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ATW89A

Prophecy, End-Times, and American Apocalypse:Reclaiming Hope for O ur WorldBARBARA R. R O S S I N G *

Americans today are fascinated by apocalyptic visions and pre-dictions, as seen in the Left Behind series and various analyses ofpolitical conflict and natural disaster. Even political and theologi-cal moderates have noted a sense of things com ing to an end. Bib-lical apocalyptic is often read as predicting violence, destruction,and an imm inent end in which only a few chosen are saved. How-ever, apoca lyptic in Scripture presents a significantly different vi-sion. In the book of Revelation and elsewhere, destruction is theplaying-out of human misuse of creation and of power The earthitself cries out in conjunction with the poor, the oppressed, and thesilenced. God responds with healing and renewal. The visionChristians should foster is that ofthe New Jerusalem in which isset the Tree of Life, and in which God dwells with us in a world ofbeauty and justice.

An article in the October 2006 New York Magazine led off withthe question "What do Christian Millenarians, Jihadists, Ivy Leagueprofessors, and baby-boomers have in common? Answer: They're allhot for the Apocalypse."-^

Hot for the Apocalypse: The whole notion of Apocalypse, of cata-strophic future scenarios, and end-times is prominent on Americancultural radar screens these days. A new Christian video game, "LeftBehind: Eternal Forces," released just before Christmas, invites

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550 Anglican Theological Reviewplayers to "Command your forces through intense battles across abreathtaking, authentic depiction of New York City. . . . Recover an-cient scriptures and witness spectacular Angelic and Demonic activityas a direct co nseq uen ce of your choices." An on-line ad for the gam eshows gun-wielding soldiers marching through New York City, heli-copters exploding overhead, accompanied by the music of "AmazingGra ce. "^

So is this how Cod 's unfinished future is abo ut to end ? Is this th eApocalypse? We must say "no" to the "Left Behind" fictional version.We are faced with experiences of a sense of an "end" from all

kinds of qua rters w hethe r from global climate change caused by car-bon dioxide levels higher than any time in the past 500 million years;or the prospect of Peak Oil (the gradual or sudden depletion of thesupply of the elixir that has fueled world expansion these past 100years); or from escalating violence and the threat of nuclear weapons.We cannot just say an easy "no" to apocalyptic questions anymore,much as I would like to. There is a sense of an end right now in ourculture. Christians need to address that.W hen H urrican e Katrina hit New Orleans a year and a half ago, Iwas in the M iddle East, attending a conference in Bethleh em , the cityof Jesus' birth. I had seen some television images but h adn 't graspedthe full m agnitude of the disaster. A rep orte r from Ohio em ailed m ethat she wa nted to interview me for a story on Katrina and th e book ofRevelation, to get my take on whe ther this hurricane was pre dicte d inthe Bible. Since I had very limited in terne t access, I emailed m y hu s-band , "Can you check on LeftBehind.com, Pat Rob ertson, etc., to seeif the right-wing American Christians are really saying HurricaneKatrina is the A pocalypse? Because of cou rse I ne ed to say that it isn't."My husband emailed me back in capital letters: "What do youmean this isn't the Apocalypse? Isn't that always what you have beensaying is the root meaning of the word Apocalypse: 'pulling back acurtain to reveal som ething'?"If Apocalypse means "revealing," as my husband rem ind ed m eand that is the meaning ofth e Creek word then the question is: whatcurtain did Hurricane Katrina pull back to reveal for us? What do

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R E C L A I M I N G H O P E F O R O UR W O R L D 55 1Iraq^you name themunveil for us today? How do we read thesigns of th e time s?

