The Americanization of the Apocalypse

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The Americanization of the Apocalypse

• XIDS 2100-02

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Christopher Columbus

• Between 2nd and 3rd voyage to America, he
  compiled his own collection of apocalyptic and
  prophetic passages that he had extracted from the
  Bible, the writings of the church fathers, and
  various medieval commentaries, a work that he
  titled The Book of Prophecies.
• He was convinced that God bestowed the gold and
  silver of the Americas on Christendom in order to
  finance the reconstruction of the temple in
  Jerusalem, the apocalyptic city par excellence.

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Christopher Columbus (16th century)

• Recognized himself in the prophecies of Joachim
  of FioreColumbus wrote
• Jerusalem and Mount Zion are to be rebuilt by
  the hand of a Christian, and Abbot Joachim said
  that he was to come from Spain
• Who will offer himself for this work? If our
  Lord brings me back to Spain, I pledge myself, in
  the name of God, to bring him there in safety.
• Columbus was convinced that the End of Days were
  already under way
• God made me the messenger of the new heaven and
  the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse
  of St. John, and he showed me the spot where to
  find it.

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Puritans led by John Cotton (1585-1652)

• Their destination was the new promised land, a
  place that had been reserved by God for his
  elect people as the actual site for a new heaven
  and a new earth (Wlm. Blake)
• Increase Mather (1639-1723) Christ by a
  wonderful Providence hath dispossessed Satan, who
  reigned securely in these Ends of the Earth, for
  Ages the Lord knoweth how many, and here the Lord
  has caused as it were New Jerusalem to come down
  from Heaven.

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Western Christendoms Apocalyptic Invasion

• Reached its fullest expression in the arts,
  letters, and architecture of France and Germany
• Worked its strange magic with even greater power
  in the hearts and minds of Anglo-Saxons on the
  far western fringe of Europe
• Believed that Jesus walked upon Englands
  mountains green and would one day set the New
  Jerusalem among these dark satanic mills (Wlm
  Blake)

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William Blake (1757-1827)

• Obsessive reader and reinterpreter of Revelation
• Poem Jerusalem became a British national hymn
• I will not cease from mental fight
• Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
• Till we have built Jerusalem
• In Englands green and pleasant land.

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Puritans

• Refused to sing hymns to England, its church, or
  its monarch
• Believed Church of England was as corrupt as
  those of the Roman Catholic Church
• Claimed kings of England as likeliest candidates
  for the role of Antichrist
• Considered Europe another Babylon

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PuritansArrival in New World

• Promptly unpacked and polished up the old
  apocalyptic texts
• John Winthrop (1588-1649), first governor of
  Massachusetts Bay Colony, famously invoked the
  New Jerusalem when he likened the Puritan
  settlement to a City upon a Hill
• Michael Wigglesworths (1631-1705) The Day of
  Doom, a poem, was the first best seller in the
  annals of the American book trade
• Accentuated the positive in Revelation and gave
  the apocalyptic idea a uniquely American spin
  that has persisted into our own anxious age
  Remarkably, the end of the world and the
  destruction of humankind, if viewed in the right
  way, could be seen as a good thing.

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Apocalyptic Dates

• John Napier (1550-1617) Scottish mathematician,
  originator of the logarithm, applied his
  arithmetical genius to a treatise on Revelation
  in which he argued that the 7th and final age of
  human history and begun in 1541 and would end in
  1786
• Isaac Newton (1642-1727) engaged in his own
  apocalyptic number-crunching

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Old World

• By the time the Puritans were coming to America,
  the book of Revelation had already started its
  descent into the netherworld of religious
  oddities and curiosities
• Great London Fire of 1666 brought a fresh wave of
  doomsaying
• By 1696 William Whiston argued that a wholly
  natural celestial phenomenon like Halleys Comet
  may have caused the Great Flood of Genesis and
  proposed that the earths prophesied destruction
  by fire would be by the same means.
• Prediction included no second coming, no last
  judgment
• Allowed no role for God

