This is part of a series of
Essays from a Christian Perspective.
So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
and Music shall untune the sky!
—"A Song for St. Cecilia's Day," John Dryden*
"The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to
extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming
generation shall continue to live."
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It's hard to deny that the apocalypse is a current cultural obsession. It's in the movies and tv shows we watch and the novels or comics we read. And it's been on my mind recently.
Let
me back up, briefly and define my term. When I say "apocalypse," I'm
talking about an event that sweeps away the old order of things and
replaces it with something new. Often, this involves the deaths of many,
many people, and typically, the thing that replaces the old order is
simple dis-order: a lack of society of any kind. There are plenty
of exceptions; there's a whole sub-genre of post-apocalypse dystopias,
where some horrible sweeping event like nuclear war or a sudden drop in birth rates
leads to a dramatic change in the organization of society for the
worse. At all events, the apocalypse is arguably real, real bad. Like,
the worst thing ever, or close.
Yet
we appear to be thinking about it, in one form or another, a great
deal. On the surface, this seems healthy: it's important to be concerned
about the possibility of the end of things, to consider that
possibility and seek to avert it or at least confront what it might
mean. And it's possible that this is what some apocalypse-focused
culture is about: I would hold up, say, Soylent Green or The Road as
at least partly if not primarily about warning people about the end of
things as they are and getting them to face that possibility.
If
that's all that we were doing by obsessing over the apocalypse, I would
wipe my hands and declare everything to be okay, or at least
acceptable. It's not all we're doing, though. It's certainly not why I
saw, say Zombieland, or why I liked Y: the Last Man. I
think we obsess over the apocalypse because (1) we're worried about the
state of things as they are; things are clearly changing all around us,
and it's unlikely they are changing for the better, and (2) we want to
know that things will be okay anyway. When I see that Jesse Eisenberg
survived the zombie apocalypse by being slightly neurotic and having a
gun, I'm not thinking about how to keep the world from getting terrible;
instead, I'm helping myself feel like everything's going to be okay: if
this guy made it through something that awful, then I can too. I don't
need to do anything about the state of things as they are.
***
I
have a theory about where this impulse comes from. The U.S. is either a
Christian society or a post-Christian one, depending where you are and
who you ask. Either way, the impulses of Christians, positive and
otherwise, are our society's impulses, or the ancestors of them. And one
huge impulse in Christian history (related, in fact, to a similar impulse in many religions) has been to hope for a capital-A Apocalypse in bad times.
The
classic, and probably earliest, example is the Book of Revelation in
the Bible. When this book was written, Christians were the direct target
of some very serious persecution. To be a Christian anywhere in the
Roman Empire was a capital offense. So Christians in the Roman Empire
needed some comfort; one way they received it was from this book,
Revelation, that said that someday there would come a time when God
would wipe away the old order of things and establish a new one, where
everything would be great and you wouldn't have to worry about someone
cutting your head off for thinking Jesus=God or drawing a fish in the
sand.
And Christians have been returning to that hope, and to
Revelation specifically, ever since, especially when things look rough.
The question I want to raise is: is that a healthy thing to do? Is it
really okay to say, "everything's going to be okay someday" in response
to trying times? If so, is it okay to pair that with, "so we don't need to do anything about the way things are now"?
***
I want to answer by offering an
alternative example. It's arguable that there have been few times or
places worse than Germany under the Nazis. A series of changes over the
course of a few short years led to a severe restriction of personal
freedoms, imprisonment and death for dissenters and minorities, and
compulsory participation for many in a war of aggression, earning the
ire of the rest of the world. It was a bad time.
Enter
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian born and raised in Germany
before the rise of Nazism. I am not an expert on his life or
theological writings, so I will try to be brief in my descriptions of
his life and actions.†
Basically,
as a pastor, Bonhoeffer had several options when the Nazis came to
power. He could go along with the German Lutheran Church, which was
taken over by the Nazis, expelled non-Aryans from the church and looked
to Hitler as its leader. But he could also, I want to point out, have
taken a traditional Christian route: preaching that the Apocalypse was
near or that death and martyrdom were the best way to confront Nazism.
Instead of doing either, Bonhoeffer
addressed the situation as a problem that he and his fellow Christians
could address through active, open resistance and, failing that,
subterfuge. During the Nazi years, Bonhoeffer helped start a Christian
movement called the Confessing Church, which opposed the corrupt
theology and policies of the German Lutheran Church at the time. He
founded illegal underground seminaries, instructing students in them and
traveling to encourage his fellow believers to resist and not give up
hope. And in the end, Bonhoeffer joined a group that attempted to
assassinate Hitler, for which he was later executed.
Bonhoeffer's martyrdom is beside the
point, though; what I want to say is that he had the opportunity to
retreat into an apocalypse end-of-everything mindset and to encourage
others to do so. But instead, he looked for ways to resist what was
happening around him and to build something good in contrast to it. He
was not concerned with his own well-being, but with "how the coming
generation shall continue to live."
***
I think that our impulse to consume and
enjoy apocalypse-oriented culture is one sign among many that we have
not learned from Bonhoeffer's example and that of people like him. And I
wonder where that failure to learn will lead us.
*I first encountered this poem in a book (The Thirteen-Gun Salute) from one of my favorite book series, the Aubrey-Maturin novels (Master and Commander is
the first; a pretty great movie was made in 2003 with this title, based
on the novels). In it, the song is quoted to describe an unbelievably
powerful storm's approach:
'Brother,' said Stephen, when the clerk had staggered off with the files clutched to his bosom, 'what is afoot?'
'I am not sure,' said Jack, 'but it may be your St Cecilia:
And when that last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.
Look out to the east, will you?' They gazed through the stern window, where deep purple was massing beneath the coppery glare.
†To those with further interest in Bonhoeffer's life, I recommend this volume,
which I'm in the middle of. It's written with a great deal of clarity
and insight, and it will give you a much better picture of the man's
life than I have.
***
Photo notes:
Photo 1 source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/athole/830255908/
Photo 2 source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clicks2006/3588465385/
Photo 2 translation: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, resistance worker and pastor, preached and confirmed believers in this church in 1932. Born February 2, 1906, killed April 9, 1949 in Flossenbrück concentration camp.