This is of course where Christian millenarians, jihadists. IvyLeague professors, and baby-boomers disagree about the signs ofthetimeseven if all can be said to be hot for the Apocalypse.I was struck by a 2005 column from an unexpected quarter, byPeggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reaganspeech writer, who coined the p hrase "M orning in America" (so she'snormally no apocalypticist). Noonan wrote a column a little over ayear ago entitled "A Separate Pea ce," suggesting that we may be living

at the end of something: "I was chatting with friends about th e shee rnumber of things parents now buy for teenage girlsbags and ear-rings and shoes. Someone said, 'It's affluence,' an d som eon e else nod -ded, but I said, 'It's also the fear parents have that we're at the end ofsomething, and they want their kids to have good memories. ' "^ T hefear paren ts have that we 're at the end of some thing.Here's how Noonan describes the larger sense of the end:I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political cul-ture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I thinkthat a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticu-lated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheelsare coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That insome deep and fundamental way things have broken down andcan't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon.

N oo nan goes on to ask abo ut ou r resp ons e as a cu l tu re , as a na t ion , asl eade rs :

If I am right that trolley thoughts are out there, and even preva-lent, how are peo ple d ealing with it on a daily basis?I think those who haven't noticed we're living in a troublingtime continue to operate each day with classic and constitutionalAmerican optimism intact. I tbink some of those wbo bave a sensewe 're in trouble are going through tbe motions.And some^well, I will mention and end with America's

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552 Anglican Theological Reviewones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I have a naggingsense that many of these people have made a separate peace. Thatthey're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuingtheir agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowl-edge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason thannonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's offthe tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothingthey can do about it.I suspect that history, including great historical novelists ofthe future, will look back and see that many of our elites simplydecided to enjoy their lives. . . . And that they consciously, or un-consciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Whichis what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you getyours."

"I got mine; you get yours." But as Christians, that cannot be ourmessage.In this essay I talk about reading the Bible for the future, maybeeven for the end of the w orld, since end-time s discourse is so pro m i-nen t in our culture an d in the B ible.But the question is: the end oiwhat world?Jtirgen Moltmann speaks about resurrection hope, eternal life,and eschatology. His work has been important on other themes aswell He developed a Christology in the book The Crucified God thatope ned up a framework on which m any feminist and liberation the o-logians have built. I also want to underscore Professor Moltmann'secological commitments, with which I deeply resonatelaid out inthe preface to his book God In Creation, in wh ich h e calls the ecolog-ical crisis "a crisis so com preh ensiv e and so irreversible tha t it can . . .be desc ribed as apocalyptic" and also in a 1996 retrospec tive, in whichhe says: "If I could start all over again I would link my theologywith ecological econom ics. Th e last two centu ries were dom inated byecon om ic qu estions; the next cen tury will be the age of ecology."^

So that's the context in which I frame the question of Cod's un-finished future today: How can we find a biblical vision for the future

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R E C L A I M I N G H O P E F O R O U R W O R L D 5 53that addre sses th e ecological crisis of global clima te change , the crisisof global warming?

As we think about Cod's unfinished future, I wdll make the casefor reclaim ing the Bible, even the Apocalypse, as a diagnosis of th e ill-ness of the imperial world, and as an urgent wake-up call about thefuture a vision for hop e for this plan et ea rth and for every one of us.Using the paradigm of illness and healing from Jesus' healings ofpeople in the gospels, and also from the final chapter of Revelation,"the leaves ofthe tree of life are for the healing ofthe nations" (Rev.22:2), I suggest tha t ou r world is ill, very ill. Th e wheels may indee d b e

off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks, to use Noonan's words.The Bible helps us face that illness.The Bible also proclaims Cod's vision of ho pe and he aling, ecolog-ical healing as well as spiritual h ealing, physical healing, p olitical h eal-ing, econom ic healinghealing for all the dee pest w ounds w e carry.We do face a sense oft he end today. W hat m ay be ending , in myview, is our unsustainable way of lifeeven our empirebut notthe earth itself. Like the early Christians in the New Testament, our

task must be to help people envision a way of life beyond empire,articulating C od's joyful and co mp elling vision for the future.In order to make that case for apocalyptic hope and healing, wemust first deal briefly with some popular but problematic interpreta-tions of Revelation and the Bibleand I'll leave aside the aging baby-boomers as well as the jihadists and Ivy League professors and othersmentioned by that New York Magazine article, in order to focus mycritique especially on the Christian millenarian interpretation made

so pop ular by H al Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth in the 1970s andm ore recen tly by the "Left B ehind" theology of Tim L aHaye and JerryB. Jenkins: that of Raptu re and Arm ageddon politics.

