Awaiting the Apocalypse?

The Warburton Lecture 2018 Awaiting the Apocalypse? Reading the Bible in Trump’s America The Revd Dr William Lamb William Lamb is the Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford. He read Theology at Balliol College, Oxford, and subsequently read for an MPhil at Peterhouse, Cambridge and a PhD at the University of Sheffield, specialising in the history of the interpretation of the New Testament. Ordained in 1995, his ministry has encompassed parish, cathedral and university posts, most recently as Vice- Principal of Westcott House, Cambridge. In recent days, Jeff Sessions, the US Attorney General, has found himself at the centre of a media storm. Following a crackdown by the Trump administration on illegal border crossings from Mexico earlier this year, adults crossing the border have been detained and, as a consequence, over 2,000 children have been separated from their parents and transferred to government detention centres. In the face of criticism of this policy, Mr Sessions cited Romans 13. He said, ‘I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes’. When Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House Press Secretary, was challenged over Mr Session’s comments, she refused to comment directly on the policy, but blaming the Democrats for refusing to change the law, she simply observed that, ‘it’s very biblical to enforce the law’. While it may be regarded as rather provocative to repeat such a statement in front of a group of distinguished lawyers, I want to invite some reflection in the course of this lecture on the use of the Bible in American political discourse. Given the ‘secularity’ of the US Constitution (Stout 2004), it is intriguing that an American political leader should persist in appealing to scripture in order to settle an argument or indeed to justify policy. In recent years, the Bible has become increasingly ‘weaponised’ in the US culture wars. How has this happened? We have watched the heart-breaking scenes of children in detention camps. Religious leaders in the United States have condemned this policy with a mixture of disbelief and horror, and they have challenged the way the Bible has been used to justify tearing families apart. Their words have been echoed by public figures and politicians. Just in the last few days, in a surprising volte-face, President Trump has issued an executive order to ensure that children are not separated from their parents. But Sessions’ use of Romans 13 still provokes an opportunity for further reflection. 1 As Professor Ian McFarland, the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, has observed, ‘Whenever anyone cites Romans 13 to demand acquiescence to an unspeakable government policy, it is well to remind them that the same principle would make impossible resistance to George III, Bull Connor, Stalin, or Hitler, all of whom were “the governing authorities” of the time. Never read Romans 13 without also having Revelation 13 alongside…’ Of course, we have just listened to a reading from Revelation 13. At first glance, it does not appear to provide much by way of illumination. The Book of Revelation has exercised and perplexed theologians for centuries. John Calvin, the sixteenth-century Reformer who wrote a commentary on just about every book of the New Testament, is reputed never to have written a commentary on the Book of Revelation because he thought it was just too confusing. It also aroused in Martin Luther a mixture of suspicion and mistrust: ‘I consider it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic…’ he wrote. It’s style was so different from the other Johannine literature in the New Testament that the Book of Revelation could not possibly have come from the same hand. Hence Luther’s insistence that it could not be apostolic. That said, Luther changed his mind as the Reformation progressed and as he realised that the rhetoric of the Apocalypse provided some rather more promising resources for polemic against the Roman Catholic Church in general and the papacy in particular. Indeed, in the course of its history, the Book of Revelation has given rise to some fairly eccentric interpretations. As G. K. Chesterton famously said, ‘Though St John saw many strange monsters in his visions, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators’ (Chesterton 1909: 13). D.H. Lawrence, possibly rather better known for writings other than his biblical commentary, wrote that the Book of Revelation ‘resounds with the dangerous snarl of the frustrated, suppressed collective self, the frustrated power-spirit in man, vengeful’ (Lawrence 1931: 23). Consequently, we sometimes view the Book of Revelation with a mixture of bewilderment and embarrassment. We find this book right at the very end of the Bible, right at the margins of the canon, and we may prefer to regard it as rather marginal to the whole enterprise of Christian discipleship. With its weird visions and its perplexing words about battles and blood, plagues and earthquakes, destruction and martyrdom, it’s not exactly the usual fare offered by the ‘Church of England’, notwithstanding the occasional rendition of the hymn Jerusalem. I have long been fascinated by religion in America. When I first graduated from University, I was awarded a scholarship to travel around the United States over the summer months and to undertake some research on American religious movements. One of the things that I learned there was that the Book of Revelation has a rather different resonance in the United States. As Michael Northcott points out in his influential study of apocalyptic religion in America, one of the reasons that this book has such a strong hold on the American imagination can be traced back to Christopher Columbus, who wrote that: ‘God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of John… and he showed me the spot where to find it’: 2 The very name ‘the New World’, which was adopted to describe the American territories, carries this sense that America was the ‘new heaven and new earth’ of which the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, speaks. Thus even the agnostic Tom Paine, a central figure in the framing of the American constitution, announced that ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand’ (Northcott 2004: 9). Fleeing persecution in England to settle in America, many Puritans believed that in the New World, they would establish the fabled millennium of peace foretold in the Book of Revelation. Northcott describes these early Protestant settlers as postmillenialists. In other words, ‘they believed that in building a godly commonwealth in the New World they were ushering in the millennial rule of the saints on earth after which they believed Christ would return as judge of the earth’ (Northcott 2004: 15). It was a positive and optimistic vision. They were living in the New Jerusalem. Their story represented ‘the fulfilment of Biblical passages about the end of history, the last judgement and the final revelation … of the millennial rule of the saints in which human history is finally redeemed. Americans in this millennial reading of history came to see America as the ‘redeemer nation’, the first nation fully to realise the true salvific intent of human history’ (Northcott 2004: 15). This confidence is just one of the elements that has shaped the American dream. And yet, for all its optimism, it was not always possible to sustain this postmillennialist vision: first the American Revolution and then the American Civil War, with all their terror, suffering and violence, appeared to resonate less with Revelation 21 and the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, and far more with the conflict and carnage characteristic of Revelation’s earlier chapters. This period was also accompanied by a series of religious revivals in America. The Great Awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries inaugurated a period of evangelical hegemony in America. Some remained faithful to a postmillennialist vision of society, which manifested itself in a commitment to social reform and the abolition of slavery (although northern and southern evangelicals parted company over slavery). Others adopted a rather more pessimistic attitude towards society. They were troubled by the theological liberalism that had emerged in mainstream denominations as preachers wrestled with modern biblical criticism and sought to reconcile their reading of the Bible with scientific discovery. This provoked a reaction from some evangelicals who published a series of pamphlets under the title ‘Fundamentals’. As Matthew Avery Sutton points out in his elegant study of American evangelicalism, their teaching was characterized not only by a commitment to biblical inerrancy, but also by the conviction: that the world was going to end. Imminently. Violently. Tragically. This conviction defined their relationships to those inside and outside of the faith. It conditioned their analysis of politics and of the economy. It impacted how they voted and for whom. It determined 3 their perspectives on social reform, moral crusades, and progressive change. It influenced the curriculum they brought into their schools and their views of American higher education. It defined their evaluation of alternative expressions of Christianity as well as competing religions. It framed their understanding of natural disasters, geopolitical changes, and war (Sutton 2014: 3). For ‘fundamentalists’, one of the indispensable guides to reading the Bible was the Scofield Reference Bible.

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