Prophecy, End-Times, and American Apocalypse: Reclaiming Hope for Our World

Abstract

Americans today are fascinated by apocalyptic visions and predictions, as seen in the Left Behind series and various analyses of political conflict and natural disaster. Even political and theological moderates have noted a sense of things coming to an end. Biblical apocalyptic is often read as predicting violence, destruction, and an imminent end in which only a few chosen are saved. However, apocalyptic in Scripture presents a significantly different vision. In the book of Revelation and elsewhere, destruction is the playing-out of human misuse of creation and of power. The earth itself cries out in conjunction with the poor, the oppressed, and the silenced. God responds with healing and renewal. The vision Christians should foster is that of the New Jerusalem in which is set the Tree of Life, and in which God dwells with us in a world of beauty and justice. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Headnote

Americans today are fascinated by apocalyptic visions and predictions, as seen in the Left Behind series and various analyses of political conflict and natural disaster. Even political and theological moderates have noted a sense of things coming to an end. Biblical apocalyptic is often read as predicting violence, destruction, and an imminent end in which only a few chosen are saved. However, apocalyptic in Scripture presents a significantly different vision. In the book of Revelation and elsewhere, destruction is the playing-out of human misuse of creation and of power. The earth itself cries out in conjunction with the poor, the oppressed, and the silenced. God responds with healing and renewal. The vision Christians should foster is that of the New Jerusalem in which is set the Tree of Life, and in which God dwells with us in a world of beauty and justice.

An article in the October 2006 New York Magazine led off with the question "What do Christian Millenarians, Jihadists, Ivy League professors, and baby-boomers have in common? Answer: They're all hot for the Apocalypse."1

Hot for the Apocalypse: The whole notion of Apocalypse, of catastrophic future scenarios, and end-times is prominent on American cultural radar screens these days. A new Christian video game, "Left Behind: Eternal Forces," released just before Christmas, invites players to "Command your forces through intense battles across a breathtaking, authentic depiction of New York City. . . . Recover ancient scriptures and witness spectacular Angelic and Demonic activity as a direct consequence of your choices." An on-line ad for the game shows gun-wielding soldiers marching through New York City, helicopters exploding overhead, accompanied by the music of "Amazing Grace."2

So is this how God's unfinished future is about to end? Is this the Apocalypse? We must say "no" to the "Left Behind" fictional version.

We are faced with experiences of a sense of an "end" from all kinds of quarters-whether from global climate change caused by carbon dioxide levels higher than any time in the past 500 million years; or the prospect of Peak oil (the gradual or sudden depletion of the supply of the elixir that has fueled world expansion these past 100 years); or from escalating violence and the threat of nuclear weapons. We cannot just say an easy "no" to apocalyptic questions anymore, much as I would like to. There is a sense of an end right now in our culture. Christians need to address that.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans a year and a half ago, I was in the Middle East, attending a conference in Bethlehem, the city of Jesus' birth. I had seen some television images but hadn't grasped the full magnitude of the disaster. A reporter from Ohio emailed me that she wanted to interview me for a story on Katrina and the book of Revelation, to get my take on whether this hurricane was predicted in the Bible. Since I had very limited internet access, I emailed my husband, "Can you check on LeftBehind.com, Pat Robertson, etc., to see if the right-wing American Christians are really saying Hurricane Katrina is the Apocalypse? Because of course I need to say that it isn't."

My husband emailed me back in capital letters: "What do you mean this isn't the Apocalypse? Isn't that always what you have been saying is the root meaning of the word Apocalypse: 'pulling back a curtain to reveal something'?"

If Apocalypse means "revealing," as my husband reminded me-and that is the meaning of the Greek word-then the question is: what curtain did Hurricane Katrina pull back to reveal for us? What do other events-the accelerating melting of Greenland ice, the war in Iraq-you name them-unveil for us today? How do we read the signs of the times?

This is of course where Christian millenarians, jihadists, Ivy League professors, and baby-boomers disagree about the signs of the times-even if all can be said to be hot for the Apocalypse.

I was struck by a 2005 column from an unexpected quarter, by Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speech writer, who coined the phrase "Morning in America" (so she's normally no apocalypticist). Noonan wrote a column a little over a year ago entitled "A Separate Peace," suggesting that we may be living at the end of something: "I was chatting with friends about the sheer number of things parents now buy for teenage girls-bags and earrings and shoes. Someone said, 'It's affluence,' and someone else nodded, but I said, 'It's also the fear parents have that we're at the end of something, and they want their kids to have good memories.' "3 The fear parents have that we're at the end of something.