That's the version of Revelation most people are getting in theculture, on Christian television and radio, and indeed that has beenspilling over into our political life in multiple and very dangerousways.Is the goal of biblical apocalypses to spell out a recipe for Ar-

ma geddon as many Christian fundamentalists claim? Do es Revelationfurnish us with a road-map for the end-times in which America's war

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554 Anglican Theological Reviewbattles, a divinely ordained World War III? Does the Bible snatchChristians off the earth to escape the suffering, and then mandateJesus' future re tu rn to ear th seven years later as an avenging wa rrior ona white horse to do battle with his enem ies after the so-called R ap-ture and after thre e q uarters of the world's people have been killedto fight the bloody battle of Armageddon on the plains of northernIsrael and then take up reside nce on David's thron e in Jerusalem ?

That's what the best-selling Christian Left Behind novels and tel-evangelists want you to thinknovels in which the heroes are an eliteban d of bom -again Christians called the "tribulation force" who drivegas-guzzling Hummers and carry Uzis as they battle the Antichristdurin g earth's seven last years.

Listen to the almost pornographic description of Christ's secondcoming by today's popula rizers in Glorious Appearing (2004), th e lat-est volume of the in term inable Left Behind series: "Men and w ome n,soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as ifthe very words of the Lord had sup erhe ated their blood, causing it toburst through the veins and sldn"; "Even as they struggled, their ownflesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated";"Jesus m erely raised one h and a few inches, a n d . . . they tumbled in[ tohell], howling and screeching."^

My specialty as a New Testament scholar is the book of Revela-tion, and I am alarmed at how Revelation, indeed the entire biblicalapocalyptic tradition, with its important critique of imperial injus-tice, has been hijacked to provide a platform for violence, evenvoyeurisma cavalier use-it-or-lose-it mentality that risks dismissinglong-term issues such as peace and even the environment on thegroun ds tha t the e arth only has to last seven mo re years. It's a theologythat one Jewish scholar has aptly decried as "God so loved the worldthat he sent World War III."^Revelation is the foundational text for this militant prophecy in-dustry. No t R evelation's c ritique of em pire and its healing vision for arenewal for the world which I believe is the heart of the book, butrather the violent story of Armageddon, of a supposed countdown totribulation and destruction in which only a few individuals are saved

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R E C L A I M I N G H O P E F O R O U R W O R L D 555out of the w orld, a story of how the p lanet m ust be d ecim ated beforeth e wrathful lion-like Jesus can retu rn to earth to fight a ba ttle in whichblood will flow up to the horses' bridles. (Let me make clear: the LeftBehind novels can be fun, thrilling, exciting, even spiritually renew ing,if you have a stomach for violence. But the y're fiction, not only the plotand th e cha racters, but also the theology on which the y're based.)

The so-called Rapture that forms the basis for the Left Behindnovels is not traditional biblical teaching, but was rath er a nin etee nth -century invention of the B ritish pastor John Nelson D arby, founder ofthe Plymouth Brethren.^ Rapture theology "sounds biblical," asRom an Ca tholic bishops of Illinois have wa rned . B ut it is not b iblical.Nowhere does the Bible say that bom-again Christians will besnatched up to heaven while they watch Cod inflict tribulation anddisasters on earth, although believers can piece together a chain ofBible verses to construct th e Ra pture chronology. Already in the nine -tee nth century, wh en this Raptu re theology first came ou t, the formerslave Sojourner Truth critiqued both its escapist framework and itsviolence a c ritique that is amazingly timely today also:

