The Warburton Lecture 2018

Awaiting the Apocalypse?

Reading the 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 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 . 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 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 , 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 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. Published in 1906, the marginal notes provided by Charles Scofield, a Congregationalist minister, popularized a dispensationalist vision of human history. Drawing on the writings of John Darby, the founder of the Plymouth Brethren in the nineteenth century, Scofield asserted that there were seven dispensations in human history, the first being the paradise of the Garden of Eden, and the last being the 1,000-year reign of the saints referred to in Revelation 20.1-7. This millennium lies in the future after the Second Coming of Christ, heralded by the rapture, a period of tribulation, the rise of the Antichrist, and the battle of Armageddon. Premillennialists believe that they are living near the close of the sixth dispensation and awaiting the Great Tribulation. In the early decades of the twentieth century, with the experience of two world wars, and then subsequent conflicts in Vietnam and the Middle East, Scofield’s rather sober view of world events appeared to many only to confirm the prophecies of the Book of Revelation. If postmillennialism is characterized by an extraordinary optimism, premillennialism is characterized by a dispiriting pessimism about the state of the world.

Of course, ‘the end’ has often been predicted. And while it may be the case that the anticipated ‘end’ is more often than not about as eventful as the millennium bug, we should not underestimate the continuing popularity of The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, which saw in the Israel-Palestine Six Day War of 1967 and the Cold War of the post-war era signs of nuclear catastrophe, or for that matter, the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, which recasts the Book of Revelation as an adventure thriller about a global conflict set in the twenty- first century. They have sold over 65 million books. While one might hesitate before assuming that the readers of these books ‘are essentially passive in their acceptance of any inherent ideological message’ (Guest 2012: 5), one cannot ignore the fact that Christian Zionism, and the support offered to the State of Israel by evangelical Christians, is driven largely by premillennial dispensationalism. The foundation of the State of Israel is regarded as one of the precursors for the end. More recent events on the world stage, following 9/11, have only stimulated further speculation. What the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is supposed to signify is anyone’s guess, but there can be no doubt that much of this speculation has been animated and informed by the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation.

But before we dismiss this fascination with the Book of Revelation as the curious preserve of members of the religious right, we need to recognize that the visions contained in the Book of Revelation are also a source of inspiration for more radical voices on the left. In the United States,

4 one of the most provocative twentieth century commentators on the Book of Revelation was a lawyer called William Stringfellow. He had been a leader of the postwar ecumenical student movement. Listening to stories from those involved in the confessing Church in Germany and their resistance to the Nazi regime radicalized him and led him to embrace a life of intentional Christian discipleship. Stringfellow knew that Revelation 13 was one of the texts that the confessing Church in Germany drew on in order to find the resources to confront and challenge the Nazi regime. On graduating from Harvard Law School, he went to live and work in . His book An Ethic for Christians and other Aliens in a Strange Land is a commentary on the Book of Revelation.

Stringfellow presents Revelation as a tale of two cities: Babylon and Jerusalem. John the Divine describes the fall of Babylon. In John’s imagination, Babylon represents the power of imperial Rome. She is seated on a seven-headed beast. And the seven heads are interpreted as a series of emperors, a series which has nearly run its course. Revelation 18 describes the destruction of Babylon. A contrast is drawn between Babylon and Jerusalem: Babylon is the city of death, Jerusalem is the city of salvation; Babylon is the harlot, Jerusalem is the bride adorned for her husband; Babylon is the realm of demons and foul spirits, while Jerusalem provides a dwelling place of safety. Babylon is an abomination, Jerusalem is a holy city; Babylon is doomed, while Jerusalem is redeemed. Stringfellow saw in these descriptions of Babylon and Jerusalem two contrasting images of society. He reads Revelation, and particularly the Babylon passages, as a parable for America in the seventies, just as it was a parable for Nazi Germany in the thirties. In Stringfellow’s imagination, Babylon is an archetype of all nations. For him, it represents the deadliness of death and the complicity of nations and governments in perpetuating a culture of death: ‘The Babylon parable”, he says, “ascribes death as the moral reality which rules nations and all other principalities and powers of this world. Death assumes for the principalities the office or role of God. Death permeates the whole of the existence of the principalities’ (Stringfellow 1973: 67). For Stringfellow, ‘Babylon’ is a symbol of ‘the demoralisation of America’ (Stringfellow 1973: 27). The stridency of Stringfellow’s language reflects the fact that his horror at the involvement of the American government in Vietnam is never far from his mind. It should be evident that William Stringfellow’s reading of Revelation 13 could not be further apart from Jeff Session’s reading of Romans 13.