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Cotton Mather (1663-1728) son of Increase
Mather, grandson of John Cotton

• Earnest belief in the power of witchcraft as
  supposedly practiced by the women of Salem
• Penned a panic-making treatise on satanic
  possession that played a role in the witch
  trials Go tell the world what these Monsters
  love to do
• Belief in the power of the newfangled science of
  smallpox inoculation
• Had his young son inoculateda controversial act
  in colonial Boston
• Prompted one citizen to bomb his lodging room
  But, this Night there stood by me the Angel of
  God, whose I am and whom I serve

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Mather Herald of the Lords Kingdom now
approaching

• Conviction that he was beholding, at once, the
  shuddering death of the old earth and the birth
  pangs of the new one
• Mathers blend of optimism and paranoia is
  entirely characteristic of the millennial
  visionDamian Thompson
• fear of witches is above all evidence of
  End-time anxiety, since it was believed that the
  Last Days would see a terrible loosing of the
  powers of darkness
• At same time witnessed the prosperity of the
  American coloniesgreat increase in the
  blessings of the land and the seaas evidence
  that God had surely intended some great thing
  when he planted these American heavens and
  earth.
• Shared his father and grandfathers belief that
  America was the place where the prophecies of
  Revelation would be fulfilled
• So fixated on Revelation that the convinced
  himself that evil angels, speaking through a
  young woman whom he believed the be the victim of
  demonic possession, once scolded him for
  neglecting a certain passage from the book of
  Revelation in his sermons (Rev. 138)
• Defied the demon by choosing Rev. 2015casting
  into the lake of fire

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Mather Embracing Religion Science

• 1709 Our glorious LORD will have a Holy city
  in AMERICA
• Adopted a phrase that has become an American
  credo, a City, the Street whereof will be Pure
  God
• Masses immigrated to America looking for this
  pure goldliterally and figuratively

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Puritan Theocracy

• Embraced the Revelation style of government
• a theocracy as near as might be, to that which
  was the glory of IsraelJohn Mather
• Aspired to create a religious utopia and felt
  justified in denying citizenship to anyone who
  was not a member of the puritan congregation
• Soon eclipsed by new arrivals to America

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Founding Fathers

• Drew inspiration from the proto-democracies of
  pagan Greece and Rome
• Willing to tinker with the Bible itself Thomas
  Jefferson disdained the Book of Revelation and
  boldly took it upon himself to rewrite the
  Gospels ot suit the spirit of a revolutionary and
  democratic age, keeping only what he regarded as
  the very words of Jesus and cutting away the
  artificial vestments in which they have been
  muffled by priest, who have travestied them into
  various forms as instruments of riches and power
  for themselves

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Theres a new world comingcore theology of
Revelation

• Appealed to even the most secular of the American
  patriots
• Apocalyptic vocabulary of abuse put to good use
  by pamphleteers in the struggle for American
  independence
• King George denounced as the Antichrist
• Mark of the beast Stamp Act of 1765 required
  the American colonists to affix a tax stamp
  bearing the kings name and image to their papers
  and publications
• Samuel West sermonized on that terrible
  denunciation of divine wrath against the
  worshippers of the beast and his image meaning
  the British monarch (lion)

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1776 American Version of the New Earth

• A place where every human beingor, at least,
  every adult white maleenjoyed the inalienable
  rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of
  Happiness, free of the dictates of kings or
  priests
• 1782 Novus Ordo Secularum motto placed on great
  seal of the U.S.A new order of the ages.
• Thomas Paine, who stripped his rhetoric of all
  religious trappings, expressed himself in terms
  of the millennial ideal that can be traced all
  the way back to Revelation We have it in our
  power to begin the world over again.

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John OSullivan (1839) Manifest Destiny

• We are entering on its untrodden space, with the
  truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in
  our hears, and with a clear conscience unsullied
  by the past. In its magnificent domain of space
  and time, the nation of many nations is destined
  to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine
  principles to establish on earth the noblest
  temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most
  Highthe Sacred and the True.

