TIMING IS EVERYTHING

"You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if we're the generation that is going to see that come about. I don't know if you've noted any of those prophecies lately, but believe me, they certainly describe the times we're going through."



I think it's purely subjective," Dr. Wessinger told me last January. "There is no objective way to draw that conclusion, to my knowledge. Because when you look at it from a historical perspective, people at any given point in time will be looking at current events around them and saying, 'This is the time.'" Dr. Landes put it more colorfully: "I don't know of any case of an apocalyptic prophet who did not look around and say, 'Can't you see? The world is going to hell in a handbasket.'"

Still, it would also seem that a genuinely objective reading of the nature of our current historical moment could easily support that very conclusion. "That is the scary thing," Dr. Wessinger acknowledged. "We're living in a time right now when there is a lot of conflict in the world. You've got climatic issues, environmental issues, nuclear issues. And there are a lot of hot spots where things could get out of control. It could turn out very bad. So therefore, naturally, it's going to feed into all of those traditional prophecies, and the interpretations of those prophecies." This would seem especially true given that perhaps the only element of most of these prophecies that doesn't seem open for question is the fact that the appearance of the Messiah corresponds with a difficult, if not disastrous, time in human history.

For example, Hindu scripture tells us that the Kalki Avatar will come at a time when "the rulers of the earth will have degenerated into plunderers" and when "the practices taught by the Vedas and the institutes of law shall nearly have ceased." Buddhist scriptures are even more graphic, describing, as Buddhist scholar José Cabezón explains, a time of great strife when "human beings basically continue to deteriorate both mentally and physically. There's constant fighting, constant feuding. Humans become physically shorter, and they have shorter lifespans. When it gets really bad, the figures that I've heard are that they live only about ten years, and they're about ten inches tall. These things could be metaphors, but in any case, that's the time when Maitreya comes." Islam, heavily influenced by Christian end times theology, shows little mercy in its description of the conditions surrounding the Mahdi's coming. We are told that "the false Messiah (the Antichrist) will remain for a while, destroying mankind completely, and the earth will witness the greatest fitnah (tribulation) in its history." Judaism, which has already lived through one apocalypse in the last century, is the only one of the major religions that doesn't seem to insist that things must get worse before they get better.

"Prophecy has often been discredited in the past by misguided people who said that the end of the world was near or that the Messiah was coming," declares Hal Lindsey in the video version of his book, The Late Great Planet Earth. But Lindsey has his own reason for believing that now really is the moment of messianic destiny. "The key to the whole prophetic pattern," he assures us, "... has always been the rebirth of the State of Israel." Modern interpreters like Lindsey offer statements like this one to place the end of history firmly in our lifetime, but definitive statements in relationship to any Biblical or, for that matter, Talmudic, Kabbalistic, Koranic, Vedic, or Pali prophecy tend to be inherently problematic, to say the least. Indeed, the traditions offer very few clear benchmarks by which to measure the veracity and timing of their predictions, a situation that has left an interpretive vacuum waiting to be filled by generations and generations of messianic Chicken Littles. Or so history has proved them to be so far.

So is there anything more concrete outside of the context of traditional religious scripture? Well, if you don't mind your prophecies being delivered in more unconventional packages, then there is a veritable mountain of evidence that begins to tumble out of the pages of history. Not necessarily evidence that would get past a good lawyer—but then again, those ancient prophets of the scriptural canon didn't exactly have to subject themselves to the mainstream press. Prophets are sort of like presidents: the farther back in history, the more respect we tend to give them. There are the usual suspects like Nostradamus, whose obscure quatrains are almost impossible to decipher but which seem to suggest, at the very least, some kind of tribulation at some future moment in history. And then there is Edgar Cayce, the famous early-twentieth-century psychic, who correctly predicted both World Wars and made such cheery pronouncements as, "The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea. The upper portion of Europe will be changed as in the twinkling of an eye." The Mayans had a prophetic calendar that points, we are told, to the date 2012 as the end, or the beginning, of an entirely new cycle in the pages of history. Add the Hopis, the Aborigines, the Eskimos, many of the occult traditions, and a few hundred other miscellaneous soothsayers and would-be prophets to a mix that already includes just about every major religious tradition and it's enough to make you at least wonder if something (or someone) big isn't headed our way in the near future.

But we live in a rational age, and most prophecy, no matter how compelling, isn't going to convince the skeptical Sergeant Fridays (or Agent Scullys) of anything. Indeed, if all we have are highly subjective interpretations, based on highly uncertain timing suggested by prophetic statements that we may or may not yet believe, then the notion of the coming Messiah starts to look like it's resting on pretty thin ice. And so it may be. However, there is more to the story, and it has to do with something far more objective than any particular interpretation of any particular prophecy. It has to do with the unique characteristics of this moment in history.

