Including this
month there is an ongoing stream of articles that ask if the CERN Hadron
Collider work could "wipe out everything from here to the farthest
star."
The European
Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN,
was established in 1954 in Switzerland by 12 member states. Since then, it's
swelled to 22 member states and has made dozens of important discoveries,
including the Higgs
boson, or "god" particle, and the invention of the World Wide
Web.
But a powerful
scientific laboratory like this is ripe for conspiracy theories, especially
after it turned on the Large Hadron Collider. For a while, before it hit the
"on" button, people feared the Large Hadron Collider might destroy
Earth, being the largest machine in the world used to smash subatomic particles
together.
CERN insists its
research, including that of microscopic black holes, is perfectly safe, but as
the above-quoted Nov. 2019 article, "let’s just hope that" headlines
continue to read “The Day the World Didn’t End.”
A history of the end of the world
The end of the world,
whether caused by the Hadron Collider by many ‘true believers’ is seen as the
fulfillment of the divine prophecies that are described in Revelation:
Plus ideas have a
history, and while most will remember the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Millerites
and Hal Lindsey, one could argue that those who did most make the myth survive
into the modern era where Isaak Newton in England, Joachim of Fiore in Italy, and
Hildegard of Bingen in the German-speaking lands.
Joachim of Fiore (ca.
1135-ca. 1202) was raised and educated to serve as an official in the royal
court of the Norman king in southern Italy, but he was drawn to the life of “a
wandering holy man,” the same calling that sent John to the seven churches of
Asia Minor. Joachim took monastic vows and later founded a monastery in the
rugged reaches of the Calabrian countryside, where he was inspired to undertake
a study of the scriptures in an effort to crack the divine secrets that were
hidden away in Holy Writ.
When Joachim started
to read the book of Revelation, he hoped to find “the key of things past, the
knowledge of things to come,” as he puts it, “the opening of what is sealed,
the uncovering of what is hidden.” 1
He became convinced,
for example, that human history is divided into three ages, each one
corresponding to a “person” of the Trinity-the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
The first age lasted until the crucifixion of Jesus, the second age was in
progress during Joachim’s lifetime and would end with the arrival of the
Antichrist, and the third age-an age of spiritual peace and perfection-would
begin only after the Antichrist is defeated. And, echoing the words of Jesus
himself, Joachim expressed his conviction that the final battle between God and
Satan was at hand.
No less commanding a
figure than Richard the Lion-Hearted, the legendary English king, called on
Joachim on his way to the Holy Land during the Third Crusade in 1190-1191 to
find out what Revelation might foretell about his own fate. And the old monk
obliged the crusader-king by revealing that when John sees “a beast rise up out
of the sea” in the book of Revelation, he is actually glimpsing the Saracen
army that Richard would soon face in the battle for Jerusalem. Soon thereafter,
Joachim assured Richard, Jesus Christ would return to earth to undertake the
final crusade against the Antichrist, the long-promised battle of Armageddon.
‘’And this Antichrist was already borne in the citie
of Rome, and should be there exalted in the Apostolical see,” Joachim is shown
to say to King Richard in a sixteenth-century Protestant tract. ‘’And then
shall the wicked man be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirits
of his mouth and shall destroye with the brightness
of his coming.”
The Antichrist, in other words, would be the pope
himself.
Hildegard of Bingen,
who today is still respected as a visionary in such books like “Illuminations
of Hildegard of Bingen” by Matthew Fox (2002), along with Joachim, used
Revelation as a weapon against the church itself: "In her vagina there
appeared a monstrous and totally black head with fiery eyes, ears like the ears
of a donkey, nostrils and mouth like those of a lion," Hildegard writes in
her account of the vision that came to her as she prayed.2
Significantly, if
also surprisingly, Hildegard's preachments were not condemned by the church.
Hildegard was so credible and so compelling that the archbishop under whose
authority she lived and worked found himself forced to concede that her
visions "were from God," and so did the pope himself. Indeed, a monk
was assigned to serve as her scribe so that the prophecies issuing from
Hildegard's mind and mouth would be promptly and accurately preserved, and she
corresponded often and at length with popes, emperors, kings, and churchmen all
over Europe.
