Audio Documentary

A student at Appalachian State University, Courtney Huffman, interviewed me for an audio documentary she did called "The End of Days: Religion, Science and Faith Considered." She's given me permission to post it. You can listen to it here. I thought that she did a nice job of fairly presenting my point of view. When I wrote to ask her if I could post it, since it seemed appropriate for this blog, I said I would have liked to have a chance to respond to her last interviewee who was a "prophecy teacher" and represented the traditional evangelical view of the end times. She said she expected to come back to it and would give me another shot. Here's what I would say to the points the "prophecy teacher" raised (and they are fairly traditional so if your familar with this tradition none of them will surprise you):

1. A cashless society and microchipping -- This one has been around a long time and dispensationalists need a cashless society for the whole "mark of the beast" thing to work. As technology has advanced the notion of "the mark" has been updated to match. In the 70's it was going to be a barcode. Now its microchips. The problem of course its that our economic system is not conducive to the sort of unified financial system that would be necessary. To have the sort of world where all economic transactions were conducted through a single venue (i.e. a chip) would require the sort of economic collaboration and consolidation that seems less likely in a capitalist world. The dispensationalist world view is in a sense mired in a cold war, command economy, vision of the economy rather than thousand flowers of capitalism. Bear in mind, the clock is still ticking. The generally accepted understanding of the 1948 problem is that essentially we now have until the last baby boomer dies (rather than a fixed date like 1988). That still only gives use 40-50 more years at best to unify all these diverse economies and currencies and markets into a single one. Does that seem likely? Particularly given the money that is made through currency exchange and foreign market investment which depends in part on diversity of currency?
   
2. One world religion -- Islam or the URI? This one also makes me laugh. There are basically two visions here for the future of religion. One is that a single religion conquerors all the others. The other is that everyone chooses to give up their religion for some sort of new vast worldwide religion. Ok now let's think both of these through. First, the idea that some religion will conquer the world. Do we really think that the United States, Latin American and Africa -- all extremely Christian places -- are really going to say, "we see the error of our ways we all want to be Muslims"? Even if you rapture out the fundamentalists, there is no way the Catholics, the Orthodox (Greek, Coptic, Ethopic, Armenian, etc.), the Protestants (who aren't raptured) are going to surrender to Muslims. Episcopalians don't want to be something else, thank you, they are happy being Episcopalians even if they aren't going to make the rapture. But then you have the other approach, where everyone abandons their current religion for some new master religion. Now the argument works the other way. Do we really think that those Islamic countries are just going go from "There is no god but Allah and Mohammad is his Prophet," "neo-wicca is really cool!" Clearly not. Perhaps I lack imagination, but I can envision no way where the 2 billion Christians, the 1.5 billion Muslims or billion Hindu's who have all been at war with each other off and on for hundreds of years are going to wave the white flag and defect to one or the other's religion. There are fundamentalists in all those religions, and even if the Christian brand gets sucked up in the rapture the others will still be here and they are not keen on converting to something else. That is not going to happen. And to promote the URI (United Religion Initiative) as the vehicle for some new one world religion is a perversion of what the URI stands for. The URI is an ecumenical movement that tries to get religions to work together for common goals like peace, feeding the poor and taking care of the needy. It has no independent religious ideology. The notion that it does is simply to project fundamentalist paranoia on to it. Though I'm sure the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches appreciate the break because they are usually the target of choice.
3. One World Government -- I think the Bush Administration tried this one already and we see how well it has worked. Look at the effectiveness of the U.N. in a place like Rwanda or Darfur and then tell me how likely a one world government is. And the EU? As a new one world government? Please, the EU can barely keep its own act together, much less be the launching pad to take over the rest of the world. Part of the problem is that the world is so much bigger than when Revelation was written. The Roman Empire was huge for its time, and yet it was barely a patch on the British Empire's behind. The Roman Empire was 2.2 million square miles, the British Empire was almost 7 times larger at 14.2 million square miles. And the British Empire, as huge as it was, only ruled a quarter of the world. Can we really imagine China with 1.6 Billion people suddenly bowing down to the EU? Can we imagine India with its Billion people doing the same? How about the US, can we really imagine giving our freedom over to a coalition that has as one of its principal leaders the French? And does anyone really want to run the whole world? Who wants to try to control the warring factions in Africa, Asia, South America? Who really thinks that the ethnic strife from the Former Soviet Union to the Sands of the Middle East to the Jungles of Indonesia can really be solved by one charismatic figure in 3 1/2 years?
   

I contend that the more we understand how really large and really complicated the world is, the modern adaptation of the story of Revelation, which was written without a recognition of five of the seven continents of the world is really fantasy. Never is there discussion about how Chinese national interest is going to figure in to this, or Japanese, or Indian, or Venezuelan or even Canadian. Its all about a war over Israel, a country from a global economic perspective that has little import. I would contend that the war that will bring civilization to something approximating Armageddon is as likely to happen in Taiwan as it is in the Valley of Meggido. It is only when the world is telescoped back to a focus on two continents again, as though the world was still the same as the first century, that all these elaborate fantasies can be spun. When we look at the world we have and not the one they had we can see that none of these ideas are in the least bit plausible. We do not live in the world of the book of Revelation. It was an attempt to give hope to its audience and it spoke of and to the world it knew. But it is not our world, and it is not elastic enough to cover our world.