Apocalypse on the Wireless

Time to use the Giles Fraser graphic again, though I think he has a beard now. I do my best to avoid ‘Thought for the Day’ but I caught it on Monday which was a great way to begin a week off. In this particular instance Fr Fraser was dealing in apocalyptic, ‘the End is Nigh’ language which he averred that the Church had given up since the possibility of nuclear annihilation pushed it towards encouraging optimism instead. This was only good sense, Fraser says, because nobody believes in the Book of Revelation stuff anymore. But now, as he sits looking at wildfires eating up acres of English countryside, it seems to have suddenly struck him that human society might actually, really, be under threat. He couldn’t bring himself to be hopeful in any way, he concluded, to come up with some statement about God stepping in to sort it all out: he sounded on the brink of tears. And indeed, ‘Thought for the Day’ is not usually so revealing.

I was surprised. Giles Fraser claimed never to have heard a sermon in an Anglican church that dealt with the Apocalypse, but I talk about it relatively frequently, and it’s there in the background even if not explicit. The final section of the 1996 Anglican Cataclysm – sorry, Catechism – begins ‘The Christian lives in certain hope of the advent of Christ, the last judgement, and the resurrection to life eternal’, while I’ve just finished reading a book on the suffering of the non-human Creation all five of whose theological contributors, from very different perspectives, nevertheless envisage a final sovereign act of God in which creation will be renewed, the current order of things pass away to be replaced by a perfected one. When I was in the process of converting my friend Comrade Tankengine, son of an old-fashioned High Church Anglican clergyman, told me the prospect of the End of All Things was the only thing that gave him the hope to carry on at all.

We could take the apocalyptic tradition as symbolic rather than literal. In fact we probably should, unless we’re really ready to countenance the appearance of multi-headed dragons as part of God’s process of preparing the world for the End. In this reading, the strain and violence embedded in the texts represent the increasing recognition of good and evil as humanity advances towards what God wants for it. And it may be so; but that recognition could still require the destruction of everything we hold dear: the two might go hand-in-hand, and we should take account of the possibility.

I faced this a few years ago when thinking my way through the climate emergency. I was not sure then, and am not now, exactly how likely the End is to arise from the changes we can see around us at the moment: for what it’s worth, I think not, though I’m not at all sure our current civilisation will make it through, and that’s a shame enough. But it behoves us to think about it, and pray, and not for that Day to take us by surprise, like the thief in the night.