Intriguingly, there are also echoes of the language and imagery of the Book of Revelation in current debates about environmental policy. While rather more allusive, warnings of climate change often feature disastrous, apocalyptic and catastrophic scenarios. For at least as long as the birth of environmentalism, discourses of ecological crisis have adopted, both consciously and unconsciously, themes and concepts derived from apocalyptic. In a recent article, Madeleine Fagan points out that popular culture offers numerous examples of ecological collapse couched in the imagery of the Apocalypse: ‘there are films focusing directly on the imminent dangers of climate change’ such as An Inconvenient Truth or The Day After Tomorrow, while literary fiction

5 offers in the writings of Margaret Atwood or Cormac McCarthy, narratives which speak of ecological disaster and its effect on the collapse of civilisation (cf. Fagan 2017). A number of environmental activists have recently challenged the way in which apocalyptic imagery is used. With Doomsday predictions of flooding coastlines, destructive storms and fires, the rhetoric of apocalyptic serves only to accentuate a forlorn pessimism about the future. While one might expect such rhetoric to impress upon the listener the sense that the situation is critical and needs to be transformed, instead ‘apocalypse fatigue’ sets in (cf. Stoknes 2015).

Now the fact that the Book of Revelation has been interpreted in such a perplexing variety of different ways is of a piece with recent analysis which suggests that the world of American evangelicalism is becoming increasingly fragmented. Indeed, we might regard these different readings of Revelation as ‘a barometer of the changing evangelical condition’ (cf. Gribben 2006: 92). While evangelicals have traditionally been aligned with the right, there is evidence that this political settlement is beginning to fracture. Indeed, it is no longer clear that the apocalyptic eschatology of premillennial dispensationalism is the principal lens through which twenty-first- century evangelicals engage with American life. Recent scholarship has cited a number of different reasons for this: first, this fragmentation is partly a consequence of immigration. The rise of Pentecostalism in Latin America means that there is now a growing population of Latino Evangelicals in the United States. Like many of the Black Pentecostal churches, they have developed rather different political loyalties and priorities from white Evangelicals. The balance of power is changing. Secondly, although 81% of white evangelical voters backed Trump in the Presidential election, President Trump has proved to be a divisive figure among American evangelicals. A number of Evangelical leaders have expressed increasing unease with the way in which Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell (Jr) have been happy to support President Trump in spite of evidence of his misogyny, racism and cruelty. Among black evangelicals, 85% said that they leaned towards the Democrats, and 86% said that they disapproved of Mr Trump’s performance. An increasing number of white evangelicals, particularly those from a younger generation, have come to regard the religious right’s support for the Republican cause as a stumbling-block for their evangelism. The Southern Baptist Convention has recently elected a 45 year old President, who studiously avoids party politics. There are also signs that the social engagement and commitment to social justice, characteristic of an earlier generation of evangelicals is gaining ground (Birdsall 2018). There is even evidence of a more sympathetic engagement with issues of climate change. American evangelicalism is now more complex politically and less univocal ideologically: this provides the context for Jeff Sessions’ recent foray into the world of biblical interpretation.

In Arguing the Apocalypse, Stephen O’ Leary notes that: ‘Apocalyptic arguments made by people of good and sincere faith have apparently succeeded in persuading millions; it is unfair and dangerous to dismiss these arguments as irrational and the audiences persuaded by them as ignorant fools’ (O’Leary 1994: 4). Many of these ‘apocalyptic arguments’ give voice to a set of

6 profound anxieties and fears about the perils of life in the twenty-first century. On both sides of the Atlantic, we live in societies which are increasingly fearful and anxious, and there is some evidence to suggest that the burden of that anxiety is shared disproportionately by the generation known as ‘Millennials’.

In The Apocalyptic Imagination, John Collins points out that Christians in every century down to the present have turned to the Book of Revelation for symbols to express their fundamental hopes and fears. I suspect the reason why ‘hope’ and ‘fear’ figure so prominently in the apocalyptic imagination is that both ‘hope’ and ‘fear’ are ways of coping with uncertainty. We all live with uncertainty, and yet the final chapters of the Book of Revelation remind us of some of the dangers of allowing fear and anxiety to define reality. Optimism and pessimism both profess to know exactly what the future holds. Hope tends to be more elusive. The problem is that when reading the Book of Revelation, many people get lost in tortuous attempts to map the prophecies of the book onto events in history. If the history of interpretation tells us anything, it teaches us to cultivate a healthy skepticism about such endeavours. The Book of Revelation is not some kind of cosmic horoscope.

