appear and pour out plagues and burning sulfur on the earth and the great kingdom of Babylon, as it's called, a picture of Rome, comes crashing down and the world rejoices at the overthrow of tyranny.
Then toward the end there's a vision of a thousand year period when the powers of evil are locked up and God's people rule the earth. And then Satan is weirdly let loose again and it looks like all the pain and tyranny will begin all over. But then with the snap of a finger or actually a sword out of the mouth of Jesus,
The whole thing fizzes. The devil and his collaborators are thrown into the lake of fire, and God creates a new heaven and a new earth where peace and justice reign for eternity. That's the book of Revelation. It's terrifying. It's full of vivid imagery. But it essentially says the tyrannies of history will be overcome, smashed to pieces.
by sacrificial faithfulness to a gospel message about a slain lamb.
But it's not done in any kind of straightforward prediction. It's done, and this is the thing people really notice when they start reading Revelation, it's done to a large extent in terms of images, symbolic images. Revelation is just full of these symbolic images, and you have to learn how to read them. It's not always easy. I asked Professor Borkham to introduce us to some of the key characters in the book of Revelation.
Well, the main characters, of course, are God, who is portrayed very much as the one who sits on the throne. Well, in chapter four, John is taken up into heaven, into the heavenly throne room of God. The purpose of that really is so that he can then see the world from the perspective of heaven, of God on his throne, as it were. And
Very soon after that, the second main character is called the Lamb, which is the predominant name that John uses for Jesus Christ, though Jesus Christ appears in other symbolic forms as well. But I think the fact that the dominant one is the Lamb is really important. It's
It's Jesus as the one who suffered and died. And the way John thinks that particularly is that Jesus bore faithful witness to God to the point of death. So he's the sacrificial lamb, he's the witness. And then when you get into the book, the kingdom of God, of course, has to, in some way, overturn the forces of
of evil, the anti-God forces, which in the book of Revelation
set themselves up as God. I mean, this is very much a contest between the true God and earthly powers with Satan, the devil, behind them. But earthly powers that really claim divinity. They claim the kind of sovereignty that requires worship. And in some ways, Revelation is a sort of contest of worship between those who worship the true God and those who worship the beast, as he's called.
So the powers of evil appear in these three characters of the dragon, who's Satan, the supernatural force of evil. The beast from the sea, the monster with seven heads and ten horns, and he represents the military power of Rome, I think. The Roman Empire as a vast military power that controlled the world.
and which people were so in awe of that they worshipped it. And Rome claimed this kind of divine power and expected to be treated in that way.
Another character rides on the beast, and she is the character known as the Whore of Babylon, the Harlot of Babylon. And she represents the city of Rome. So this is the city of Rome portrayed really as an economic power, which sucks in all the wealth of the provinces into the city of Rome.
So she's kind of the economic power and all the wealth and luxury of Rome riding on the military power of Rome, which is the beast. And then there's a second beast, the beast from the land. And he seems to be, he's a little bit more controversial, what people think he represents, but he seems to be the imperial priesthood and the
Those who actually, those who conducted the worship of the beast. And he resorts to all kinds of false tricks and miracles and things like that to make people think that the beast is divine. So he's a kind of deceiver of the people, deluding them with imperial propaganda.
Professor Borkum says Rome's propaganda machine was actually really significant in the meaning of the book of Revelation. In his own book, Borkum writes that Revelation advances a thoroughgoing prophetic critique of the system of Roman power. It is a critique which makes Revelation the most powerful piece of political resistance literature from the period of the early empire. Sounds cool if you ask me.
I think the idea of propaganda is terribly important here, that Rome was a propaganda machine. They boasted of the Pax Romanum, the great peace that Rome had brought to the world, so that everyone should be grateful to have a certain truth in the fact that they had
brought peace to the empire, but the peace of the empire was maintained by constant warfare on the borders of the empire. So it was a kind of peace maintained by military conquest. And Rome claimed to be the eternal city, the city that could never fall.