You seem to be expecting to go to some parlor away up some-where, and when the wicked have been burnt, you are comingback to walk in triumph over their ashesthis is to be your NewJerusalem!! Now I can 't see any thing so very nice in that, comingback to . . . a world covered with the ashes of the wicked. Besides,if the Lord comes and bums as you say he willI am not goingaway; I am going to stay here and stand the fire, like Shadrach,Meshach, and Abednego! And Jesus will walk with me throughthe fire, and keep me from harm.*

Coing to a parlor away up somewhere to watch the destruction, andthen coming back to earth walk on the ashes seven years later is an aptdescription for the pre-tribulation rap ture prem illennial dispensation-alist system.The program is especially dangerous for the Middle Eastforboth Israelis and Palestinians. While the Middle East is not my focus

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556 Anglican Theological Reviewtoday, let me just note that Christian fundamentalists have becomea major lobby regarding US policy in the Middle East, with someextreme voices going so far as to promote a US nuclear strike onIranthis, in order to fulfill Cod's prophetic plan. Very scary stuff,a complete reversal of Jesus' blessing of peacemakers and Jesus'teaching of love for enemies.

Rom an Catholics, Lu theran s, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, M eth-odists, and most evangelicals all reject such violent R ap ture theology.But institutional religious criticism has a hard time gaining muchtraction against such an incredible popular culture and mass mediaphenomenon.

So what do we do? In th e face of such problem atic fundam ental-ist interp retatio ns of Apocalypse, th e logical solution m ight seem to b eto reject th e apocalyptic strand o fth e Bible all togethe r. After all, it isdangerous cultural stuff, open to wildly misguided interp retation s, asearly Christians realized already in the second century w hen a grass-roots movement called New Prophecy or Montanism began to claimthat Revelation's prophecies were coming to life in their own time.Bu t can we reject the A pocalypse today? Is such a move helpful oreven possible? No, because the Apocalypse is part of our publicrhetoric as well as part of our B ible, and has bee n for cen turies. M ain-line Christians have tried ignoring RevelationI know I did when Iwas pastor of a Lutheran congregation in the 1980s. But while wemainline Christians were busy ignoring this apocalyptic book, funda-mentalists came in with a vengeance to tell Christians what it "really"means.M oreover, I believe th e Apocalypse can help us today. It can h elpus face seriously that our world is ill, very illill with what Seattlefilmm aker Jo hn d e C raaf calls "affluenza," a com bination of affluenceand influenza; ill with what nature writer and Methodist BillMcKibben calls the disease of "More" with a capital M, a carbon-devouring lifestyle that is not sustainable; ill with what ChalmersJohnson calls the sorrows of em pire , manifested in man y different andinterrelated waysmilitarily, economically, ecologically, spiritually.^

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R E C L A I M I N G H O P E F O R O U R W O R L D 557The voice of the earth and the voice of the poor are crying out to uswith two parallel cries, writes Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff Ibelieve that the biblical apocalyptic tradition can help us listen tothese two parallel cries, the cry of th e earth and the cry of th e poor.

W hat we n eed to do is reclaim the im portan t biblical apocalypticvoice of protest and hope away from the problematic violent readingsthat have bec om e so dom inant in Am erica today Th e hea ri of Revela-tion and o the r apocalypses is a pro ph etic message very different fromwhat we're being told by the fundamentalist program of the Left Be-hind novels or others seeking to precipitate Arm ageddon in the Mid-dle East. The heart of the Bible and even of the book of Revelation isnot rapture and Armageddon, but a vision of hope, a critique of em-pire and imperial violence, including violence against the earth. It's amessage that Sojourner Truth and so many others have lifted up instruggles for justice through the centuries, whether in the struggleagainst slavery in the US or more recently in South Africa or LatinAmerica.

As my husband reminded me that day in Bethlehem, the wordapocalypse means "unveiling." Apocalypses pull back the curtainlike the movie "The Wizard of Oz," where Dorothy's dog Toto is theone w ho pulls back the c urtain to expose O z for who he really is. Apoc-alypses unveil and expose; they help us see the truth. They take us ona journ ey b ehin d th e c urtain, a journ ey into the h eari of our world, ajourney to the thron e of Cod.

