Perhaps an idea about apocalyptic thought I have found most confounding—and intriguing—has been the sheer amount of thirst, or want, or desire, call it what you will, associated with believers in seeing, living, and experiencing the day of doom.  End time scenarios are never quite pleasant—they always involve some degree of torment, of pain and suffering, and certainly lie in stark contrast to what we might envision as a narrative of life, love, or tolerance that might be (naively, perhaps) expected out of those claiming the Gospels as their gospel.  Yet in apocalyptic thought lies comfort, the comfort of ultimate vindication, and therein seems to lie the rub, by which those who are waiting, want to see it.

My expectation had been, before beginning this course, that those who followed apocalyptic thought would want to wait on the end time, my thought being that no one would actually desire witnessing such terrible things as those envisioned in such texts as Revelation.  Reading the excerpts this week from Strozier and Boyd helped to make sense of the why behind the desire to be there for the apocalyptic action.  The conception of time as linear, and as reaching its ultimate endpoint, one in which only certain persons, or groups, can anticipate and welcome, gives such people a feeling of “righteousness” which allows for violence to be perfectly acceptable (31).  The violent is transformed into just another aspect of the progress of either the redemption of earth, or the ultimate end of one earth in the making of a new.  The terrible violence of doomsday scenarios is, in this sense, concretely otherworldly—it is not akin in any way to the violence of the here and now—and in this way, it is just another manifestation of a narrative of progress of which only a certain few have been allowed to know.