As a species, we are just waking up to the fact that we have become a global power capable of giving and taking away life on a planetary scale. Whether or not we are in the end times, we are definitely playing an endgame with human history. Everything we do has global implications, and these days God's wrath is pretty low on the list of apocalyptic concerns. Indeed, we're quite capable of taking out the biosphere, destroying civilizations, and releasing plagues, all by ourselves. Don't like the Book of Revelation? Fine. Just read some recent issues of Science magazine. Or Wired. Or Michael Crichton's latest novel. The end of the world is a notion that has escaped the confines of theology and now thrives in sociology, economics, science, and politics. And that should give everyone more than a moment of pause—not only for the gravity of our collective situation but also for the fact that never, before a very recent point in history, has it been possible to so easily fulfill the prophetic statements of our apocalyptic heritage. As Dr. Landes puts it, "Just at the moment where I don't know of any serious scholar who would actually profess publicly that he believed in a God who intervenes in history, we now don't need to believe in a God who intervenes in history to believe in an apocalypse. Up until recently, you had to have God for an apocalypse to occur. But we now have objective scientific reasons to believe in it."

While it might not be enough to make one a true believer, the recognition of this time period as a profound global transition point unlike any other in recorded history starts to have eerie resemblances—the first such similarities that have existed in history—to the exact conditions that we are told over and over again will call forth a messiah into this crisis-riddled world and change human destiny forever.


SEARCHING FOR SALVATION

"Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that it passes through,
He unleashed His power at an unknown hour that no one knew.
How long can I listen to the lies of prejudice?
How long can I stay drunk on fear out in the wilderness?
Can I cast it aside, all this loyalty and this pride?
Will I ever learn that there'll be no peace, that the war won't cease
Until He returns?"



Only a God can save us," declared the German philosopher Heidegger as he approached the end of his life and looked out on the looming realities of the twentieth century. He was perhaps speaking for a great many who look out at the overwhelming nature of our modern society and find themselves reaching beyond human agency for the answers to the urgent questions of our time. For better or worse, we live in a culture well primed for a messiah—a culture that Dr. Landes describes as a "supersaturated solution."* "In order for an apocalyptic movement to take," he explains, "it really has to be carried by a prophet who has sufficient charisma to act as sort of a seed crystal in a supersaturated solution. Seed crystals won't work if the tension isn't big enough. But if the tension is big enough, amazing things will happen." Those "amazing things" may be even more amazing in today's world, as messianic movements find themselves poised to have an unprecedented global impact. For all would-be messiahs out there, that is good news indeed, but for the rest of us the picture is a little more murky. Indeed, Heidegger himself was temporarily seduced by the Nazi regime, and his and others' missteps serve as fair warning that when it comes to picking messiahs, human beings don't always do such a great job of evaluation. And in this brave new world, everyone is potentially affected by both our successes and our failures. There simply is no longer any geographical isolation behind which we can hide from the eschatological visions and millennial dreams of our brother and sister religions, not to mention our own. When an evangelical minister suggests to Pat Robertson that maybe he should not run for president because success in making the world a better place might delay the Second Coming of Christ, you don't have to be a fundamentalist or even a Christian to feel the dangerous proximity of the apocalyptic fires of Western history. And when certain groups in radical Islamic circles declare that the only way to bring about the true Islamic society ruled by the Mahdi is to act as violent agents of a cataclysmic transition, none of us can afford to ignore the implications. Like it or not, we truly are a global village, and if a few neighbors down the street decide the Apocalypse is near and the prophesied one is set to arrive, there is no way to pack up your house and move on.

Still, the omnipresent reality of globalization cuts both ways. "Christ and the Buddha worked in a time where they had a very limited influence because of the geographical constraints upon them. Today, any true teacher who comes forth has the media at his or her fingertips and can reach the entire planet rather than just a small area in Palestine or a small area in India," says Kathy Newburn, an editor at Lucis Trust, publisher of the works of the late esoteric spiritual teacher Alice Bailey. "The power for planetary transformation is so much greater this time, and that's why I think there's an opportunity here for a teacher, or teachers, to come and transform the consciousness of the planet as a whole through the internet and mass media. There's a possibility that through the influence wielded by a group of men and women who are truly enlightened, the whole structure of our planet can shift to a much higher level." In messianic millennialism, as in all other fields, globalization is a twenty-first-century reality, and it is a reality that could be our greatest ally or our most dangerous foe. In the end, perhaps, it simply depends on exactly what kind of messiah figure we are talking about. And that brings up a crucial question: What kind are applying for the job?


*A supersaturated solution is a solution that contains more dissolved solute than can ordinarily be accommodated at that temperature. Therefore, if you drop a seed crystal into it, the entire solution will crystallize out almost instantaneously. All the chemicals in the solution will quickly find their places in relationship to the seed crystal.