The Real History of the End of the World (36 page)

In 1891, Christian Zionist theologian William Blackwell tried to convince President Benjamin Harrison to support a Jewish State in Israel. On the petition he sent to the White House were the names Charles Scribner, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan as well as those of several congressmen.
⁵

It may seem a contradiction to want a Jewish state in order to convert Jews to Christianity. This had to do with the belief drawn from the Book of Revelation that the battle of Armageddon would be fought when the Twelve Tribes were united in Israel. Conversion was the main goal, but the rebirth of Israel was essential to the fulfillment of prophecy. It also struck a chord in the spirit of the people living in the New Israel—America. One person wrote, “The whole United States . . . is an asylum for the Jew. . . . The moment he lands on our blessed shores, he is safe.”
⁶

The problem with all this rhetoric was that before the migrations of the 1840s, there were almost no Jews in the New Israel. It also turned out that the Jews who were so well loved were Abraham, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and David, although the last wasn't always very nice. The Old Testament Jews who hadn't been contaminated by their blindness in denying Christ, who hadn't degenerated into a morally bankrupt race, those were the ones that the early nineteenth century evangelists admired.
⁷
Certainly they wanted the present-day Jews to convert but, until they did, they really couldn't be allowed to come to dinner with nice people. Therefore, a Jewish state was a good place for them to go.

My impression is that this dichotomy continues to the present among pro-Israel dispensationalists.

Therefore the connection between the dispensationalists and the Jews was not a sudden change in Christian teaching. Nor was it a radical new idea that America should lead the way in helping the Jews return to the Holy Land. What the new sects did was refine ideas that had been vague before.

In dispensationalism as John Nelson Darby expressed it, one of the beliefs is that after the faithful have been caught up in the Rapture, Jews from all over the world would begin to migrate to Israel. He based this on the work of earlier Protestant writers and the Old Testament prophets, which he connected with verse twenty of Revelation. Once in Israel, some would immediately convert to Christianity. The rest would live strictly by the laws of Moses and would suffer under the Antichrist until he was defeated by Christ, at which time all Jews left alive would accept him as their savior and the Last Judgment could begin.

The birth of Israel in 1948 was like a tune-up note from the Last Trumpet for dispensationalists and many other evangelical Christians. The fact that Jerusalem wasn't included in the settlement agreement worried some, but in 1967, when the Israelis captured Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, hopes went through the roof.

The most generous and enthusiastic segment of society to support the continuation and expansion of Israel is the fundamentalist Christian movement. When the U.S.-based United Jewish Appeal refused to fund kibbutzes across the Green Line dividing Israeli and Palestinian land, money came in from evangelical foundations. It was estimated that two thirds of all Likud West Bank settlements received money from the Christian Right.
⁸

The dispensationalists have little use for a secular state of Israel. The Rapture is overdue, and Israel is not predestined to be a mundane nation but the site of Armageddon. Fundamentalist Jews understand this but their immediate goals match those of the evangelicals. They want to continue spreading across the West Bank, destroy the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.
⁹

The dispensationalists are with them all the way. What happens afterward may prove a problem, especially if the world doesn't end.

1
Nancy Gibbs, “What Do End Time Prophesies Mean for Israel and Judaism?,”
Time,
June 23, 2002. Available at
www.time.com/time/cover/1101020701/jew.html
. Accessed August 2009.

2
Benjamin Ravid, “ ‘How Profitable the Nation of the Jewes Are': the
Humble
Addresses of Menasseh Ben Israel and the
Discorso
of Simone Luzzatto,” in
Mystics, Philosophers and Politicians,
ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Daniel Swetschski (Durham, NC:, Duke University Press, 1982), 173.

3
Clarke Garrett, “Joseph Priestley, the Millennium and the French Revolution,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
34, no. 1 (1973): 57.

4
Robert K. Whalen, “ ‘Christians Love the Jews': The Development of American Philo-Judaism 1790-1860,”
Religion and American Culture
6, no. 2 (1996), 229.

5
Don Wagner, “For Zion's Sake,”
Middle East Report
223 (1992): 54.

6
Quoted in Whalen, 230.

7
Ibid., 231-235.

8
Colin Shindler, “Likud and the Christian Dispensationalists: A Symbiotic Relationship,”
Israel Studies
5, no. 1 (2000): 155-156.

9
Wagner, 56.

It seems we are about to witness an “autopsy” of modern
society. As one system or company fails we shall learn
what other systems, companies and countries depend on
it. The year ahead will present unique opportunities for
education, research and public service as we help the
public understand what we are experiencing.

—Dr. Stuart A. Umpleby,
Science
(May 21, 1999)
¹

 

 

 

 

T
he year 2000 was the first apocalyptic prediction that was truly worldwide. It was both secular and religious. The panic cut across educational and economic lines. Even such a short time after the event, I'm still not sure how it all happened. However, there are plenty of others who have spent the years since 1997 trying to explain it.

The first note of concern about Y2K began in 1993, when a Canadian computer consultant pointed out the problem in the way computers recorded dates. They only bothered with the last two years, such as 99. Therefore, when the calendar flipped to 2000, there could be a breakdown of computers in everything from banking to medicine to military controls. Even serious scientists were worried, but more about the amount of work involved in reprogramming. Few of them, if any, thought it would be the end of the world, just a big mess caused by a lack of planning on the part of programmers, governments, and financial institutions.
²

What wasn't expected by those working to avoid the problem was the response from average citizens, especially those who were inclined toward seeing signs that the end was coming soon. It didn't help that 2000 was a millennial year and a super leap year. For many evangelical Christians, these signs together were what they had been expecting for generations. The call went out that Armageddon was at hand.