So all these things were conveyed in this propaganda, which not just words, but visual material, you know, the temples to the Emperor Augustus, people were impressed everywhere they went.
by the visual representation of Rome's power. So one of the reasons why the Book of Revelation is so full of vivid symbolic images is because it's a kind of counter to the imperial propaganda. So John is actually...
trying to get his readers to see the world as it looks from God's perspective, not through the eyes of Rome's propaganda, but as it were in a different perspective. So, you know, the city of Rome, who might be represented as the goddess Roma, a glorious figure, she becomes the harlot who
who seduces all the nations with her promises of wealth and so forth. The other thing that John's Revelation is full of is allusion to the Old Testament.
So very often, to understand what these symbols mean or what the kind of language he uses means, we have to remember what goes on in, particularly in the Old Testament prophets, because I think John puts himself in the succession to the Old Testament prophets, and he's very much taking up parts of their message and understanding it within his own fresh context, which is obviously a Christian one. So it's a kind of...
There's probably nothing the New Testament teaches that doesn't have its roots in ancient biblical Judaism. Certainly, the Jews in the period before Jesus had faced tyrannical regimes.
the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and then the Romans. Apocalyptic literature was one of the ways the Jews responded to this. It was their way of talking in a code only they understood about God's overthrow of evil and the establishment of a just king who would rule the world for eternity with peace and love.
Of course, Jesus himself shared this view and even claimed in saying after saying that he was that king of the kingdom. The difference was he hadn't come to conquer through violence, but through his own teaching, example, and suffering. But back to the book of Revelation.
One of the most important things to remember when reading this text is that the book is also a letter. It contains brief epistles to seven different communities in Roman Asia Minor. In chapter one, Jesus Christ, the exalted, risen, exalted, reigning Jesus Christ,
appears to John where he is on earth, and John sees him walking among seven lampstands, who represent the seven churches of the Roman province of Asia.
Ephesus, Thyatira, Pergamum and others. They're a series of named most important Christian communities in that area of the world, which John apparently knows very well because he can talk with knowledge about them. And then Jesus, as it were, gives him a message specific to each of these seven churches. And these are really the introduction to the rest of the book.
So the people in Ephesus had their own, as it were, way into the rest of the message of the book, anchored in their own particular situation. And these are seven communities in actually very different kinds of situations. I mean, some of them are rather sternly rebuked for compromising their faith with the idolatry of their contexts. Others are commended for
for holding out under persecution. So the point is that the whole book is actually initially addressed to these seven specific churches at the time. And we do have to read it in that way. And just as if we read one of Paul's letters,
we realize we have to think a bit about the context of those Christians in order to understand what Paul is saying to them. It doesn't in the least prevent Paul's letters from being still relevant to us,
They are literature that has, as it were, exceeded their original context and have continuing value, which is why Christians have been reading for centuries. And the same is true of the book of Revelation. It has proved its relevance again and again through history and in our own time.
But we do have to do a certain amount of interpreting it via the first readers. And that means that we shouldn't do things like, say, you know, the great army of strange mythical creatures in Chapter 9, etc.
actually are a prophecy of the current pandemic, as I think some people are saying. That's not how anyone at the time could have understood it. So we've got to look at what these symbolic images would have meant in that time and place and in the light of the Old Testament.
Take again the city of Babylon, Rome. Rome is called Babylon. And Babylon is quite clearly Rome because she sits on seven hills, John is told. And everybody knew that Rome was the city that sat on seven hills. You couldn't be clearer, actually, in identifying the city of Rome without actually using the name Rome. Why does he call it Babylon? He does so because it goes right back through the Old Testament where Babylon was the city
a great enemy of the people of God, and right back to the Tower of Babel in Genesis. So he brings this whole tradition of prophetic witness against the enemies of God and applies it
to contemporary Rome. But then, of course, you know, if we read it in a later time, I sometimes say, you know, do you know that proverb, whoever the cat fits must wear it. If a power later in history, as it were, fills the role of Babylon, then,
then Revelation is becoming appropriate in a new context. But it's not as though John specifically foresaw this later world power, whatever it might be, but he drew a picture of that sort of power that was instantiated in his time in the city of Rome, but can go on being instantiated in other ways in the continuing history of the world.
Okay, that's a lot to take in. We'll get back to Revelation later when we explore why this ancient text written to seven specific historical churches still has plenty of relevance today.
For now, Alyssa Wilkinson points out that in the broader culture, the stories we tell ourselves about the end of the world tend to reflect the particular anxieties we have in this moment. End of the world scenarios became much more numerous during the Cold War with the threat of nuclear catastrophe. And then after September 11. And in the 21st century, our narratives have changed once again.
