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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
The Things to Come2/04/2007 01:48:38For the afternoon, I went to a "prophecy conference" at a local evangelical church. It seems that every year, this church organizes an all-day event in which hundreds of people sit in the pews (which are beach benches, since we live in Santa Barbara) and listen to dynamic lectures about how to interpret world events biblically. Of course I am not unaware of prophecy, particularly in our day. I've read lots of articles accusing George Bush and his supporters of basing our whole foreign policy around satisfying their ideas about the end times. And then of course I've read the Bible and the prophecies in it and wondered what they mean and what they are for and how we can learn from them. Usually I saturate myself in their wonderful imagery and get lost in it, forgetting the real world and its minions for "the things to come." The first of the talks was good. It was about how the whole point of prophecy should be "putting on" the Lord Jesus Christ and living the life that is good in the eye of God. Throughout the day, people kept saying that prophecy should be a comfort to us, because it says that in all the madness of events, God's hand guides them, and God will see us through. This struck me as a very useful message. The second talk, however, made me begin to worry. It was a young man (all the speakers were fashionable, polished, extremely articulate men) whose essential message was that Islam is a religion of violence and cannot be welcomed as a friend of Christianity or the Christian world. Muslims abroad want to destroy us and Muslims here are the first wave that will take us over. One resounding message of everyone I heard was that "the God of the Bible is not the God of the Qur'an" and that Islam is the doctrine of demons. They also emphasize the violent elements of the Qur'an (without any comparison with those in the Bible). The image, generally, was that anybody faithful to Islam would be necessarily violent. Any Muslims who are not violent are "backsliding" Muslims, and there is no reason to believe Muslim countries will come to the negotiating table with any kind of good faith (once again, let's remember the logs in our own country's eye). Islam is incompatible with democracy and is responsible for most of the wars currently going on in the world. Next, Israel. There was a strong showing at the book-selling tables for materials for evangelizing to Jews (and Catholics!), and one of the speakers was a Jewish believer. The nation of Israel, of course, is the critical piece of the puzzle in this reading of the last days. One speaker told us, "If you stand for Israel you'll be blessed by the Lord and if you don't stand for Israel you won't be blessed by the Lord. Find out what your elected officials think and vote accordingly." The Israel they had in mind is of course that which the ancient prophets imagined, spanning from southern Turkey to Sinai to Kuwait. The two-state solution for Palestinians is no solution because Israel deserves all that land and the Palestinians would just use it as a staging base for destroying Israel anyway. Territory was renamed, with historical Bible maps placed over actual land, people, and renamed cities. One speaker insisted on referring to the West Bank exclusively as Judea & Sumeria, making the past the "true" map and the present an illegitimate deviation. Finally, the state of the world is best understood as a battle against radical Islamic fundamentalism (conveniently shortened to RIF), which is basically the reigning ideology of the entire Middle East (remember, non-fundamentalist Muslims are backsliders). Violence is the only way to combat this force, which will not enter a negotiated settlement or practice rules of engagement, because violence "is the only language these people understand." The whole Islamic world was implicated in this war, and they are effectively all our enemies. Iran is bound to attack with nuclear weapons, so the only question is whether us or them will attack first. It seems like a reliquary of Cold War theology (and its arm of Cold War eschatology, like Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth) hastily adapted for a new time with the same foolishness as before. As Christians of course we are called to love our enemies and pray that they will find Jesus, but their religion is deeply, decidedly false. For me, the most moving moment of the whole event was at the start of the second speaker's talk, when the Muslim call to prayer was played over the loudspeaker. It is so saddening when a beautiful creation of human spirit and worship is presented as a work of the devil. There is a very compelling logic and consistency to this whole system. Sitting there, I was dumbfounded and couldn't for the life of me find the words to explain why it felt wrong. The audience amazed me. There were hundreds of people, a large warehouse church almost completely filled with people of all ages and as ethnically diverse as Santa Barbara can muster in English. Cool teenagers and grandmothers. People whispered words of approval at statements that struck me as hateful and intolerant. There was applause at the fightin' words. Later, talking it through with a friend, I think I was able to put into words the wrongness I was feeling a bit more clearly. It begins with the maps. The maps these interpretations draw are devoid of people. People are puppets for God, particularly those living in the territory that Israel is supposed to inhabit. I have had friends (most particularly my girlfriend Mary) who have lived in the occupied territories in Palestine whose lives were utterly changed by seeing the suffering and indignity heaped upon the people there. Those people, I suspect, are the real religious situation there, not the shape of the map. Jesus and St. Paul had such wonderful ways of dismissing the ideas of people who think they can draw the world into principalities and powers with so much seriousness. Sure! Be respectful to authorities! They have their reward. Hearing all this, I kept bringing my mind back to this documentary I saw recently about Iraq, which showed some pretty scary preaching by al-Sadr's followers. Gosh, it sounded so alike. Men standing up before microphones and telling people who respect them that the far enemy wants only to destroy them and their families. I think human nature has this pattern so deeply printed in its (evolved?) design. Maybe because we are made to belong to small tribes and fight in unison against our enemies. So the pattern continues and, wherever possible, even when the alternative seems so incredibly possible, we make sure to drive wedges and distinctions between us and to dehumanize the other. As a theory of religion, I call this the speciation of religion, the seemingly endless splintering that makes religions both so interesting and dangerous. I look at myself disagreeing so predictably with these people and think the same thing. I am no different, no better. But what about God watching over (and within) all this? What about Jesus? Does God really want us to fight still more wars? Is it simply a fact of life or something that is actually worth changing? This is a really critical question, one I thought there was agreement on roughly, but there is not. We need to decide before we can act together as a country. Do we want peace, truly, a "perpetual peace" in the words of Kant, or do our theologies condemn us to more insane wars until the skies open up and the great Referee comes down to recover us, the hardly-improved, poor banished children of Eve? It is true, in this sense, the prophecies may offer some nice comfort to those of us who are unaffected, who can sit back in Santa Barbara and tell ourselves that God's plan is coming about and we are on the good side. But that is not peace. Driving in our big cars and destroying the environment and scouring the impoverished world for its oil is climbing onto a big mound of sin that sorely needs undoing. The only comfort we need now is that which will give us the strength to reach out to those in need, whose prophetic claims cry against us.
re:The Things to Come - 2/04/2007 21:06:57
...But what about God watching over (and within) all this? What about Jesus? Does God really want us to fight still more wars? Is it simply a fact of life or something that is actually worth changing? This is a really critical question, one I thought there was agreement on roughly, but there is not.... "...What will the present chaos lead to? How will it all end? It can only end in one way. Mankind will be sick of it all. Men will be sick of wanting and sick of fighting out of hatred. Greed and hatred will reach such intensity that everyone will become weary of them. The way out of the dead-lock will be found through selflessness...." (M. B.) "...There is no prophet in the earth's chronicle who's not honored here today...." (C. McCarthy, _The Road_) |
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