So wh at, if anything, does R evelation unv eil for us today? T hat isthe q uestion we ne ed to ask and consider together. Revelation doesn'tpre dic t events in the twenty-flrst century. It is prophecy, bu t pro ph ecydoesn't mean prediction.

If we can take ourselves back to the first century to hear its mes-sage for the original hearers to which it was written, then we can askabout analogies to today, places where that first-century messagemigh t also be Cod 's wo rd for today.Fo r chu rch es living in first-century Rom an Asia Minor, th e origi-nal audience of the book. Revelation's core unveiling was an urgent

pron oun cem ent ofthe end of the imperial world it diagnosed the ill-ness, the sickness of the Rom an world. And he re I draw a d istinction

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558 Anglican Theological Reviewbetween three different Creek words for "world." Revelation unveilsnot the end o fth e physical created w orld (the Cre ek words kosmos orge) but the end ofth e imperial world, the oikoumene.The Roman Empire had its own imperial eschatology, the mes-sage of Roma aetema, "world without end," bombarding people everyday through imperial propag anda and iconography, inscriptions, mag-nificent triump hal arches, victory parade s, coins showing co nqu eringdivine emperors on one side and weeping captives on the other. Themessage was everywhere that Rome had conquered the whole oik-oumenethe lands, the seas, the ends ofthe earih, geographically aswell as tempo rally. Any resistance was futile.

This theology is perhaps best captured by one famous imperialscene, exquisitely carved in sardonyx on a tiny cameo, called theCemma Augustea, now in the museum in Vienna. It shows a personi-fied figure of Oikoumene placing a crown on the head of EmperorAugustus, signifying the whole imperial world, the whole oikoumene,giving its allegiance to the e m pire. That's the top tier o fth e two -tieredcam eo. Below, figures of Rom an soldiers abuse bo un d captives in AbuChraib-like scenes, graphically reminding viewers of how the wholeRom an imperial system rested on the backs of con qu ered peop les andlands. It is to this Roman imperial eschatology of "empire withoutend " that the New Testam ent says "no." Jesus, the gospels, Paul, Rev-elation: all counter Rome's claims of eternal domination with a strongsense of an end, an end to the oikoumene.I find it striking tha t the N ew Testam ent refrains from referring

to the oikoumene in any positive sense probably becau se oikoumenehad co me to m ean th e imperial world, as signified in the C em m a Au-gustea's depiction. In the gospel of Luke's Christmas story, for exam-ple, when Caesar Augustus decrees that the whole world should beenrolled in a census, the word for world is oikoumene. Similarly, w ha tSatan offers Jesus in the temptation stories in both Luke and Matthewis the kingdoms of the worldthe oikoumenethe imperial world.Th ere a re no positive references to the w ord.Two other Creek words, for earth (ge) and world (kosmos), areused more positively. The earih ceriainly suffers judgment and tribu-

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R E C L A I M I N G H O P E F O R O U R W O R L D 55911:18 in which Cod says, "I'm going to destroy the destroyers o f th eearih," not "I'm going to destroy the earih."

In this Roman imperial eschatological context, the core vision ofRevelation for first-century Christians was a choice be twee n two cities,two competing political economies, two ways of lifeCod's economyof justice and w ell-being versus the R om an Em pire's way of life.The b ook takes us on two tours led by th e sam e angel: first, a to urof Rom e called the whore of Babylonto see and experience th e ter-rors of the unjust imperial world; and second, a tour of Cod's NewJerusalem. Th e plagues are pari ofthe first tour, projecting out into th e

future the logical conse quen ces ofthe trajectory ofthe Rom an E m pireso that people can see where it will all end before it's too late. Theseplagues are not prediction s bu t rathe r warnings, like Scrooge's visionaryjourneys in Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol, where Scrooge isshown horrifying future scenarios not becau se they must ha ppe n, butso tha t he can a lter the course of his life.Even nature itself pariicipates in this warning, crying out tooppressors about the consequences of their own deadly actions.