So there's more stories of apocalypse than ever right now. And I've been kind of watching how they play out in recent days. You know, we I wrote the book five years ago and there's been plenty of apocalyptic stuff that's come out since then.
And one thing that I've really noticed is our mounting anxiety about digital technologies, social media, and also artificial intelligence. So those have always been part of science fiction for a long time, but now they're reality. We can see ways in which
you know, Facebook causes problems on the world stage that you wouldn't have necessarily believed would have happened or where a computer seems extremely smart and we start to wonder what if it
actually is capable of doing the things that we've only seen in movies before. But those kinds of stories have been popping up because they embody something new, which is not just we can imagine this, but rather it's here. One thing that we really notice is that for lots and lots of human history, all of the stories of Apocalypse were about God got tired of us or the gods took out their revenge or the gods were just distracted and accidentally wipe us out or something like that.
And then you see a real pivot around the turn of the 19th century, where in the wake of modern science and industrialization and new technologies and the feeling that the world is speeding up, you start to see us telling more stories in which we're the people who have become the gods. Like it's us. We're going to be the problem here. And maybe it's because we
tried to cure a virus and we invented a cure that actually turns people into zombies, right? That's, that's kind of, um, that's a story that's been told several times, or we're going to cause environmental collapse, um, through our wanton use of the earth's resources. And we're going to end ourselves that way. Or nuclear war certainly has been hanging over us for a long time or other kind of apocalyptic scenarios in which it's the humans who did it. And God is,
If he's there, he wouldn't really care because it's kind of our own fault. When we talk about apocalypse, our thoughts are often about annihilation, destruction, full stop, the end. But that's not actually the story we tell, either in our secular narratives or in the Christian version of the end. It's not an end. It's a new beginning. It's why the book of Revelation ends not with destruction, but new creation.
If you think this has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention. Game of Thrones is really, you know, it's kind of a show about an environmental apocalypse. Winter is coming and there's these ice witch things that are going to come and like kind of take over the land of the living. And that show is really about how people would
argue and try to grasp power, even in the face of an actual mounting catastrophe that's right on the edges of things. And we see this all the time, where politicians are too busy scoring political points to actually do their jobs, right? So that's sort of what that show is about. And The Walking Dead has many of those same aspects where a lot of it is about
If humanity was almost wiped out and was under threat of a kind of merciless, unmotivated horde that just wanted to kill it off but wasn't angry, it wasn't something you could reason with.
then what would happen? And how would we have our civilization in the middle of that, would we? Would it look like anarchy? Would it look like consensus? Would it look like a focus on laws? Would it look like a focus on intuition? All of those things. And the different ways that people argue with each other under those circumstances. Everyone stop panicking and listen to Rick.
All right, we'll set up a perimeter. In the morning, we'll find gas and some supplies. We'll keep pushing on. Glenn and I can go make a run now towards Grungell's and Gates. No, we stay together. God forbid something happens and people get stranded without a car. Rick, we're stranded now. I know it looks bad. We've all been through hell and worse, but at least we found each other. I wasn't sure. I really wasn't, but we did. We're together that way. We'll find shelter somewhere. There's got to be a place. Rick, look around.
Okay, there's walkers everywhere. They're migrating or something. There's got to be a place, not just where we hole up, but we fortify, hunker down, pull ourselves together, build a life for each other. I know it. It's out there. We just have to find it now. You know, one thing that I write about in the book is that apocalyptic stories reveal things about ourselves. So the apocalypse, the actual word, you know, comes from a Greek word that means revealing things.
And so the idea is that the curtain is pulled back and we sort of see reality for what it is. Civilization falls away. These kinds of social niceties, they tend to fall away in moments of apocalypse. And so I think one reason we've always been obsessed with
seeing how things will end is that we are also really interested in what fundamentally makes us human and knowing or at least speculating about what would happen if some of the things that seem like they're what makes us human or they seem to constitute our civilization, if they disappear, what are we actually at core? And that's something that Apocalypse shows us and tells us about.
You know, I think one important point to note is that neither of those shows are ending with like a blackout and all the humans are gone and they're like, well, that was the end, right? Apocalypse really isn't about the end of things. It's the end of a period or the end of a time or the end of an epic. And then where do we go from there when someone hits the reset button?