And so Hildegard
reminds us, that a charismatic man or woman might succeed in catching and
holding the attention of an audience by invoking the power of Revelation.
The self-made
apocalyptic seer who literally put the apocalyptic idea on the best-seller
lists of America was a colorful and charismatic preacher named Hal Lindsey (b.
1930). After studying at the Dallas Theological Seminary, a center of
premillennialist doctrine, Lindsey went on the road as a preacher for the
Campus Crusade for Christ. Inspired by the lively response to the sermons on
Bible prophecy that he delivered in the late 1960s, Lindsey and his
collaborator, C. C. Carlson, went public with his prediction that the end was
near with the publication of The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970.
Like the
"medieval best sellers" of an earlier age, Lindsey's book repurposed
and reinterpreted the text of Revelation and other apocalyptic passages of the
Bible in terms that made sense to contemporary readers. And Lindsey was
rewarded with best-seller status that far exceeded even the Scofield Reference
Bible and, significantly, reached far beyond the customary readership of
Christian fundamentalist texts and tracts. The Late Great Planet Earth sold
more than 20 million copies, and Lindsey was hailed by the New York Times as
"the best-selling author of the 1970s."3 Bart Ehrman goes even
further and declares that Lindsey is "probably the single most read author
of religion in modern times."4
Lindsey comes across
in The Late Great Planet Earth as media savvy and thoroughly modern, but he is
only the latest in a long line of apocalyptic preachers that reaches all the
way back to the author of Revelation himself. And, like the author of
Revelation, he condemns all ideas about religion except his own, and he
suggests that diversity and toleration in matters of faith are, quite
literally, the tools of Satan.
"Satan loves
religion, which is why he invades certain churches on Sunday," Lindsey
writes, hinting but never stating exactly which churches he regards as the
"throne of Satan." "Religion is a great blinder of the minds of
men."5
No doubt another
sensationally successful media enterprise that demonstrates the power of the
apocalyptic idea in its purest and simplest form, is the Left Behind series by
Tim LaHaye.
This protracted
account of the Tribulation and the antics of the Antichrist, spawned not merely
a string of novels but a multimedia empire, including books, comics,
newsletters, audios, videos, and a Web site called "The Left Behind
Prophecy Club." Significantly, the publisher spun off a separate series
especially for young readers, titled Left Behind' The Kids, which now consists
of an additional forty titles. While Hal Lindsey was hailed as the best-selling
author of the 1970s for selling 20 million copies of The Late Great Planet
Earth, the Left Behind series has reportedly sold more than 50 million copies
since the first title was published in 1995. And the end-surely to the
disappointment of its authors-is nowhere in sight.
Aside from the Left
Behind series, LaHaye's fifty books include tracts that condemn the United
Nations, gay sexuality, "secular humanism," and various other bogeymen
of Christian fundamentalism. And LaHaye himself readily acknowledges that the
Left Behind series is a yet another weapon in the struggle for the hearts and
minds of his fellow Americans.
Significantly, both
Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye are Christian Zionists. "The hands on Israel's
prophecy clock leaped forward on June 8, 1967," writes Tim LaHaye in The
Beginning of the End (1973), an apocalyptic tract that predates the Left Behind
series, "when the Israeli troops marched into the Old City of
Jerusalem." And a 1984 book titled:
Whereby Ronald
Weinland's book 2008, God's Final Witness, predicted that the US will be
destroyed within two years.
But scientific doom
saying changes nothing at all for apocalyptic true believers. The end of the
world, whether caused by the Hadron Collider or not, it is still seen by many
as the fulfillment of the divine prophecies that are described in Revelation, whereby
the stream of books and seminars including this month is ongoing.
Thus also for this
year there have been a number of predictions and end-time
books including one by David Montaigne claiming the earth will end on 21
Dec. 2019.
1) Quoted in Richard
Emmerson and Bernard McGinn, eds. The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages. Cornell
Univ. Press, 1992, p. 532.
2) Quoted in McGinn,
Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages. Columbia
University Press, 1998, p.101.
3) Timothy P. Weber,
Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillenarianism
1875-1982. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987, p.211.
4) Ehrman, Jesus:
Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, Oxford Univ. Press, 1999, p.7.
5) Lindsay,
Apocalypse Code, 1997, p.131-32.
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