The Proper Meaning of Apocalypse

The Church of England has recently borrowed the idea that there should be an informal liturgical season dubbed 'Creationtide', falling around the traditional Harvest season at the end of September and start of October. It is really Bartholomew, Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, who is responsible for this theme, and the Anglican Church now produces its own material for churches which decide to observe it. 

Statements about human beings acting as stewards of God's creation are venerable enough, and might seem more apposite than ever now we are living in what we are to think of as a Climate Emergency. However, there is another theme in Christian thought - that this world is impermanent, that it is passing away, and that we are not to hold onto it. The Bible, of course, concludes with a terrifying and occasionally bizarre vision of the process by which this order of things comes to an end, in wars and disasters, in deceit and conflict, before Jesus returns to judge the whole of creation. I am far from optimistic about the ability of human beings to manage the changes they will need to avoid the collapse of Western civilisation and very possibly the end of humanity itself; perhaps the narrative Revelation reveals is at hand, and how can any Christian not welcome it? When you see these things begin to happen, says Jesus, then lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.

I struggled for a long time to work out what to think about Revelation and the picture it paints. Eventually I began to think like this: ‘Judgement’ means working out what is good and evil, what is false and true, and a ‘last judgement’ would mean deciding that once and for all. Revelation is describing how good and evil become finally separated and seen for what they really are: it suggests that human history is on a journey towards that point, of seeing things truly and clearly, as God sees them, rather than the mess we experience now. But that hasn’t been an easy process in the past, and wouldn’t be in the future. It would involve pain and conflict, and would culminate when good and evil, truth and falsehood, could no longer be held together in this world. And then would come the End. That’s what I came to think, and I discovered I wasn’t alone because proper theologians had concluded something similar decades ago.

We do seem to stand at a turning-point in human history. For the first time we can really see how our God-given creative energy, our ability to make things, also involves destruction. In the past it didn’t matter as much, but now there are so many of us and our activities are so all-pervading that unless we deliberately make different choices, we will very soon destroy the resources we rely on. Those choices involve how we make our energy, what we consume and what we throw away, what we eat, how often we use the car or travel by plane, even the size of our families; how we will deal with the changes that will probably begin happening by the middle of this century, as millions of people move around the world in search of mere survival: whether we react with justice or with fear.

Seen from a Christian point of view, the climate emergency is about whether we are willing, as individuals and as a society, to live by what have always been very basic Christian virtues: truth, love, and sacrifice. Even if, as seems to me quite likely, we don't make it through, it brings us towards that last moment when good and evil are revealed in complete clarity. It will be the greatest, and maybe final, test of what human beings want to be.