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Existential Threats. Lisa Vox
Читать онлайн.Название Existential Threats
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isbn 9780812294019
Автор произведения Lisa Vox
Издательство Ingram
De Forest’s novel centers in part on two scientists (a Russian and an American) who vie for the development of “the cathode ray,” described as “a terrible war weapon for aircraft use.”175 Just as after 1945 premillennialists would compare the effects of atomic weaponry to biblical passages that indicate destruction by fire, the fictional cathode ray’s effects resemble, according to the scientist that developed it, a prophetic passage in Zechariah: “And this shall be the plague wherewith the Lord shall smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem, their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes and their tongues shall consume away in their mouths.”176 When the cathode ray is used in the novel, an observer exclaims: “There’s nothing left but skeletons—grinning, horrible skeletons! The others are going the same way. The flesh scabs, dries, falls off and disappears.”177 Though the cathode ray gun was a silly conception, the adoption of science fictional language indicates De Forest’s desire to place prophecy on a scientific footing. Far from God’s judgment being a supernatural event, humans could create the means by which God metes out punishment in De Forest’s novel.
De Forest is a notable exception in a field that white men mostly pioneered and dominated. Pentecostals and charismatics tended to be more inclusionary in practice than other evangelicals, taking the idea of brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ to its logical conclusion. The Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson spent the 1920s and 1930s warning her radio audience that doomsday was near, while also daring to hold integrated revivals, but she had no female counterparts in the older evangelical sects. McPherson personified the differences between Pentecostals and other evangelicals who believed women had no business preaching and who eschewed interracial cooperation. Though fundamentalists and Pentecostals could form an alliance regarding the evils of evolution or the necessity of salvation through Christ, the Pentecostal practices of faith healing and speaking in tongues resulted in doctrinal differences within dispensational premillennialism.178
The most common formulation of dispensationalist premillennialism describes miracles as gifts that ended on the Day of Pentecost when Christ’s apostles experienced a communion with the Holy Spirit, resulting in their speaking in tongues. Such miracles will only reappear during the Tribulation period in this interpretation. For Pentecostals and charismatics, speaking in tongues and faith healings were part of the spiritual life of modern believers, and that experience in the Holy Spirit was a necessary precondition for being Raptured.179 The rivalry among evangelical sects, evident in competing versions of dispensationalism, did not make a major appearance in general works of Bible prophecy until the new millennium.
Early Pentecostalism did not have a Scofield or Larkin of its own to popularize a Pentecostal version of dispensationalism; this may be because the movement in its infancy focused on differentiating itself from other evangelicals. The centrality of healings and glossolalia in charismatic faith may have also led to an emphasis of the supernatural over the scientific. Early Pentecostals believed prophesying the future was a spiritual gift that believers enjoyed, although many modern Pentecostals argue that prophesying is best understood as testifying to the power of the Lord. Access to prophecy via the Holy Spirit may have dampened enthusiasm for poring over the Bible for new insights in the light of modern science.180
Despite the incorporation of science and man-made weapons into their visions of the End, most conservative evangelicals, including Pentecostals, maintained an emphasis on the supernatural throughout this period, albeit sometimes combining discussion of the two. The fundamentalist founder of the Sword of the Lord, John R. Rice, in Bible Lessons on the Book of Revelation (1943), discussed natural phenomena alongside the supernatural. He expounded on the potentially apocalyptic effects of natural phenomena like comets and meteors, seeing the effects of a meteor crash in the description of Revelation 8:10–11: “scientific men have long known that if a great meteor should fall to earth it might kill many thousands of people, if in a populated section, and that the gases and chemicals might poison millions.”181 For Rice, even though God may work through natural phenomena, he certainly did not have to follow the laws of nature. Rice argued that Revelation 21:23–24 suggests “when the heavens pass away at the time when the earth is burned over (II Pet. 3:10, 12) that the sun will be done away with.”182 The Earth would continue, with Jesus Christ providing it the light it needs, in Rice’s interpretation.
The wartime context probably affected Rice’s pessimism very little, but World War II transformed scientific apocalypticism. The technological advances of the nineteenth century initially had inspired great optimism about the future among Westerners. The prominence of the English in directing scientific apocalypticism during this period suggested, however, that perceived threats to the national ascendancy of such a major power could seem apocalyptic. As Americans gained national power, they too began fearing what having such power and such technological expertise could mean. The world wars forced the United States to assume a greater role in world affairs. While World War I had induced apocalyptic fears—with some observers referring to World War I as “Armageddon” to evoke the new destructiveness of warfare—World War II proved to be the war that confirmed the idea that next time a war would mean an apocalypse. Because of Americans’ technological prowess, they could likely help cause it. Americans who pulled at this pessimistic strand unraveled the blanket trust in a technological age by the twenty-first century.
Unlike after World War II, one overriding apocalyptic concern did not dominate the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leading up to 1945. After 1945 the nuclear bomb focused the attention of both scientific and Christian apocalypticists. In this earlier period, scientific apocalypticists expressed a variety of anxieties over race, technology, and natural disasters. Evolution provided a link for these different concerns; perceived racial groups within humanity and humanity itself were destined for extinction whether by their own obsolescence, their own technology, or a natural cause, like the death of the sun. In articulating these threats, scientific apocalypticists defined the end of the world in a new way. Some of these writers considered unambiguously how the Christian apocalypse might fit into their scheme of the End, while others implicitly incorporated ideas like humanity deserving judgment through destruction. Compared to later in the twentieth century, however, during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the scientific apocalyptic was less likely to borrow religious imagery to describe the End. Science popularizers’ concentration on the implications of evolution created a distinctive apocalyptic apart from premillennialism. When scientific apocalypticists proposed that humans could cause their own destruction, their formulations of the End became more similar to premillennialists. The idea of humanity causing its own death, however, was at odds with the optimistic idea that humanity could endure with technological help. The bomb ushered in the ideas that would resolve that tension. That humanity was in danger from itself pervaded post-1945 apocalyptic literature.
Christian apocalypticists on both sides of the Atlantic also did not display one overriding anxiety about the world; after 1945, for them, too, the bomb and the Cold War dominated their literature. In this earlier period, premillennialists were concerned with defending themselves against modernist interpretations of the Bible and promoting a politics in harmony with their beliefs. Modernists tended to see Christ’s Second Coming as metaphorical rather than literal, and for many conservative evangelicals, defense of dispensational premillennialism was just part of defending their faith. While modernists may have tempered their beliefs and their interpretations in accordance with what was scientifically plausible, conservative evangelicals used science in quite the opposite way: to show just how believable and possible biblical