Here's how Noonan describes the larger sense of the end:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon.

Noonan goes on to ask about our response as a culture, as a nation, as leaders:

If I am right that trolley thoughts are out there, and even prevalent, how are people dealing with it on a daily basis?

I think those who haven't noticed we're living in a troubling time continue to operate each day with classic and constitutional American optimism intact. I think some of those who have a sense we're in trouble are going through the motions.

And some-well, I will mention and end with America's elites. Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I have a nagging sense that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives. . . . And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you get yours."

"I got mine; you get yours." But as Christians, that cannot be our message.

In this essay I talk about reading the Bible for the future, maybe even for the end of the world, since end-times discourse is so prominent in our culture and in the Bible.

But the question is: the end of what world?

Jürgen Moltmann speaks about resurrection hope, eternal life, and eschatology. His work has been important on other themes as well. He developed a Christology in the book The Crucified God that opened up a framework on which many feminist and liberation theologians have built. I also want to underscore Professor Moltmann's ecological commitments, with which I deeply resonate-laid out in the preface to his book God In Creation, in which he calls the ecological crisis "a crisis so comprehensive and so irreversible that it can . . . be described as apocalyptic" and also in a 1996 retrospective, in which he says: "If I could start all over again I would link my theology with ecological economics. The last two centuries were dominated by economic questions; the next century will be the age of ecology"4

So that's the context in which I frame the question of God's unfinished future today: How can we find a biblical vision for the future that addresses the ecological crisis of global climate change, the crisis of global warming?

As we think about God's unfinished future, I will make the case for reclaiming the Bible, even the Apocalypse, as a diagnosis of the illness of the imperial world, and as an urgent wake-up call about the future-a vision for hope for this planet earth and for every one of us.

Using the paradigm of illness and healing from Jesus' healings of people in the gospels, and also from the final chapter of Revelation, "the leaves of the tree of life are for the healing of the nations" (Rev. 22:2), I suggest that our world is ill, very ill. The wheels may indeed be off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks, to use Noonan's words. The Bible helps us face that illness.

The Bible also proclaims God's vision of hope and healing, ecological healing as well as spiritual healing, physical healing, political healing, economic healing-healing for all the deepest wounds we carry.

We do face a sense of the end today. What may be ending, in my view, is our unsustainable way of life-even our empire-but not the earth itself. Like the early Christians in the New Testament, our task must be to help people envision a way of life beyond empire, articulating God's joyful and compelling vision for the future.

In order to make that case for apocalyptic hope and healing, we must first deal briefly with some popular but problematic interpretations of Revelation and the Bible-and I'll leave aside the aging babyboomers as well as the jihadists and Ivy League professors and others mentioned by that New York Magazine article, in order to focus my critique especially on the Christian millenarian interpretation made so popular by Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth in the 1970s and more recently by the "Left Behind" theology of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins: that of Rapture and Armageddon politics.

That's the version of Revelation most people are getting in the culture, on Christian television and radio, and indeed that has been spilling over into our political life in multiple and very dangerous ways.

Is the goal of biblical apocalypses to spell out a recipe for Armageddon as many Christian fundamentalists claim? Does Revelation furnish us with a road-map for the end-times in which Americas war in Iraq plays a divinely ordained role? Does the Bible predict a countdown of events of ever-escalating violence, all prophesied in advance, including earthquakes, tsunamis, plagues of bird flu or e coli, hurricanes and floods of greater intensity, all leading up to the mother of all battles, a divinely ordained World War III? Does the Bible snatch Christians off the earth to escape the suffering, and then mandate Jesus' future return to earth seven years later as an avenging warrior on a white horse to do battle with his enemies-after the so-called Rapture and after three quarters of the world s people have been killed-to fight the bloody battle of Armageddon on the plains of northern Israel and then take up residence on David's throne in Jerusalem?

That's what the best-selling Christian Left Behind novels and televangelists want you to think-novels in which the heroes are an elite band of born-again Christians called the "tribulation force" who drive gas-guzzling Hummers and carry Uzis as they battle the Antichrist during earth's seven last years.

