One: Something Rich and Strange

I know the ending," goes the slogan on a license-plate frame that can be spotted here and there on the streets and highways of America. "God wins."

It's a credo that pious Jews, Christians, and Muslims hold in common, although they might quibble on exactly what is meant by the word "God." But the plainspoken slogan conceals a profound and enduring mystery: human beings of all faiths, in all times and all places, have wondered when and how the world will come to an end. Nowadays, of course, the very same questions are being asked (and answered) by scientists rather than theologians. For the Christian true believer, however, "the ending" refers to a scenario that is described in horrific and heart-shaking detail in the single scariest book in all of scripture, the book of Revelation.

The beginning of the end, according to Revelation, will be augured by mysterious signs and wonders—a black sun and a blood-red moon, the stars falling to earth, persecutors and false prophets, plague and pestilence and famine. Then the satanic arch-villain who has come to be called the Antichrist will rise to absolute power on earth. After seven years of oppression and persecution under the Antichrist, Jesus Christ will descend from heaven in the guise of a warrior-king, lead a celestial army of resurrected saints and martyrs to victory over the demonic hordes at the Battle of Armageddon, drape Satan in chains and confine him in a bottomless pit, and reign over an earthly kingdom for one thousand years.

At the end of the millennium, Satan will break out of his bonds, and Jesus Christ will be compelled to fight a second and final battle. At last, the dead will be resurrected, the living and dead alike will be judged, and the earth as we know it will be destroyed once and for all. The end of the world, according to Revelation, will be followed by the creation of "a new heaven and a new earth," a celestial paradise where the Christian saints and martyrs will spend eternity in perfect bliss. Everyone else will sizzle forever along with Satan in a lake of fire and brimstone.

That's the pitch line for the book of Revelation, so to speak, but the text itself is something even richer and stranger. The nightmarish landscape conjured up by its author is stalked by God and the Devil, the Lamb and the Beast, a lascivious whore and a woman in labor, angels and demons in the countless thousands, and a bestiary of monsters so grotesque and so implausible that they would not seem out of place in a comic book or a horror flick. At certain moments, in fact, the book of Revelation resembles nothing so much as an ancient prototype of the psychological thriller and the monster movie, and its imagery seems to fire the same synapses in the human brain.

Nowadays, Revelation finds its most ardent readers in Christian fundamentalist circles, but even someone who has never opened the very last book of the New Testament is likely to find the plot and characters to be hauntingly familiar. The idea that the world will end (and soon)—and the phantasmagoria of words, numbers, colors, images, and incidents in which the end-times are described in the book of Revelation—are deeply woven into the fabric of Western civilization, both in high culture and in pop culture, starting in distant biblical antiquity and continuing into our own age. The Battle of Armageddon, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Seventh Seal, the Great Whore of Babylon, and, more obliquely, the Antichrist, the Grim Reaper, and the Grapes of Wrath have migrated from the pages of Revelation to some of our most exalted works of literature, art, and music as well as the sports pages, the movie screen, and the paperback best seller.

Above all, the book of Revelation has always been used as a kind of codebook to discover the hidden meanings behind the great events and personages of history—war and revolution, kings and conquerors, pandemic and natural disaster. And the words and phrases of Revelation, its stock figures and scenes, have been recycled and repurposed by artists and poets, preachers and propagandists—all in ser vice of some religious or political or cultural agenda. The conquest of Jerusalem by medieval crusaders, the Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence during the Renaissance, the naming of the newly discovered Americas as the New World, and the thousand-year Reich promised by Adolf Hitler are all examples of the unlikely and unsettling ways that the book of Revelation has resonated through history. Even today, end-of-the-world fears and fantasies are peddled by Hollywood moviemakers and best-selling novelists, hard-preaching televangelists and presidential hopefuls.