Yeah, so there's something about new creation, could I even use that language, about this apocalyptic genre? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the apocalyptic genre almost inevitably, I can't really think of it
situation, save for a few small things here and there in which an apocalyptic story doesn't end with the promise of something new happening. Even when the most bleak ones I can think of is the road based on Cormac McCarthy's novel. And then there's the very fine movie. And even at the end of that, it's bleak, but the
the hope that there's something on the horizon, that something can be saved or salvaged is very much there. And that patterns itself after every story of apocalypse from what happens in the book of Revelation to this earlier this spring, I watched Wagner's Ring Cycle because the Metropolitan Opera was broadcasting it. And that's a story of apocalypse. And it's the same, you know, there's renewal at the end of all things.
Renewal is something many of us yearn for. We want to see an end to the deep pain so many have experienced. But we don't simply want the absence of hardship. We don't want to detach only from pain. We long for the presence of the good, of justice, equality, health, and so on.
The Christian view is that God, the creator, will renew all things. As the book of Revelation puts it, God will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away. And the one seated on the throne said, I am making all things new.
And the famous Lord's Prayer, or Our Father, explicitly prays for the coming of the kingdom. Thy kingdom come, Jesus taught his followers to plead. But how does the kingdom come?
Book of Revelation's answer to that is that evil is overcome in the first place by the witness that Jesus Christ bore to the truth of God to the point of death, and then primarily by those who follow in his path and who also witness to God in the world, even at the cost of their own lives,
if need be. And there's a great thing in Revelation where the language of conquest is used to refer to the martyrdoms of Christians who are faithful. And sometimes it says the beast has conquered them, because from the beast's point of view, it looks as though they're dead and finished, you know, he's won. But actually, from the martyr's point of view, they have conquered the beast,
because what he has not been able to do is to get them to deny their witness. That's what makes them martyrs. And so he's killed them, but that's all he's been able to do. He hasn't been able to overcome their witness and their message.
So for Revelation, that's the way in which the truth of God prevails over the delusions of the beast. And a lot of it is about truth prevailing over delusion.
by way of the life and witness of the church, in fact, of the Christian communities. - Is there anything concrete the book of Revelation teaches us about the future, about the unfolding of the world? Does it tell us anything about what will happen? I mean, will Jesus actually come back? Is there a judgment or is all of that just symbolic too? - Yes, Jesus Christ returns and it's a very symbolic representation of that.
It's a rider on a white horse who rides out of heaven with the armies of heaven. The armies of heaven are the martyrs, actually. And they're coming to share the triumph that Jesus has won through his faithful witness.
And that's how, in the end, the kingdom of God is achieved. And of course, it's not just a matter of all of this seems to be about, as it were, the human world and politics and stuff, but it actually includes the whole creation. So that all this leads into the healing and restoration of
of the whole of God's creation, which is the great biblical vision for where it's all going in the end. And then evil will be completely eliminated, all sorts of evils. There's a lovely image in Revelation that God will wipe away every tear from every eye. No more suffering, no more death.
So beyond even the kind of political oppression and so forth of the great powers, these kind of metaphysical deficiencies of this creation will be overcome in the new creation. So that's what all gets in the end in the last couple of chapters.
Look, Professor Borkum's answer isn't exactly what many folks want to hear. Some want to know more. They want to know exactly when and how the world will end. Where is the Battle of Armageddon going to be and who are the main players?
There are some interpretations of the book of Revelation that give a more precise account of how things are going to play out. And it has to be said, these interpretations are most popular in the wonderful United States. So after the break, we're going to be...
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.
68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash AnglicanAid.
and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions. We're talking about the rapture.
Billboards proclaiming imminent doomsday are popping up all over the U.S. Judgment Day is at hand, according to a Christian radio preacher in California. If 90-year-old Harold Camping's Bible-based calculations are correct, you shouldn't be making any plans past Saturday, May 21st. On May 21, there's going to be a terrific earthquake, way, way greater than anything that the Earth has ever experienced before.
and that'll be the beginning of Judgement Day. Camping's followers are spreading the word. Some have quit jobs or school to prepare for the end. Camping believes that only a tiny percentage of humanity will be swept up to heaven on Saturday. As for the rest of us, well, I'll see you in hell.