When waters and springs turn to blood, the angel (messenger) ofthewaters interprets this through the logic of natural consequences, as aboomerang-like effect, in Rev. 16:6: "You are just, O Holy One . . .for you have judged these things. Because they shed the blood ofsaints and prophets, you have given them blood to drink. It is ax-iomatic" {axios estin; Rev. 16:5-6). It is not the language of punish-ment so much as the language of axiomatic consequences. Themessenger of Revelation's waters seems to be saying that oppressorswho commit acts of violence will eventually unleash their owndestructive consequences upon themselves.

Such biblical plagues, therefore, are m ean t to be not predictionsbu t rathe r urgent warnings, like the Exodus plagues, par i ofth e book'sdiagnosis ofth e illness of th e imperial world, to wake us up to the co n-sequences of our actions before it is too late. Revelation 17-18 showsthe catastrophic end of that empire, its way of life, as merchants,kings, shipping magnates all lament the destruction of their worldtra de cen ter. ^

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560 Anglican Theological ReviewBut Revelation doesn't end tliere. It doesn't just take you to Ar-mageddon, to the smoke rising from burning Babylon. It also offers

the vision of ho pe the alternative.The entire book of Revelation leads up to the wondrous vision ofNew Jerusalem in chapters 21-22, the incredible city of beauty, wel-com e, and ecological renew al. This is the most imp oriant vision of th ebook to which the whole tour has been leading: "And I saw the holycity, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from Cod, pre-pared as a bride. . . . And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying'See, the dwelling of Co d is am ong m orials. C od will dwell with themas their Cod; they will be his people, and Cod's very self will be withth e m '" (Rev. 21:2-3).

Heaven is not mentioned again after Rev. 21:2, a fact especiallystriking for a book in which heaven has been so central. This isbecause Cod's throne moves down to earih, to be with us.The New Jerusalem of Revelation 21-22 is a wonderfully earih-centered vision of hope for this world. Contrary to the escapism and"heavenism" that dominate many fundamentalist interpretations, thepicture of Revelation emphasizes that our future dwellingandCod's^will be on ea rih, ren ew ed , in a radian t, thriving city land scap e.The core vision of Revelation, and a vision that we need for today, isnot of peop le be ing "rap tured" away to heaven, bu t rather, if anything,of Cod being "raptured" down to earih (Rev. 21), to dwell with us inwha t is called New Jerusalem.That's why I think it can even be an ecological vision. In everyway, this beloved city is the very opposite of the toxic political econ-omy of the Roman Empire. Whereas Rome was built on deforesta-tion, mining, slavery, unjust globalized tradeall critiqued in theamazing cargo list of Revelationl8:12-13New Jerusalem centersarou nd a tre e of life. In cha pte r 22, my favourite p ari, John sees a par-adise of green space right in the m iddle of th e city, a river of life, flow-ing throug h the city of Co d from the thro ne . W hat a wonderful imagefor o ur rivers!^^ On eith er side of th e river grows the Tree of Life, awondrous canopy of shade. And the leaves ofthe tree are medicine.

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R E C L A I M I N C H O P E F O R O U R W O R L D 5 61like those of so many trees in traditional religions. The leaves of thetre e "are for healing o fth e nations," John says.

