Christian Eschatology: Heretical Abuses

As has been evident with this blog, I do not find all heresies praiseworthy, and some only partly praiseworthy. A disturbing trend in contemporary Christianity is an obsession with the Rapture, Armageddon, the Second Coming, the Last Judgment, all features of what is theologically known as the Eschaton (from Neo Greek: "End of the World"). All instances in history where Christians have become obsessed with these matters mirror times of particular and prolonged difficulties and uncertainties, often due to economic, climatological or cultural changes of a dramatic nature. Human civilization and the planet itself goes through cycles of change as the cumulative effect of an ongoing series of changes reaches critical mass, and then matters gradually re-stabilize. In earlier times, such waves of anxiety could manifest in popular movements which sought scapegoats and brought about persecution and mayhem toward vulnerable minorities. Less innocuously, but rather self-destructively, such movements as they manifested repeatedly in the 19th century caused adherents to give away all their worldly goods, quit their jobs, hand over their farms and business, leaving themselves destitute and without socioeconomic station in life when the hoped-for appearance of the messiah did not occur. Nowadays, we are reaching a fever of spiritual (and psychological) anxiety over the outcome of highly dubious trends and policies in our society and all over the world. These factors form enough of a burden if one is merely an atheist or agnostic seeking to cope on a practical level. However, for a person of faith, the burden is doubly so. The implications of any one of the multiple scenarios for a Biblically-based, theologically and cosmologically-construed Doomsday are not pleasant and run contrary to many teachings in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which otherwise present God as a force of compassion and peace in the world. According to these eschatologies, an exceedingly small number of people will be permitted to survive the tribulations that will ensue, and of all the souls that ever lived, an exceedingly small number of them will be saved for eternal bliss and from eternal damnation. This of course runs contrary to a parallel concept that we are judged as soon as we die, rather that at the "End of Time". The prophetic tradition of Armageddon involves Divinely Willed suffering of various kinds, including famine, plague, war and deceitful political leadership on a global scale. In sheer objective terms of humanity, many innocent people will suffer and die miserably in abject terror and despair. The aforementioned war will supposedly involve a cosmic conflict between an earthly "Anti-Christ" assisted by the hosts of hell and its chief fallen angel, Satan. On the side of good, the heavenly angels (including the archangels), Jesus and God himself (of course they are dual manifestations of one Divine Being in Christian orthodoxy). Ultimately God and the Power of Good will win over Evil, and Satan will be bound away forever. Jesus will then rule as a Benign Monarch over an Earthly Paradise for a thousand golden years, until the cosmos as we know it will be transfigured and time itself dissolved. Various eschatological traditions differ (and vehemently argue) over the proper order of these culminatory events, but these are the essential elements of the affair. So where do such beliefs leave a Christian who seeks to better him or herself spiritually and lead a good life day by day? Well, these beliefs introduce ideas which are abused in terms of cultivating a healthy moral faith. For one, they make fear the fulcrum of people's Christian faith. They also make blame an insidious force in people's religious passion. Who is (or will be) the Anti-Christ? Who are his agents? What sorts of political or cultural activities represent the agenda or acquiescence to the Will of the Anti-Christ to prepare the Earth for the cosmic rule of his infernal abettor, Satan? Obviously we, being only imperfect (and necessarily imperfectly informed) mortals, cannot make clear, just, impartial, accurate or even a united determination as to what the answers to any of these questions are, and those who have the hubris to choose to act on their own subjective judgments in these matters have the potential of wreaking serious harm and injustice against people who are quite innocent. Those who make eschatology rather than compassion the center of their spirituality and religiosity turn into self-perceived "soldiers of God", and unwittingly put themselves at the disposal of very un-Christlike political agendas here on Earth. We have to remember how different the Christ of the Gospels is from the role eschatologists force him into as they construct their complex meldings of obscure prophetic passages from the Book of Revelations and various Epistles in the New Testament, not to mention the prophecies from the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Testament. All of these selected texts from Holy Scripture are actually open to a vast range of interpretation, which one could just as easily argue that the spiritual anxieties being expressed in them belong very much to the various cultural and historical context of the times in which they were written, and otherwise 0nly have as much to do with defining the very real problems of our own time as would the symbols painted on caves fr0m the Stone Age! We've got global warming, growing poverty, intolerable social imbalances, educational decay, environmental degradation and an overall decline in the quality of democracy in the world today. To use religion as a weapon to aggravate these issues on sectarian lines, rather than coming together peacefully and ecumenically to solve them with our God-given hearts and minds, is a heresy of the worst kind.