What Catholics Believe About The End of the World
by Kenneth E. Untener
In January of 1843, a preacher named William Miller—the founder of the American Adventist movement—announced that the end of the world would take place between March 21,1843, and March 21,1844. He had combed the Bible for clues and figured it all out.
Thousands from all denominations believed him, and tension mounted as the yearlong vigil began, heightened by the appearance of a comet. Alas, the fateful year came to an end, and the world didn’t.
Neither did the speculation. There had been a miscalculation, Miller pointed out. He and his followers found a passage in the prophet Habakkuk about a “delay,” and a verse in the Book of Leviticus about 7 days and 10 months. Neither passage, of course, had anything to do with the end of the world, but never mind that. A new date was announced: October 22, 1844. Tension mounted once again. You know the outcome.
Similar scenarios have taken place in every age and continue at this moment. Such prophets never fail to find believers. Elvis lives.
The hype increases as we approach the year 2000. Some take it seriously, even fanatically, as did the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, in 1993. One radio church lists 24 signs from the Bible that the end is near. Crop rotation in Israel, for example, fulfills a prophecy in Amos about the plowman overtaking the reaper. And on and on it goes.
Doomsday Passages in Scripture
We now take a closer look at how the Bible treats the end of the world. We are familiar with various kinds of literature: poetry, science fiction, history, satire. Most people are not familiar with a kind of literature called “apocalyptic.” It was very popular from about 200 B.C. to 200 A.D., a time of great crisis in Israel.
The Greek word apocalypse (in English, revelation) literally means “to draw back the veil.” When times were tough, writers tried to bring comfort by putting things into a wider perspective. Baseball managers try to do the same when their team is in a slump: “We were riding high at the beginning of the season, but now the sky has fallen in. Well, we’ve been through tough times before. It’s a long season and we’ve got the horses.”
Apocalyptic literature attempts to give assurance that, however bad things may be, one need only draw back the veil and see things in the perspective of the great battle against evil, and appreciate the length and breadth and depth of God’s victorious power at work among us.
To paint this larger picture, writers drew from a storehouse of stock apocalyptic images that dwarfed the immediate crisis. Among the standard images were: stars falling from the sky, the sun and moon darkened, lightning, thunder, dragons, creatures with many eyes, four horsemen, trumpet blasts, water turning to blood, plagues. It’s a way of saying that the present order of things is not the whole picture and will be giving way to something new and much larger.
Strange pictures are conjured up when people take these apocalyptic images literally. Imagine what would happen if people in future epochs took literally images we use today: raining cats and dogs, hit the roof, money coming out of his ears, two-faced, forked tongue, on cloud nine and so on
When will it all happen?
When will history come to term? When will the “birth” happen? We don’t know. There is no indication that it is near, and there is no assurance that it is far. What is important is not when it will happen, but that it will happen. History is short when put in perspective. The Second Epistle of Peter reminds us, “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day” (3:8).
What is also important is that our own end is relatively near. By the insurance mortality charts, I have 23 years left. Only God knows the actual count. In the Parable of the Rich Fool, Jesus presents this perspective in language we can all under*stand. After a bountiful harvest the rich man plans to store his grain in bigger barns, believing be can now rest, eat, drink, be merry. God says to him, “You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” (Lk 12:20)
When we see ourselves and this world in the perspective of history coming to term, we see with different eyes. Things that seem so important within the limited horizon of the womb of history become not so important. Things that seem not so important in this world’s eyes become very important. It changes one’s whole attitude about what you want to do with your life.
Instead of fretting about the question of “when,” therefore, we are wiser to focus on the question of “who”—namely, upon a loving God who promises to walk with us to the end, whenever that occurs. Our understanding of the “end” flows from a real-life conviction about the here-and-now meaning of our lives and our universe. In short, we believe with St. Paul that the same God “who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil 1:6).