Over the years, certain kinds of Christians, I'm not looking at you, Mark, have tried to fill in the blanks to get a clearer idea of the end of the world and how we should expect Jesus to return. It's actually a pretty recent thing. I'm talking to an American who's an expert on apocalyptic scenarios. So I've got to ask you, when is the rapture?
Well, that really depends on your denomination. I should preface it by saying outside of America, the rapture hardly rates are mentioned.
I know. And this is very funny to me. So it's not an American invention specifically, but it's certainly something that Americans have latched onto. And if I could tell you why I would, I'm sure there's some kind of amazing reason tied to notions of American exceptionalism that we really like this idea. But yeah, I mean, it's funny when you tell American evangelicals in particular that
The rapture is not something that people talk about elsewhere or that was talked about for most of Christian history. It's like you blew the top of their heads off. It's amazing. The rapture is the idea that at the return of Christ, all believers will be caught up, raptured to meet the Lord in the air. Those who take this view point to 1 Thessalonians chapter 4, where the Apostle Paul wrote,
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.
In certain circles, a literalistic interpretation of this paragraph has led to some record-breaking books. The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins gives an account of the rapture and what follows when all the Christians have been taken up into heaven and the world is left to fend for itself. The series sold almost 80 million copies. That's as many as Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
It's the second most commercially successful Christian fiction in publishing history, beaten only by C.S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, which is much better for you. And a study from the National Association of Evangelicals back in 2011 found that 65% of evangelical church leaders in the US identify with pre-millennial theology, which grounds this rapture idea. I asked...
By the way, we had so much gold for this episode, we had to cut some really fun stuff on the millennium. For some reason, producer Kayleigh reckons 90 minutes is too long for a podcast episode. Anyway, some of the extra material is in the show notes. Also, if you head to the show notes, we're giving away 20 copies of my book, 666 and all that,
The Truth About the End Times, which I co-wrote with my good buddy, Dr. Greg Clark. So if you'd like to win a copy, all you need to do is be one of the first 20 new subscribers to the Undeceptions e-newsletter. So quick, go to undeceptions.com, head to this episode's show notes and subscribe, and we'll post you out a book. Can you tell me briefly about the rapture?
Did ancient Christians ever believe in that thing? Is it New Testament teaching?
It certainly has no basis in the book of Revelation. I mean, really, it seems to me the idea of the rapture is based on a single text in Paul's first letter to Thessalonians, where Paul has a little picture of Jesus coming back at the end. It's a picture of Jesus coming, as it were, from heaven. And we are taken up to where he is on his way down to earth.
I think, to join him in his triumphal arrival on earth. So it's not meant to say that we are taken up, or people who are alive at that time will be taken up to heaven. We are taken up to join Jesus on his journey from heaven to earth. The model is of an ancient monarch,
paying a royal visit to one of his cities. And so he would arrive and people would come out as a welcoming party to meet him on his way. And then the point, of course, was that they accompanied him into the city. That's probably the kind of image that Paul is drawing on, and it's not meant to be literal.
And it just isn't a part of ancient Christian teaching in that, you know, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, you know, all the way through the Middle Ages, people didn't know about this. It appears in the 19th century. I mean, actually, just nobody thought of this until the early 19th century. It's totally a modern reading of the matter. Welcome. Welcome. Tributes. We welcome you. We salute you.
That's a clip from the wildly popular dystopian and post-apocalyptic series The Hunger Games.
24 young men and women, selected from districts all across the fictional Pan Am, are entering the capital in preparation for the annual Hunger Games, where they'll be placed in an arena and forced to fight to the death. The capital is the heart of Pan Am, where all the wealthy people live. In the days leading up to the Hunger Games, the capital's citizens are glued to their screens, enjoying the spectacle of the games.
Alyssa Wilkinson postulates that the Hunger Games popularity is a reflection of the millennial generation's distrust of institutions. In the Hunger Games, anyone with power is untrustworthy, power corrupts.
