Is there no end in sight?:

...He was, unlike serious Communists or Young Republicans, harmless, in that no violence seemed to be contemplated against King Juan Carlos, since his temporary triumph was fore-ordained and therefore inevitable...

...There were reports that in Russia a number of people saw a special significance in Revelation 8:10-11: "And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters...

...he had a view of the world which, like the view of committed Communists or Reaganites, explained the world neatly and left no stray ends dangling...

...It will close on us like a trap...

...but with its power centers rearranged, the world went on as before...

...Jerome, the Fathers of the Desert, and most of the people who have read it prayerfully throughout history...

...What I say to you, I say to all: Watch.'' Two things occur to me here...

...He was not any crazier than people who talk to crystals or than Shirley Me Actress and her reincarnations...

...What stands out is the place Jesus gives to the end of time, the final days, and the need for Christians to live as if the end could come at any moment...

...There are several ways to look at Scripture which could let us off the hook here...

...The driver gave me a sheaf of photocopied evidence which he kept in a box in the front seat of the cab...

...He picked up my wife, my son, and me in front of a hospital and drove us to our hotel through a near blizzard...

...One says that the early church, hemmed in and harried as it was, longed for an end to persecution and had a stake in looking for the Last Days, and read this longing back into the words of Jesus...

...The judgment with which individual morality is concerned turns us in on ourselves and our own salvation...

...In another account of the final judgment, in Matthew 25, it is said explicitly that what we have done or failed to do for one another will be the criterion by which we are saved or damned...

...It wasn't the first illegal thing we'd seen done in a cab, and he was driving steadily and safely enough...

...At the risk of being put into the loony camp, I must say that this is a mistake...

...it is part of the midwife's job we have, to be ready when the moment of birth comes...

...When I mentioned it to my wife the driver overheard and said, "I'm sorry evil has touched you so close, brother, but you know it's only going to get worse, now that we're in the Last Days...

...It should be undertaken precisely to redeem an essential ancient Christian doctrine from people who want to use it to justify everything from anti-Communist foreign policy to a suspicion of, God help us, poor King Juan Carlos.oor King Juan Carlos...

...The Last Days always seem to loom at times when the calendar moves towards a flip of the zeros...

...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey IS THERE NO END IN SIGHT...

...This would seem to give encouragement to those who scour the newspapers for clues to God's schedule...

...I don't mean that it makes any sense to try to find out from a squinty search of the Bible just when the Last Days will begin...

...There is something paradoxical about the ways in which that last day is presented...

...Still, something significant is dropped out of this approach to Jesus' teaching, a teaching which takes the form of a warning...

...Individual morality alone does not...

...It may seem to put us into some embarrassing company, but we should take the long view: considering the place of this teaching in Christian history, and the words of Jesus himself, it puts us in some very good company as well...

...This theme is found not only in the Book of Revelation, but can also be found in Paul, who speaks of all of nature groaning as if in childbirth, as it moves towards that moment, and it can be found throughout the Gospels...

...One is that not knowing the time of the end is itself important, an encouragement to the alertness which is our vocation...

...There was certainly a change in the way the church lived in and with the world when time passed, and the end seemed nowhere in sight...

...Moral, ethical, and social teaching take on a new urgency when the watchfulness Jesus speaks about is taken seriously...

...Basil the Great, St...

...Pat Robertson has made similar loony uses of Scripture, and it has to be said that he acts in a long tradition, one which goes back at least as far as the Middle Ages...

...An agnostic might deny the judgment part, but no one can deny the truth of the rest of the idea (though we usually live as if we could...

...But there are other reasons for developing a non-fundamentalist theology of the Last Days...

...Apart from the fact that this sharply contradicts the way in which Scripture has been used by the church throughout its history, it brings up another problem: the Bible is seen as something into which we twentieth-century secular sorts have a privileged insight, one hidden from St...

...Paul says it "comes in fire...

...The news was on...

...The point is not simply for me to avoid evil personally, though I must do that...

...The light of Christ's Transfiguration on Mount Tabor is the light which finally illuminates everything in creation, according to some Eastern Christian thinkers...