Oh, how we nee d those healing leaves! As I think about the me s-sage of Revelation for our political life, for ecology, for global warm-ing, for violence in the Middle East, I keep coming back to thismedicinal tre e of life, with its wo ndro us "leaves for the hea ling o ft h enations." Cod wills not to destroy our world but to heal it. That's thefinal wo rd of th e Bible. He aling com es in Revelation not directly fromC od bu t from the leaves of a tre e, from the c reation . The tr ee of life isan image common to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and to so manyother religious traditions.The question for us is: How can we take to heart tha t healing t reeand those medicinal leaves today? How can we reclaim our vision forplanet earih, our political vision, our spiritual vision, to be shaped notby Armageddon and war, but by this healing vision?a vision ofJerusalem and all cities as places of justice and beauty, with a river oflife flowing though the middle, welcoming all.Co ntrary to the dispensationalist claims. New Jerusalem is not r e-served for a f"ar-off future , an even t on a chron ology after Arm ageddonand other destructive events. Rather, New Jerusalem is a vision thatwas inten de d to gu ide the ethical life of Revelation's reade rs even now.It is a future vision, yes, bu t also Cod's life-giving vision for justice forour whole wounded world. Revelation invites marginalized people,those who hunger and thirst for justice, to come for healing to thetree , to come to the river: "Let everyone who thirsts take the w ater oflife as a gift, w itho ut pr ice" (Rev. 22:17).

O ur w orld is ill. W e all feel tha t. I t is a sickness, this war m on ger-ing. The p lan et is hea ting u p with a fever, th e fever of global wa rmin gthat we all mu st urgently addre ss. Th e Arctic has suffered an oth erreco rd loss of sea ice. As the A rtie region absorbs m ore h eat from th esun, causing the ice to m elt still furiher, th e relen tless cycle of m eltingand heating will shrink the massive land glaciers of Creenland anddramatically raise sea levels. Scientists tell us that the Creenland icesheet is ill, sliding the length of a football field each day. Soon we maycross a critical threshold beyond which the climate cannot recover,scientists tell us. How do we find healing?

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562 Anglican Theological ReviewH urric an e K atrina leaves from the tree of life, to save those glaciers,to downsize our ecological footprint before it is too late, to help healand reconcile the war and brokenness of our world? Can the Apoca-lypse play such a healing role for our culture today, rather than beat-ing the drum for Rapture and Arm ageddon?

I'm not a novelist, but that's the version of the story that urgentlyneeds to be written. People are hungry for narratives of how Cod isalive and at work in th e w orld, as Left Behind reminds us. Stories holdgreat power to shape our worldview.We need a novel that tells the story of the Bible and Revelation

not as escape from ear th or earih's destruc tion, b ut as a story of ho pe ,of renewal for the p lanet. We ne ed a novel whose he roes a re not hid-ing out in underground bunkers, or flying around in attack heli-copters, or driving gas-guzzling Range Rovers and Humvees, as in theLeft Behind novels, bu t whose heroes are rooted on the earih, living insustainable communities, maybe practicing Permaculture garden-ing sharing in the river of life, ten din g th e nation -healing tre e of life.Such a story could be just as thrilling as the Left Behind storybutinstead of carrying guns to battle t he A ntichrist and his forces, our lit-tle band of heroes carries seedlings, or solar pan els; they resc ue farm-ers about to be bulldozed by developers; they foil the evil forces ofpolluters and greenhouse gas emitterstoday's most dangerous man-ifestations ofthe Antichrist.

We need a novel based on the book of Revelation in which theearih herselfthe feminine figure of Ge from chapter twelve of Rev-elation and eighty-some other referencesplays a starring role, firstcrying out for justice on behalf of all the victims of imperial oppres-sion, both human and non-human, and then becoming the hero. InRevelation cha pter twelve, the Ea rth com es to the rescue of a mythic"woman clothed with the sun," who represents us. Cod's people, indang er of being de voure d by the Satanic dragon of em pire . Now that'sa story! The e arih opens its mou th to save us from ou r own captivity toempire!It's all there in the Bible. I'm not making it up. We need a novelthat helps us envision the promise and renewal of chapters 21-22. It

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R E C L A I M I N G H O P E F O R O U R W O R L D 5 63taking part in an urgent plot, and most of all, the story of the healingtree of life, that amazing tree at the very cen ter o fo ur world.

Salvation from empire, from Armageddon, from our own de-struction. Th e tree of life. The river of life. W ho will write th e novel ofthat Apocalypse?

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