The stories we tell ourselves about the apocalypse certainly reveal the worst of human behaviour. But then so does our obsession with the end itself. Alyssa writes in her book that seeking entertainment in the apocalypse is a luxury for wealthy developed societies that don't have to encounter the consequences of systemic collapse and rupture.
root violence on a daily basis. We watch movies about the end of the world from our comfy couches, while at the same time, in a seemingly distant place, others are fighting for survival. Lord have mercy.
Seeking entertainment in the apocalypse is a signal of our decadence and privilege. But it's also possible that the Christian focus on the apocalypse is detrimental. It may blind believers to the suffering of this world here and now.
Skeptical people insist that if you're thinking too much about a glorious future, you're going to take your eye off the problems here. So does thinking about a future kingdom and an unfolding, you know, glorious future diminish the pleasures and delights of the present? Yes. I mean, I think one part of an answer to that is to point out that, of course, revelations have been a tremendously important message for
for people who are actually not enjoying current life but suffering very badly. I mean, I gather that Christians in Iran at the moment are very dangerous and difficult to be a Christian in Iran, and the book of Revelation is a source of sustenance and hope for people in that sort of situation.
For the rest of us, I think this is tied up with an idea of the Christian tradition as encouraging kind of an otherworldly hope.
which diminishes this world. The worst form of this charge, of course, is that we neglect to help other people in this world. We neglect helping the poor and the sick and so on. And actually, that's demonstrably untrue. The most otherworldly people in the medieval period, the monks and nuns, were sometimes very focused on the world to come, but they were also notable for their charitable work. I mean, they also actually worked very hard
to make life better for people who are suffering in this world. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. Well, I do feel fine. I feel okay. The important part of that lyric, that song title is As We Know It. We're about to go through, we are going through something that none of us have ever experienced.
That, of course, was Michael Stipe from the band R.E.M. talking to his fans about how to stay safe during the coronavirus pandemic.
We seem to be living through our very own apocalypse right now. And it's not just the coronavirus that has plagued us in 2020. We've seen smoke and flames that have turned Australia's skies blood red. Wildfires raging at earthquakes and floods that have killed hundreds of people.
The Macquarie Dictionary's word of the year is doom-scrolling, defined as, quote, the practice of continuing to read news feeds online or on social media despite the fact that the news is predominantly negative and often upsetting. It's been an apocalyptic year.
So one thing I've really noticed is that when I talk about apocalypse as a reset button or as a revealing, people really understand what I mean. Now, this has been something I've been talking about for years, and it was this year where people were like, oh, I get it. Because...
For a few reasons. One is, at least in the U.S., the pandemic hastened and revealed a lot of things that people were maybe trying to ignore or weren't focused on. Things like inequality, who is safe, like who has the luxury of staying in their homes and who has to go out to work.
All those things are also tied to kind of racial and class lines. It also revealed a lot about what people value. Do they value their own security? Do they value making their own choices? Do they value helping their neighbor? Like there's, it's all become clear because apocalypses reveal things. It makes it impossible for us to look away from what the truth is.
Our secular apocalypse stories offer a flexible script to comment on and critique our current circumstances. The Book of Revelation is perhaps less flexible – I'd argue there are wrong ways to read that script – but it too functions as critique, a way of looking at the world from the perspective of the end, from the perspective of the Creator.
I mean, one of the things it does, and it's always done this from time to time in history, is give Christians, as it were, a place from which to be critical of the powers of the world. And this, of course, is what prophecy always does all through the Old Testament. It enables us to see the world from God's perspective and therefore to see where things are going really, really badly wrong. And we need to be critical.
So one respect in which it can help us is in that task of seeing what's gone wrong and seeing how, therefore, things could be better, standing up to the evils of the world. So I think the value of revelation is not enabling us to pick out particular people or events and say, you know, these were specifically prophesied and now they're happening.
The value of revelation is enabling us to understand what's going on in history, the kind of thing that's always going on in history. I think the idolatry of power
is a permanent lesson that we keep needing to relearn from Revelation. But on the other hand, it's an insight into how the kingdom of God comes, primarily through the faithful witness of those who follow Jesus Christ and witness to God within this world, whatever may come. Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.
Anyone who opens a Gospel will quickly discover that the central theme of Jesus' teaching was this Kingdom of God. In the Gospel of Mark alone, which is usually considered the first of the Gospels to be written, the expression appears 18 times, that's more than one per chapter.