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Revivalist vs. Reformers

• True believers who lift their eyes heavenward and
  search the skies for a sign of the Second Coming
• Practical believers who hunker down to the task
  of building the millennial kingdom with their own
  hands right here on earth
• Straddlers tried to do both at once

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Apocalypse Oppression and Persecution

• Revivalist and reformers on a collision course
• Victims told to console themselves with visions
  of revenge
• Let the code breaking begin

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Civil War

• Reminded even the most cheerful Americans of the
  dire events that are predicted
• Revelation served yet again as a language
  arsenal for combatants on both sides of the
  struggle
• The Battle Hymn of the Republic invokes the
  iconography of Revelation
• the fateful lightening of His terrible swift
  sword
• conjures up the vintage where the grapes of
  wrath are stored
• Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent
  with His heel
• Troops were rallied with apocalyptic language
  The Lord is mustering the nations to the last
  great struggle between freedom and slavery, truth
  and error. We are entering, fellow-citizens,
  upon a period foretold by prophets of oldlooked
  for and longed for by lovers of their country in
  past generationswhich kings and prophets waited
  the see, and have not seena period of the
  overthrow of despotism, and the downfall of
  Anti-Christ.
• New culture war Immigration of the Masses

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2 American Views

• Premillennialist
• Jesus will return to earth before the millennial
  kingdom is established
• Look heavenward in the hope of seeing Christ
• Postmillennialist
• Jesus will return only after the millennial
  kingdom has been established through the triumph
  and rule of the true church
• Focus on good works in the here and now

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The RaptureAn American Invention

• 19th century American Apocalyptic preachers
  rewrote the history of the end of the world with
  the happiest of endings
• Refused to believe that they would be called upon
  to endure the Tribulation
• Worthy Christians will be plucked up in the
  rapture to watch the chaos on earth, then they
  will return when the Antichrist has been
  dethroned

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The Rapture

• Neither the word nor the concept is mentioned
  anywhere in Revelation
• Based on a couple of lines in the Fist Letter to
  the Thessalonians
• For the Lord himself will descend from heaven
  with a cry of command, with the archangels call,
  and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And
  the dead in Christ will rise first then we who
  are alive, who are left, shall be caught up
  together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord
  in the air and so we shall always be with the
  Lord

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The Rapture elevated to Article of Faith

• Late 19th century among Christian fundmentalists
• Credited to an Anglo-Irish preacher named John
  Nelson Darby (1800-1882),
• who found an appreciative audience for his new
  teaching over the course of seven lecture tours
  to America between 1859 and 1877
• Traces of Joachim of Fiore and Increase Mather
• Accused of stealing the idea from Margaret
  McDonald, a fifteen-year-old Scottish religious
  ecstatic
• Idea adopted by Christian fundamentalist clergy
  including
• Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899) Moody Bible
  Institutes publishing house and radio station
• Cyrus R. Scofield (1843-1921) Scofield
  Reference Bible (1909)
• Between Moody and Scofield the Rapture achieved
  the status of received truth in the early years
  of the 20th century My hope is built on
  nothing less than Scofields notes and Moody
  Press (gospel song)

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Cults and Mind Control

• MIND CONTROL MADE EASY! Become a Cult Leader
  Today! http//youtube.com/watch?vV4-Hms7bHqY
• CIA Mind Control Techniques http//youtube.com/w
  atch?vi46RI2twVaofeaturerelated

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Homework-Quiz Grade

• Answer in typed paragraph form using specific
  evidence from Revelation. Refer to Boyetts
  breakdown
• Is Ms. Burgey the Antichrist?
• Her birthday is 6/30/60.
• Give specific reasons why or why not.

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Midterm Grades

• Average 78
• A 6
• B 4
• C 6
• D 3
• F 2