...A belief in the last days, one which places us in a household of servants who have been asked to do their task and pay attention, does not allow us to separate our personal morality from that of the surrounding community...

...This interesting fact is enough to set all sort of bibliolaters atwit-ter, but it is beside the point...

...Christian teaching on the Last Days gradually began to take an individualistic turn: we should, each of us, live as if the last day could come at any moment, because in fact there will be a moment when each of us will have a last day, and face judgment...

...No kidding...

...This is undertaken not only so that I can avoid condemnation...

...the driver said cheerily as we stepped out) that he was not crazy...

...It is a simple moral conversion that is asked of us, individually...

...and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.'' The Russian word for "wormwood" is "Cherynobyl...

...The . other is that a belief in the end of time emphasizes the universal, collective, and cosmic meaning of Jesus' teaching...

...We heard something about the murder of a woman we had met once, the friend of some friends...

...It turned out that a rather convoluted interpretation of Scripture had made it clear to our driver and members of his church that the European Economic Community was prefigured in the Old Testament, and through a further extrapolation it was revealed that the Anti-Christ was . . . King Juan Carlos of Spain...

...I realized after we left the cab ("See you on the way up...

...It could even conceivably exist in a world in which there were no other human beings...

...One important consequence of this belief is that we are moved away from individualism and mere moralism...

...We made the sort of noncommittal sounds most non-fundamentalists do when the Last Days are brought up so earnestly, and he went on: "Yes, the son of Satan is on the earth now, and we think we have a • pretty good idea who he is...

...Much of what we consider Christian morality is in this sense a means to an end-a readiness, an alertness...

...it could exist in a world which will go on forever, as well as one with an end in the near or far future...

...Without denying what modern scholarship can offer us, and without accepting the fundamentalist notion of scriptural literalism or inerrancy, I think one thing must be insisted on: the Gospels give us a more or less accurate picture of the teaching of Jesus, one to which (if we are Christians) we must pay some attention...

...At the personal level, our response to Jesus' call for watchfulness is obviously central, and can move us away from a self-preoccupied morality...

...At an extreme, this way of looking at Scripture makes everything a product of the limited mind-set of first-century Jewish and Greek converts, and effectively denies that Scripture really tells us anything about Jesus, but rather tells us a-bout the various contending schools of early Christianity...

...I must also treat the earth as something which will be transformed, and live with others as people whose lives are to be made capable of a divine transformation...

...We are warned that the last times will be full of distress, and are even told that we will know, when "these signs appear," that the end is near...

...Perhaps because some of those who are so insistent on the Last Days are so obviously silly, mainstream Christians have moved away almost completely from serious consideration of the end of our age, and the Second Coming of Christ...

...The driver was a pleasant man, full of jokes about the terrible weather...

...We had only to be forewarned, and to pray...

...GETTING READY FOR THE MILLENNIUM I had an interesting time in a Chicago cab last winter...

...and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood...

...it is to be "made new" in every way...

...In fact, Jesus says, "this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done" (Mark 13:30...

...We noticed that he had a television set in the front seat of his cab, which is, I think, illegal...

...Various major events (the fall of Rome was obviously one of them) were taken at first as indications that here it was at last...

...What is not beside the point is the fact that the end of time and the Second Coming of Christ were very much a part not only of early Christian consciousness, but apparently of Jesus' own thinking...

...But this passage is followed by one which says that only God knows when these things will happen, and no one else, "no man, no, not the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father.'' Then Jesus compares us to servants who have been given a task, in the absence of a master who will return at an unknown moment, ordering the doorkeeper to stay awake...

...A belief in the Last Days means that our lives are not lived against an indifferent backdrop, but that all creation is part of the same story of cosmic as well as individual transfiguration...

...with a millennial shift only twelve years away, it is not unusual that the Millennium is being talked about...

...The world is to be transformed, in all of its aspects...

...Collectively we await the renewal of everything, and the job we have been given is to be alert and ready for it...

...The emphasis is on our duty to one another, and an attention which looks to a time when the meaning of all history, and of the universe itself, will be revealed...