Listen to the almost pornographic description of Christ's second coming by today's popularizers in Glorious Appearing (2004), the latest volume of the interminable Left Behind series: "Men and women, soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through the veins and skin"; "Even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated"; "Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches, and... they tumbled in [to hell], howling and screeching."5

My specialty as a New Testament scholar is the book of Revelation, and I am alarmed at how Revelation, indeed the entire biblical apocalyptic tradition, with its important critique of imperial injustice, has been hijacked to provide a platform for violence, even voyeurism-a cavalier use-it-or-lose-it mentality that risks dismissing long-term issues such as peace and even the environment on the grounds that the earth only has to last seven more years. It's a theology that one Jewish scholar has aptly decried as "God so loved the world that he sent World War III."6

Revelation is the foundational text for this militant prophecy industry. Not Revelation's critique of empire and its healing vision for a renewal for the world which I believe is the heart of the book, but rather the violent story of Armageddon, of a supposed countdown to tribulation and destruction in which only a few individuals are saved out of the world, a story of how the planet must be decimated before the wrathful lion-like Jesus can return to earth to fight a battle in which blood will flow up to the horses' bridles. (Let me make clear: the Left Behind novels can be fun, thrilling, exciting, even spiritually renewing, if you have a stomach for violence. But they're fiction, not only the plot and the characters, but also the theology on which they're based.)

The so-called Rapture that forms the basis for the Left Behind novels is not traditional biblical teaching, but was rather a nineteenth-century invention of the British pastor John Nelson Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren.' Rapture theology "sounds biblical," as Roman Catholic bishops of Illinois have warned. But it is not biblical. Nowhere does the Bible say that born-again Christians will be snatched up to heaven while they watch God inflict tribulation and disasters on earth, although believers can piece together a chain of Bible verses to constmct the Rapture chronology. Already in the nineteenth century, when this Rapture theology first came out, the former slave Sojourner Truth critiqued both its escapist framework and its violence-a critique that is amazingly timely today also:

You seem to be expecting to go to some parlor away up somewhere, and when the wicked have been burnt, you are coming back to walk in triumph over their ashes-this is to be your New Jerusalem!! Now I can't see any thing so very nice in that, coming back to ... a world covered with the ashes of the wicked. Besides, if the Lord comes and burns-as you say he will-I am not going away; I am going to stay here and stand the fire, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego! And Jesus will walk with me through the fire, and keep me from harm.8

Going to a parlor away up somewhere to watch the destruction, and then coming back to earth walk on the ashes seven years later is an apt description for the pre-tribulation rapture premillennial dispensationalist system.

The program is especially dangerous for the Middle East-for both Israelis and Palestinians. While the Middle East is not my focus today, let me just note that Christian fundamentalists have become a major lobby regarding US policy in the Middle East, with some extreme voices going so far as to promote a US nuclear strike on Iran-this, in order to fulfill God's prophetic plan. Very scary stuff, a complete reversal of Jesus' blessing of peacemakers and Jesus' teaching of love for enemies.

Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and most evangelicals all reject such violent Rapture theology. But institutional religious criticism has a hard time gaining much traction against such an incredible popular culture and mass media phenomenon.

So what do we do? In the face of such problematic fundamentalist interpretations of Apocalypse, the logical solution might seem to be to reject the apocalyptic strand of the Bible all together. After all, it is dangerous cultural stuff, open to wildly misguided interpretations, as early Christians realized already in the second century when a grassroots movement called New Prophecy or Montanism began to claim that Revelation's prophecies were coming to life in their own time.

But can we reject the Apocalypse today? Is such a move helpful or even possible? No, because the Apocalypse is part of our public rhetoric as well as part of our Bible, and has been for centuries. Mainline Christians have tried ignoring Revelation-I know I did when I was pastor of a Lutheran congregation in the 1980s. But while we mainline Christians were busy ignoring this apocalyptic book, fundamentalists came in with a vengeance to tell Christians what it "really" means.

Moreover, I believe the Apocalypse can help us today. It can help us face seriously that our world is ill, very ill-ill with what Seattle filmmaker John de Graaf calls "affluenza," a combination of affluence and influenza; ill with what nature writer and Methodist Bill McKibben calls the disease of "More" with a capital M, a carbon-devouring lifestyle that is not sustainable; ill with what Chalmers Johnson calls the sorrows of empire, manifested in many different and interrelated ways-militarily, economically, ecologically, spiritually.9 The voice of the earth and the voice of the poor are crying out to us with two parallel cries, writes Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff.10 I believe that the biblical apocalyptic tradition can help us listen to these two parallel cries, the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.

