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Existential Threats. Lisa Vox
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isbn 9780812294019
Автор произведения Lisa Vox
Издательство Ingram
Larkin’s willingness to consider scientific arguments in his biblical analysis also appeared in his discussion of the apocalypse but was less profound than in his discussion of creation. He was willing to attribute some of the plagues described to natural causes. The blast of the third trumpet in Revelation 8:10–11 “sounds a ‘great burning star,’ called ‘Wormwood’” and may very well be in the form of a meteor “that in exploding will fill the atmosphere with ‘noxious gases,’ that will be absorbed by the rivers and fountains of water, and poison them, so as to cause the death of all who drink of them.”158 He repeated the correlation of natural events with Bible prophecy when alluding to Peter’s prophecy that “the Heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”159 Larkin argued that Peter used the Greek word “cosmos,” which suggested that not the Earth but the atmosphere will burn up: “the intense heat will cause the gases in the atmosphere to explode, which the Apostle describes as the ‘heavens (the atmosphere) passing away with a great noise.’”160
Similar to scientific apocalypticists who supposed it was possible for humans to colonize other planets, Larkin even speculated that God intended for humanity to inhabit other planets: “it seems clear from the presence of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, that God intended the human race to populate the earth, and when it became too thickly populated, to use the surplus population to colonize other spheres.”161 That argument embodies the way conservative evangelicals could support national scientific and technological enterprises within a literalist biblical framework. Larkin’s speculation about space travel, however, would remain unusual among conservative evangelicals who never dreamed on a cosmological time scale, despite seeing God as infinite. While bound to a strict understanding of the Earth as being six thousand years old, the sophistication of other scientific arguments in Bible prophecy grew during the twentieth century.
Bible prophecy writers would also spend more time detailing social and cultural trends within the United States that they felt threatened the moral fabric of society. World War I had the effect of making premillennialists pay attention to their surrounding culture. They had never held out hope for civilization, seeing it as destined for destruction, and this was no less true when Europeans rushed off to war in 1914. When premillennialists had to defend themselves against charges of being unpatriotic, they responded by transforming themselves from pacifists into supporters of the war effort. The war against Germany became a conflict between Christian civilization and German rationalism. By the end of the war, premillennialists had committed themselves to protecting the United States as a Christian society, and their denunciations of modernism came to encompass cultural trends that belied the United States as a God-fearing nation.162 Premillennialism became the most important guiding force within fundamentalism after this shift in emphasis.163
Fundamentalists’ new preoccupation with saving civilization may have encouraged them to rescue America by promoting anti-evolution laws during the 1920s in states like Tennessee, Florida, and Oklahoma.164 The ensuing controversy in Dayton, Tennessee, featured William Jennings Bryan as representative for the prosecution pitted against Clarence Darrow, the defense lawyer for John Scopes. Scopes coached football and occasionally taught biology, and city leaders roped him into saying he had broken a law banning instruction in human evolution in public classrooms. Their plan was to take up an offer from the American Civil Liberties Union to defend any teacher who violated such a law. The trial, held in a jovial atmosphere, turned serious when Bryan and Darrow faced off.
In popular culture like the film Inherit the Wind (1960), the older Bryan appears the loser in the debate with a Darrow at his peak.165 In fact, partisanship predicted reactions to that episode during the trial. Fundamentalists celebrated Bryan’s testimony as an unambiguous victory, while liberals extolled Darrow for unmasking Bryan as an ignoramus.166 Media sympathetic to Darrow fostered the stereotype of fundamentalist Christians as antiscience, even though Bryan himself was only nominally a fundamentalist. The disappointment to fundamentalists was the unexpected refusal of scientists believed to be anti-evolution to testify on behalf of the prosecution. The one scientist, George McCready Price, whom Bryan invoked as supporting his views, was absent and had his credentials credibly attacked. Darrow pointed out that Price, a Canadian-born Seventh-day Adventist, had neither produced reputable scholarship nor attained a degree in science.
Coverage of the trial did not compel fundamentalists to go into hiding. As Matthew Sutton explains, Scopes “had little to do with the trajectory of fundamentalism proper at all.”167 The trial furnished a convenient caricature of fundamentalists to their opponents, but conservative evangelicals, including fundamentalists, continued to tackle political questions of the day. The 1920s and 1930s raised the specters of Communism and a Catholic president for conservative evangelicals, and they linked atheism to the former and the Antichrist to the latter. Their belief that Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency resembled the dictatorship of the Antichrist led to fervent opposition to the New Deal and pleas to vote Republican.168 Political failures, as with the repeal of Prohibition, easily fit into their prophetic belief that the world would only grow more sinful prior to the Rapture.
Like other Americans, conservative evangelicals still had faith in science, however. The Scopes trial suggested that the scientific establishment had sold out to evolution, but conservative evangelicals still respected scientific discoveries as a tool for biblical exegesis.169 Science and societal ills were not yet identical in their minds, and Scopes deterred no one from using science to support apocalyptic theories. In the 1930s, one such evangelical, Charles G. Trumball, the Presbyterian editor of Sunday School Times, reported on his notion that sunspots, the discovery of a possible new planet that was affecting the orbit of Uranus, and meteor showers were fulfilling the prediction that “the powers of heaven shall be shaken” prior to the Second Coming in Luke 21.170 For Trumbull and other Bible prophecy practitioners, the signs of the End were manifestations of known physical phenomena instead of mysterious supernatural events.
By this point, religious professionals were not the only ones publishing science-infused Bible prophecy. A Presbyterian lawyer from Illinois, Nathan Grier Moore, demonstrated the populist appeal of using science to explain Bible prophecy. Moore’s Man and His Manor (1934) analyzed potential ways the world could end from the perspective of science, and it attempted to reconcile science and religion in the area of end-times speculation. Moore offered a layman’s account of scientific conclusions about humanity’s and the Earth’s pasts as well as the likely future of both. Like scientific apocalypticists in Britain and Europe, Moore conceded that the end of life on Earth and the destruction of the world may occur separately or together, but, he asserted, “ultimately humanity will disappear.”171
Moore believed that the biblical account of the End was compatible with science: “on a scientific, as on a scriptural basis, the picture by St. Peter may describe it [the end of the world]. It deals rather with the fact than the method, but it is there assumed that it will be ‘burned with fervent heat.’ If so the last remnant of availing life, and the last world of matter, may break up together in a cataclysm of fire.”172 Moore’s invocation of the description of global fire in 2 Peter presaged the repeated use of that passage by premillennialists after World War II when applying science to biblical passages describing the apocalypse.173
A similar desire to incorporate technological