I hope you haven’t made any big plans for today—the world’s about to end. Or so claims Yisrayl “Buffalo Bills” Hawkins, a self-proclaimed prophet in Texas. According to Hawkins, whose past predictions of the End in 2006 and 2007 have surprisingly not come to pass, the world will end today in nuclear war.
I mention this not because I think he is right but as a way to talk about all these predictions. A recent article by Ian McEwan about belief in an imminent Day of Judgment gives us a glimpse at a how a self-confessed unbeliever sees all this. If you’re a believer you might not like the way McEwan’s approach all this but it’s interesting to hear his perspective. Here’s an excerpt in which he can’t get over how believers continue to try to set dates in spite of the repeated failure of such attempts throughout history:
For centuries now, [belief in the End Times] has regarded the end as “soon” – if not next week, then within a year or two. The end has not come, and yet no one is discomfited for long. New prophets, and soon, a new generation, set about the calculations, and always manage to find the end looming within their own lifetime. The million sellers like Hal Lindsey predicted the end of the world all through the seventies, eighties and nineties – and today, business has never been better. There is a hunger for this news, and perhaps we glimpse here something in our nature, something of our deeply held notions of time, and our own insignificance against the intimidating vastness of eternity, or the age of the universe – on the human scale there is little difference. We have need of a plot, a narrative to shore up our irrelevance in the flow of things.
It is a bit weird that Christians keep trying to guess the date of the Second Coming, isn’t it? Now I believe firmly that Jesus will one day return. My question is do you think the Second Coming is just around the corner or far off? And does it make a difference in the way you live? If so how?
1 comment:
I wasn't able to watch all of the show, but a recent "Nova" on PBS was about Sir Isaac Newton, and spent some time discussing his prediction that the world will end in the year 2060. Of course, Newton was a unitarian, which explains why he set the deadline so far in the future--it gave his fellow Unitarians plenty of time to form committees, argue, and make coffee.
Sometimes, especially after something egregiously outrageous has happened in the world, I think that surely the end can't be far off. But I am pretty well convinced that God's love for us is so great that the end will not come until the message of grace and salvation has been extended to the greatest number of souls. The fact that Jesus' return could be tomorrow (or today) should impart a sense of urgency to my life and my relationships with non-believers, but frankly, that just isn't the case. I find myself living as if I had all the time in the world.
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