What we need to do is reclaim the important biblical apocalyptic voice of protest and hope away from the problematic violent readings that have become so dominant in America today. The heart of Revelation and other apocalypses is a prophetic message very different from what we're being told by the fundamentalist program of the Left Behind novels or others seeking to precipitate Armageddon in the Middle East. The heart of the Bible and even of the book of Revelation is not rapture and Armageddon, but a vision of hope, a critique of empire and imperial violence, including violence against the earth. It's a message that Sojourner Truth and so many others have lifted up in struggles for justice through the centuries, whether in the struggle against slavery in the US or more recently in South Africa or Latin America.

As my husband reminded me that day in Bethlehem, the word apocalypse means "unveiling." Apocalypses pull back the curtain-like the movie "The Wizard of Oz," where Dorothy's dog Toto is the one who pulls back the curtain to expose Oz for who he really is. Apocalypses unveil and expose-, they help us see the truth. They take us on a journey behind the curtain, a journey into the heart of our world, a journey to the throne of God.

So what, if anything, does Revelation unveil for us today? That is the question we need to ask and consider together. Revelation doesn't predict events in the twenty-first century. It is prophecy, but prophecy doesn't mean prediction.

If we can take ourselves back to the first century to hear its message for the original hearers to which it was written, then we can ask about analogies to today, places where that first-century message might also be God's word for today.

For churches living in first-century Roman Asia Minor, the original audience of the book, Revelation's core unveiling was an urgent pronouncement of the end of the imperial world-it diagnosed the illness, the sickness of the Roman world. And here I draw a distinction between three different Greek words for "world." Revelation unveils not the end of the physical created world (the Greek words kosmos or ge) but the end of the imperial world, the oikoumene.

The Roman Empire had its own imperial eschatology, the message of Roma aeterna, "world without end," bombarding people every day through imperial propaganda and iconography, inscriptions, magnificent triumphal arches, victory parades, coins showing conquering divine emperors on one side and weeping captives on the other. The message was everywhere that Rome had conquered the whole oikoumene-the lands, the seas, the ends of the earth, geographically as well as temporally. Any resistance was futile.

This theology is perhaps best captured by one famous imperial scene, exquisitely carved in sardonyx on a tiny cameo, called the Gemma Augustea, now in the museum in Vienna. It shows a personified figure of Oikoumene placing a crown on the head of Emperor Augustus, signifying the whole imperial world, the whole oikoumene, giving its allegiance to the empire. That's the top tier of the two-tiered cameo. Below, figures of Roman soldiers abuse bound captives in Abu Ghraib-like scenes, graphically reminding viewers of how the whole Roman imperial system rested on the backs of conquered peoples and lands. It is to this Roman imperial eschatology of "empire without end" that the New Testament says "no." Jesus, the gospels, Paul, Revelation: all counter Rome's claims of eternal domination with a strong sense of an end, an end to the oikoumene.

I find it striking that the New Testament refrains from referring to the oikoumene in any positive sense-probably because oikoumene had come to mean the imperial world, as signified in the Gemma Augustea's depiction. In the gospel of Luke's Christmas story, for example, when Caesar Augustus decrees that the whole world should be enrolled in a census, the word for world is oikoumene. Similarly, what Satan offers Jesus in the temptation stories in both Luke and Matthew is the kingdoms of the world-the oikoumene-the imperial world. There are no positive references to the word.

Two other Greek words, for earth (ge) and world (kosmos), are used more positively. The earth certainly suffers judgment and tribulation, but God is the one who created the earth, both ge and kosmos, a claim that is absent for oikoumene. Moreover, a number of New Testament texts proclaim that the earth will be renewed in God's future world, as God's dwelling place (Rev. 21:1). A key verse is Revelation 11:18 in which God says, "I'm going to destroy the destroyers of the earth," not "I'm going to destroy the earth."

In this Roman imperial eschatological context, the core vision of Revelation for first-century Christians was a choice between two cities, two competing political economies, two ways of life-God's economy of justice and well-being versus the Roman Empire's way of life.

The book takes us on two tours led by the same angel: first, a tour of Rome-called the whore of Babylon-to see and experience the terrors of the unjust imperial world; and second, a tour of God's New Jerusalem. The plagues are part of the first tour, projecting out into the future the logical consequences of the trajectory of the Roman Empire so that people can see where it will all end before it's too late. These plagues are not predictions but rather warnings, like Scrooge's visionary journeys in Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol, where Scrooge is shown horrifying future scenarios not because they must happen, but so that he can alter the course of his life.