It's also the first thing on Jesus' lips according to this gospel. We read, "...after John the Baptist was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the good news of God. The time has come, he said, the kingdom of God has come near."
According to the Gospels, the Kingdom of God was a very big deal for the historical Jesus. But is it historical? Who's to say the theme wasn't invented later by people desperate to find in Jesus some ticket to heaven?
Well, for one thing, the expression kingdom of God in the Gospels sounds more like a political revolution that's coming rather than an ethereal place we go to when we die. Later theological concerns about life after death don't feature nearly as much as you might have thought in the teaching of Jesus. His concern seems to be more about evil being overthrown and justice being established here on earth.
He spoke of the destruction of one order and the renewal of all things, as it's put in Matthew 19. In short, the kingdom of God is about the Almighty doing something about the mess in the world and finally proving that he is the king over his creation. The historical question is, where did this theme about the kingdom of God come from, if not from later concerns about going to heaven?
It's fascinating that Christian leaders in the decades after Jesus, whose letters make up the bulk of the rest of the New Testament, only mention the kingdom of God in passing. It hardly appears.
Those authors seem to assume the theme, but they hardly ever teach about it using that specific term. Now, that suggests that the historical background to the theme of the kingdom of God is to be found earlier in Jesus' immediate Jewish setting. There's no way it was a later retrogression into the Gospels.
So the Old Testament, what the Jews call the Tanakh or Torah, occasionally does use an expression similar to the Kingdom of God. So in Isaiah 52, we hear about a herald who goes up a mountain with good news, the word is gospel, that God will reign as king. Now this is the verb form of the word kingdom, so it's very close to kingdom of God.
But other Jewish writings immediately after the Old Testament and before Jesus do use the exact expression, kingdom of God. So in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we find a few important examples. But we also find examples in a text written around the same time, just a few decades before Jesus. It's a text called the Psalms of Solomon. It's not a biblical text. It's a series of
nationalistic poems or songs written by Jewish leaders shortly before the life of Jesus, shortly after the year 63, when the Romans took control of Judea.
The songs were not the sort of thing imperial authorities would have enjoyed because the dominant theme was how Israel's God would soon crush the despotic sinners who dare to trample down the temple. And in place of the sinners, i.e. the Romans, God is going to elevate the righteous who will take their place in a new world order. And the word for this world order is the kingdom.
Here's how the song begins: "Lord, you are King forever, for in you, O God, does our soul take pride."
This song, number 17 in the collection,
continues in a strain of laments and then pivots to declare that while the sinners have temporarily challenged the kingdom, they'll soon be overthrown by the promised descendant of King David, the Messiah. And so we read...
And on it goes.
A song like the one I just quoted, composed so close in time to Jesus, gives us a good idea of how some people in the period thought about their predicament under the Romans and how they envisaged the future. The key expression, the kingdom of our God, has an immediate connection to Jesus' own proclamation of the kingdom of God.
Regardless of later fixations about life after death and going to heaven, the teaching of Jesus about the coming kingdom was very much part of an earlier conversation in Judea and Galilee about the problems of suffering and tyranny and what God was going to do about it all.
People in his day longed for the Almighty to step in and clean up the mess of the world. The language they used for this revolution was the kingdom of God.
Jesus' preaching, as the Gospels describe it, very much fits with the specific concerns of Jewish people at the turn of the first century. This is one of the tests we use for the historicity of things. But we can also see how Jesus' particular idea of the kingdom was radically different from the one expected in the nationalistic poems I just quoted today.
Jesus repeatedly said that God's kingdom is especially concerned with what you might call the humble, instead of the total war picture of the kingdom that we find in near contemporary literature. Jesus is recorded as saying things like, "'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom.'"
Or blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. That's Matthew 5. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom. Also Matthew 5. Or in Mark 4, what shall we say the kingdom of God is like? Or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth.
Or this one, On occasion, Jesus even implied a reversal of the expectation that foreigners like the Romans would be wiped out by the coming kingdom.
Following a really tender interaction with a Roman centurion, Jesus announced to his Israelite audience, "I say to you that many will come from the east and the west and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside.