The proliferation of books telling people how to prepare for the coming disaster was astonishing. Television programs, movies, novels, and above all, rather ironically, Internet sites, fanned the fear.

I knew people who were stockpiling cash, food, and probably guns in order to survive in the post-apocalyptic world when there would be no banks or police protection or restaurants. The magazine
Christianity Today
began to take ads for survival products. There were also carefully worded invitations to buy land in remote undisclosed sites where families and friends could create their own survival fortresses.
³

In a letter to one millennial Christian magazine, a writer proved that the word
computer,
when given numerical values for each letter, became “666,” the number of the beast in Revelation.
⁴

This love-hate relationship with technology has been around since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Some people see technology as the answer to any problem. “If they can put a man on the moon, they can [fill in the blank].” Others believe that machines strip away our humanity and threaten individual worth. Often, according to circumstances, they are the same people.

Was the computer problem that serious? If nothing had been done there might have been a few weeks of disorganization, some systems may have failed, causing power outages and the breakdown of banking transactions. In a check of one school system, some teachers would have been given ninety-four years of pension time, score-boards wouldn't have worked, and automated machines that chlorinate pools would have stopped. However, anyone with a Mac computer was fine, because they were calibrated to 29,000 C.E.
⁵

In reading through technical and financial journals from the late 1990s, I see that most experts took the computer problem seriously, but didn't link it to an end of the world scenario. In many cases these professionals spent a lot of time explaining why certain things wouldn't happen, like an automatic launching of all of Russia's nuclear war-heads.
⁶
Those who designed and programmed computers appear to have been much more concerned with the overreaction of laypeople than anything that might occur due to a programming glitch.
⁷

The Y2K bug was identified in time to figure out a solution and, despite complaints that not enough businesses and governments were making the adjustments rapidly enough, we now know that pretty much everyone did.

I didn't stockpile anything or do more than plan an end of the millennium party. But I must admit that at ten seconds to midnight, I wondered if we would all be suddenly partying in the dark. I'm pretty certain I wasn't the only one. Because, unlike most other millennial panics, this one stretched around the world. The technology that threatened us had become universal. It was hard not to feel at least a qualm in the face of all that hype.

In Papua New Guinea, a place that had only recently starting dating years by the current calendar, the message of millenarian Christian missionaries combined with rumors and news reports to create a sense of terror. This led to a rapid increase in attendance at the new evangelical churches by people “searching for their future security and for a clear picture of what was to come.”
⁸
Some Christian groups in New Guinea practiced extreme self-denial in anticipation of “the last days (
las de
) when Jesus would return and take those who followed his law to heaven.”
⁹

This is an extreme example of what was happening everywhere. Not always expressed in terms of the Apocalypse and destruction of the world, many of those who became seriously concerned about Y2K, seemed to see it as more of a symbol for all the things wrong with the planet. It wasn't necessary to believe in monotheistic apocalypses to start thinking about the fragility of civilization. Some said that the Y2K bug showed how we were replacing God with machines. Many felt that we needed to reevaluate our ideas of progress. Survivalists and conservationists were united in the feeling that technology and overdevelopment were leading humanity to its own doom without the promise of a Rapture or any last-minute savior.
¹⁰

I think that for what was just another failed prediction of the end, Y2K had a greater impact than any previously predicted. Even those who only briefly wondered how they could survive without air-conditioning, TV, automatic tellers, or e-mail faced the possibility of a very different world than the one they knew.

What annoys me is that all this time was spent worrying about how a glitch in computer programming was going to destroy the world. We were told that the economic system was going to collapse. We'd be reduced to a primitive state and Armageddon would start. And yet, when the economy did collapse seven years later, I didn't hear one prophetic word of warning. Think of all the seers who could be saying “I told you so,” but can't. It's very discouraging for those who like to be prepared.

1
Stuart A. Umpleby, “Y2K: An ‘Autopsy' of Modern Society?”
Science
284, no.5418 (1999): 1274.

2
Robert F. Bennett, “The Y2K Problem,”
Science
284, no. 5413 (1999): 438-439.

3
Lisa McMinn, “Y2K, The Apocalypse, and Evangelical Christianity: The Role of Eschatological Belief in Church Responses,”
Sociology of Religion
62, no. 2 (2001): 207-208.

4
Andrea A. Tapia, “Technomillennialism: A Subcultural Response to the Technological Threat of Y2K,”
Science, Technology and Human Values
28, no. 4 (2003): 493.

5
Elizabeth E. Bass, “The Bell Tolls—or Not,”
Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology
8, (1999): 28.

6
Michael R. Craig, “Russian Roulette: The Vulnerability of Russia's Crumbling Nuclear Arsenal to Y2K Problems Poses a Global Threat,”
Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy
14 (1999): 27.

7
Tapia, 499.

8
Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart, “History, Conversion and Politics,” in
Religious and Ritual Change, Cosmologies and Histories
, ed. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern (Durham, NC: Carolina University Press, 2009), 315.

9
Joel Robbins, “Christianity and Desire among the Urapmin,”
Ethnology
303.

10
Tapia, 497-512.

I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has
given me a lifeboat and said, “Moody, save all you can.”

—Evangelist Dwight L. Moody