Even nature itself participates in this warning, crying out to oppressors about the consequences of their own deadly actions. When waters and springs turn to blood, the angel (messenger) of the waters interprets this through the logic of natural consequences, as a boomerang-like effect, in Rev. 16:6: "You are just, O Holy One . . . for you have judged these things. Because they shed the blood of saints and prophets, you have given them blood to drink. It is axiomatic" (axios estin; Rev. 16:5-6). It is not the language of punishment so much as the language of axiomatic consequences. The messenger of Revelation's waters seems to be saying that oppressors who commit acts of violence will eventually unleash their own destructive consequences upon themselves.

Such biblical plagues, therefore, are meant to be not predictions but rather urgent warnings, like the Exodus plagues, part of the book's diagnosis of the illness of the imperial world, to wake us up to the consequences of our actions before it is too late. Revelation 17-18 shows the catastrophic end of that empire, its way of life, as merchants, kings, shipping magnates all lament the destruction of their world trade center.11

But Revelation doesn't end there. It doesn't just take you to Armageddon, to the smoke rising from burning Babylon. It also offers the vision of hope-the alternative.

The entire book of Revelation leads up to the wondrous vision of New Jerusalem in chapters 21-22, the incredible city of beauty, welcome, and ecological renewal. This is the most important vision of the book to which the whole tour has been leading: "And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride. . . . And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying 'see, the dwelling of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them as their God; they will be his people, and God's very self will be with them'"(Rev. 21:2-3).

Heaven is not mentioned again after Rev. 21:2, a fact especially striking for a book in which heaven has been so central. This is because God's throne moves down to earth, to be with us.

The New Jerusalem of Revelation 21-22 is a wonderfully earthcentered vision of hope for this world. Contrary to the escapism and "heavenism" that dominate many fundamentalist interpretations, the picture of Revelation emphasizes that our future dwelling-and God's-will be on earth, renewed, in a radiant, thriving city landscape. The core vision of Revelation, and a vision that we need for today, is not of people being "raptured" away to heaven, but rather, if anything, of God being "raptured" down to earth (Rev. 21), to dwell with us in what is called New Jerusalem.

That's why I think it can even be an ecological vision. In every way, this beloved city is the very opposite of the toxic political economy of the Roman Empire. Whereas Rome was built on deforestation, mining, slavery, unjust globalized trade-all critiqued in the amazing cargo list of Revelation 18:12-13-New Jerusalem centers around a tree of life. In chapter 22, my favourite part, John sees a paradise of green space right in the middle of the city, a river of life, flowing through the city of God from the throne. What a wonderful image for our rivers!12 On either side of the river grows the Tree of Life, a wondrous canopy of shade. And the leaves of the tree are medicine, like those of so many trees in traditional religions. The leaves of the tree "are for healing of the nations," John says.

Oh, how we need those healing leaves! As I think about the message of Revelation for our political life, for ecology, for global warming, for violence in the Middle East, I keep coming back to this medicinal tree of life, with its wondrous "leaves for the healing of the nations." God wills not to destroy our world but to heal it. That's the final word of the Bible. Healing comes in Revelation not directly from God but from the leaves of a tree, from the creation. The tree of life is an image common to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and to so many other religious traditions.

The question for us is: How can we take to heart that healing tree and those medicinal leaves today? How can we reclaim our vision for planet earth, our political vision, our spiritual vision, to be shaped not by Armageddon and war, but by this healing vision?-a vision of Jerusalem and all cities as places of justice and beauty, with a river of life flowing though the middle, welcoming all.

Contrary to the dispensationalist claims, New Jerusalem is not reserved for a far-off future, an event on a chronology after Armageddon and other destructive events. Rather, New Jerusalem is a vision that was intended to guide the ethical life of Revelation's readers even now. It is a future vision, yes, but also God's life-giving vision for justice for our whole wounded world. Revelation invites marginalized people, those who hunger and thirst for justice, to come for healing to the tree, to come to the river: "Let everyone who thirsts take the water of life as a gift, without price" (Rev. 22:17).

Our world is ill. We all feel that. It is a sickness, this war mongering. The planet is heating up with a fever, the fever of global warming that we all must urgently address. The Arctic has suffered another record loss of sea ice. As the Artic region absorbs more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further, the relentless cycle of melting and heating will shrink the massive land glaciers of Greenland and dramatically raise sea levels. Scientists tell us that the Greenland ice sheet is ill, sliding the length of a football field each day. Soon we may cross a critical threshold beyond which the climate cannot recover, scientists tell us. How do we find healing?