Still, the book of Revelation is regarded by secular readers—and even by progressive Christians of various denominations—as a biblical oddity at best and, at worst, a kind of petri dish for the breeding of dangerous religious eccentricity. Most Jewish readers have never bothered to crack open a copy of the Christian scriptures, and when they do, they are deeply offended to find that Jews are described in Revelation as members of "the synagogue of Satan." Indeed, the fact is that Revelation has always been regarded with a certain skepticism—as "a curiosity that accidentally and embarrassingly belongs to the New Testament"—even within pious Christian circles, and even in antiquity. So the ironic and disdainful treatment of Revelation in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, a darkly postmodern motion picture that questions whether God exists at all, is not wholly anachronistic.

"Death is behind your back. His scythe flashes above your heads. Which of you will he strike first?" cries an overwrought preacher of the High Middle Ages as he wanders through a plague-ridden countryside in the company of flagellants and penitents. "You are all doomed, do you hear? Doomed! Doomed! Doomed!" And a battle-scarred squire, newly returned from the Crusades and wholly disillusioned with both God and humankind, retorts: "Do they really expect modern people to take that drivel seriously?"

Whether we approach the book of Revelation as drivel or divine mystery, however, the fact remains that Revelation is still embraced with credulity and deadly seriousness by a great many men and women in the modern world, and not only by the kind of true believers who announce their deepest convictions on their bumpers. Indeed, the readers of Revelation in modern America include a few men who have possessed the godlike power to incinerate the world with the launch codes of the American nuclear arsenal.

Like the popes and kings of the Middle Ages who consulted with apocalyptic seers for advice on statecraft, more than one recent American president was raised in a faith that instructs him to read and heed the book of Revelation as God's master plan for human history. And so, if the book of Revelation is still embraced by men with the power to destroy the world, we urgently need to know what is written there, how it came to be written in the first place, and how it has been used and abused throughout the history of a world that refuses to end.

Revelation has been described as "future history." Looking forward from his vantage point in distant antiquity, its author confidently and colorfully describes "things which must shortly come to pass." But none of his prophecies have yet been fulfilled, at least not in any plain or literal way. That's why readers in every age have tried to explain away the failed prophecies of Revelation by arguing that its visions must be understood as a symbolic depiction of events that will take place long after its disappointed author died a natural death. And yet, significantly, every new generation urgently believes that its own times will be the end-times.

Thus, for example, when Hal Lindsey ponders one of the fearful but baffling passages of Revelation in his best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth—"I saw the horses in a vision, and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone"—he concludes that the author of Revelation has glimpsed "some kind of mobile ballistic missile launcher" that will be deployed in a future (and final) thermonuclear war. Ironically, such pious readings are based on the assumption that the author of Revelation and his original audience could not and did not grasp the real meaning of the phenomena that are depicted in the biblical text.

But even if Revelation is manifestly a work of failed prophecy, it has come to play a unique and ubiquitous role in the world in which we live today. Indeed, Revelation has always served as a lens through which the recorded history of Western civilization can be seen in fresh and illuminating ways. Across the twenty centuries that have passed since it was first composed—and, above all, at every point where contesting ideas of culture and politics have come into conflict—Revelation is always present, sometimes in plain sight and sometimes just beneath the surface.

The book of Revelation (or the Apocalypse, as the last book of the New Testament is also known) has been variously identified as the revealed word of God, the masterwork of a gifted if also calculating human author, or the ravings of a deluded religious crank—and some readers are capable of holding the thought that it is all three things at once.

For the true believer, of course, the book of Revelation is "the only biblical book authored by Christ," as one pious commentator puts it, since its author claims to be reporting only what was revealed to him from on high. Other readers of Revelation, however, are willing to allow that human intelligence—and human artifice—are at work: "[I]t is the one great poem which the first Christian age produced." And a few otherwise admiring critics find themselves compelled to characterize Revelation as "apocalyptic pornography," "an insane rhapsody," "the creative imagination of a schizophrenic," or, as Thomas Jefferson memorably put it, "merely the ravings of a maniac."

Copyright © 2006 by Jonathan Kirsch.