To read Revelation is to enable our view of reality and our understanding of what is true to be challenged and changed. The Book of Revelation offers us a way of intensifying our understanding of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Book of Revelation is made up of two visions. In the first vision, John falls into a trance and he sees ‘one like the Son of Man’ in the midst of seven gold lampstands. He is told to write down what he sees and send a series of messages to seven churches in Asia Minor. Then in Chapter 4, the writer records another vision. He sees an open door in heaven and he is invited into the heavenly throne room. There he sees the throne of God. And he sees a Lamb upon the throne, a vision which stands for the sovereignty of sacrificial love. In the words of the influential American Anabaptist theologian, John Howard Yoder, this imagery suggests that ‘the cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power determine the meaning of history’ (Yoder 1972: 232). One of the characteristics of apocalyptic literature like Daniel and Revelation is that these books were written not to entertain a few speculative possibilities about a rather more gratifying future. They arose as ‘ of resistance’ (Portier-Young 2011) to provide comfort and consolation in the face of suffering and oppression, grief and sadness. Perhaps in attending to the cries of little children in the media glare of the Mexican border, we may rediscover what St John the Divine meant by ‘revelation’. Most of the time we only see what we want to see, but there are also times when we allow a little truth in. And in those moments of clarity, of unveiling, we recover the confidence to see beyond our fears and anxieties, to reimagine the future, and to trust again in ‘the one who makes all things new’ (Revelation 21.5). For perhaps one of the greatest challenges we face today is the task of working out how to cultivate the virtue of hope in an age of anxiety.

7 Bibliography

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8 Francis, Pope, 2015. Laudato Si': On Care For Our Common Home. London: Catholic Truth Society. Frykholm, A. J., 2004. Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gergan, M., Smith, S, & Vasudevan, P., 2018. ‘Earth beyond repair: Race and apocalypse in collection imagination’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 0(0), 1-20 [DOI: 10.1177/0263775818756079] Gribben, C., 2006. Rapture Fiction and the Evangelical Crisis Darlington: Evangelical Press. Guest, M., 2012. 'Keeping the end in mind : left behind, the Apocalypse and the evangelical imagination.', Literature and theology, 26(4): 474-488. Hoover, J.A., 2015. ‘Wasteland America: The United States in Premillennialist Apocalypse Scenarios’, Bulletin for the Study of Religion 44(1), 26-32 [DOI: 10.1558/bsor.v44i1.26859] Kaplan, J., 2018. ‘America’s Apocalyptic Literature of the Radical Right’, International Sociology, 1- 20 [DOI: 10.1177/0268580918775583] Kovacs, J. and Rowland, C., 2004. Revelation. Blackwell’s Through the Centuries. Oxford: Blackwell. Lawrence, D. H., 1931. Apocalypse. London: Penguin. Levine, A.-J. (ed.), 2011. A Feminist Companion to the Apocalypse of John. London: T & T Clark. Lindsay, D. M., 2007. Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. Oxford: OUP. Lindsey, H., 1970. The Late Great Planet Earth. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. McKibben, B., 1989. The end of nature : humanity, climate change and the natural world. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. McQueen, A., 2018. Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times. Cambridge: CUP. Nash, R., 2014. Wilderness and the American Mind. Fifth Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. Nelson, R., 2012. The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion Versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America”. University Park, PENN: Pennsylvania State University Press. Neuhaus, R. J., 1971. In Defense of People: Ecology and the Seduction of Radicalism. London: Macmillan. Newport, K., and Gribben, C. (eds), 2006. Expecting the End: Millennialism in Social and Historical Context. Waco: Baylor University Press. Noll, M. A., 1994. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Northcott, M., 2004. An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire. London: I B Tauris. O’Leary, S. D., 1994. Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillips, E., 2008. “We’ve Read the End of the Book”: An Engagement with Contemporary Christian Zionism through the Eschatology of John Howard Yoder’. Studies in , 21(3): 342-361. Portier-Young, A. E., 2011. Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

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