What would it mean if Revelation's core message is a message of hope for the world, embodied in those leaves of the tree of life? What would it mean if Revelation wants to lay on each one of the wounds of the world-the shrinking glaciers, the Iraq war, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina-leaves from the tree of life, to save those glaciers, to downsize our ecological footprint before it is too late, to help heal and reconcile the war and brokenness of our world? Can the Apocalypse play such a healing role for our culture today, rather than beating the drum for Rapture and Armageddon?

I'm not a novelist, but that's the version of the story that urgently needs to be written. People are hungry for narratives of how God is alive and at work in the world, as Left Behind reminds us. Stories hold great power to shape our worldview.

We need a novel that tells the story of the Bible and Revelation not as escape from earth or earth's destruction, but as a story of hope, of renewal for the planet. We need a novel whose heroes are not hiding out in underground bunkers, or flying around in attack helicopters, or driving gas-guzzling Range Rovers and Humvees, as in the Left Behind novels, but whose heroes are rooted on the earth, living in sustainable communities, maybe practicing Permaculture gardening-sharing in the river of life, tending the nation-healing tree of life. Such a story could be just as thrilling as the Left Behind story-but instead of carrying guns to battle the Antichrist and his forces, our little band of heroes carries seedlings, or solar panels; they rescue farmers about to be bulldozed by developers; they foil the evil forces of polluters and greenhouse gas emitters-today's most dangerous manifestations of the Antichrist.

We need a novel based on the book of Revelation in which the earth herself-the feminine figure of Ge from chapter twelve of Revelation and eighty-some other references-plays a starring role, first crying out for justice on behalf of all the victims of imperial oppression, both human and non-human, and then becoming the hero. In Revelation chapter twelve, the Earth comes to the rescue of a mythic "woman clothed with the sun," who represents us, God's people, in danger of being devoured by the Satanic dragon of empire. Now that's a story! The earth opens its mouth to save us from our own captivity to empire!

It's all there in the Bible. I'm not making it up. We need a novel that helps us envision the promise and renewal of chapters 21-22. It needs to be a gripping, daring story of God's love for the earth, for the whole world, a world that will not be left behind-the story of God's dwelling on earth with us, with the glaciers, with every beloved species, with every endangered salmon, everything God created, taking part in an urgent plot, and most of all, the story of the healing tree of life, that amazing tree at the very center of our world.

Salvation from empire, from Armageddon, from our own destruction. The tree of life. The river of life. Who will write the novel of that Apocalypse?

Footnote

1 Kurt Andersen, "The End of the World as They Know It," New York Magazine, October 2006.

2 http://www.leftbehindgames.com/pages/the_games.htm and www.etemalforces .com (accessed November 17, 2006).

3 Peggy Noonan, "A Separate Peace," October 27, 2005, http://www.opinion journal.com/cOlumnists/pnoonan/?id=110007460.

4 Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper & Row, 1985), xi. Moltmann's comments are in response to M. Douglas Meeks, "Jürgen Moltmann's Systematic Contributions to Theology," Religious Studies Review 22 (April 1996): 105.

5 Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, The Glorious Appearing: The End of Days (Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, 2004) 225, 273, 380.

6 Yehezkel Landau, "The President and the Bible: What Do the Prophets Say to Our Time?" Christianity and Crisis (December 12, 1983): 475.

7 Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Projihecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) gives a succinct overview of Darby and his legacy.

8 Quoted in Lee Griffith, War on Terrorism and the Terror of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 193.

9 John De Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H. Naylor, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (San Francisco, Calif.: Berrett-Koehler, 2001); Bill McKibben, The Comforting Whidwind: God, Job and the Scale of Creation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 10; Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, secrecy andthe End ofthe Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

10 Leonardo Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1997), 104.

11 Catherine Keller describes living in Manhattan and thinking of the line in Revelation 18: "The smoke goes up from its burning." God and Power: Counter-Apocaluptic Iourneus (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2005), 3.

12 The Roman Catholic bishops of the Pacific Northwest used this image for a pastoral statement on the Columbia River, calling on parishioners to view this river as a watershed of life. See: The Columbia River Watershed: Caring for Creation and the Comnwn Good: An International Pastoral Letter by the Catholic Bishops of the Watershed Region, www.columbiariver.org.