That's worth reading. That's in Matthew chapter 8. Jesus' teaching about the kingdom of God not only fits with the broad hopes of his fellow Jews in the period, it also seems to challenge, deliberately confront some aspects of those dreams. The kingdom of God, according to Jesus, was not the business of freedom fighters eager to crush their pagan overlords. In light of his call to love your enemies and turn the other cheek,
He thought that violence on behalf of the kingdom actually ruled people out of that kingdom. For Jesus, the kingdom was for the meek, the little children, and for any who welcomed its arrival with humility. You can press play now.
The book of Revelation is tricky to read. It's so foreign to our modern sensibilities. But that's our fault, not the fault of the book itself. The original author and readers knew exactly how to read this literary genre, just as we have to do a bit of work to read Homer's Iliad or Dante's Divine Comedy or even Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. So we have to be patient with the apocalyptic imagery.
There's plenty to be gained from a thorough read-through, so maybe you should give it a try, even if you're sceptical about the whole Bible or really confused the last time you picked up this book of Revelation. Just give it a go. It's not just a letter to those seven ancient churches, and nor is it a book that only carries a message for people experiencing persecution.
So people sometimes think that a book like Revelation was written only for Christians who were being persecuted. Actually, it's not the case. Some of them were avoiding persecution because they were compromising and just not being faithful. So it's a call to rather costly faithfulness, as well as an encouragement to those who are being faithful in a costly way.
It's also not a book that we should be searching for specifics about how the world will end. The Bible's versions of apocalypses are left what seems, you know, kind of purposely a little vague so that we won't feel like we know what's going to happen at the end, which is something that
Christian movies about the end of times do tend to try to create like a roadmap for how things are going to happen. But Jesus is very clear about the fact that you're not going to know what's going to happen until it already happens, even if you think you do. And I used to I had a pastor when I was growing up who used to say if I felt like people had figured out something.
when Jesus was coming back and I was Jesus, I would pick a different day. So, which I always thought was pretty funny, but pretty insightful. And a big reason is that if we know that the end is here, then we don't have the same maybe motivation or we lose heart to, you know, do what we're supposed to be doing, which is blessing our neighbors and working for the flourishing of the world.
And so I think that's very smart, if I can say that on God's part. But it also says something about how I think he's kind of interested in the ways we dream up our ends. I think that, you know, creativity delights God.
It is a book that talks about what God's kingdom will look like in the future, God's purposes for the world. I think one angle on this that helps is to remember that the goal of God's purpose for history
is actually to heal and renew this world. This creation is fundamentally a good creation, which God meant for the enjoyment and flourishing of all his creatures, including humans,
we've done some wretched things to it, you know, we've made it worse than it could have been, there's lots of suffering and so on. But it's fundamentally good and it is to be appreciated. And it's not going to be, as it were, tossed aside in favour of some purely heavenly future.
that this creation itself in God's purpose is to be healed and renewed and taken into an eternal future. So when we care about this world, when we enjoy nature, for example,
It's not something alien to our future hope. Actually, you know, the whole of nature has a future with us. And it's not as though we're kind of strangers here who don't really belong.
We do really belong. And we and the rest of creation all belong also in the future that God has for us. I think it's getting this relation between the good creation, which in some respects has gone wrong, but it's not going to be replaced. It's going to be healed and renewed in God's future.
Got questions about this or other episodes? I'd love to hear them, and I'll have a go at answering them in our upcoming Q&A episode. You can tweet us, or Kayleigh, at Undeceptions, send an email to questions at undeceptions.com, or just record your question and we'll play it on the show. You go to undeceptions.com, scroll down, and hit the record button. And while you're there, check out the growing Undeceptions library, a feast of audio, video, and print material designed to undeceive.
And if you like what you see, please consider clicking the donate button. We do need your support for the wider Undeceptions project and every little bit helps. Thanks so much. See ya. Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. You deserve a free pass today, mate. Our theme song is by Bach.
arranged by me, played by the fabulous Undeceptions band, editing by Nathaniel Schumach. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is part of the Eternity Podcast Network, an audio collection showcasing the seriously good news of faith today. Head to undeceptions.com and you'll find the show notes and lots of other stuff related to our episodes. And before I go, a quick shout out to Save the Children.
These guys took me to Jordan and Lebanon last year to see their work among Syrian refugee children. And honestly, I was blown away by their professionalism and the impact on the ground. Head to savethechildren.net. Brought to you by the Eternity Podcast Network.