World Without End

The power of story and apocalypse

A sampling
Originally uploaded by chadbrooks

I have been on vacation for a couple of weeks and today is my first full day home. I wanted to watch a movie for a little while just to lay low. Out of 5 DVDs randomly on top of the player...these three were found. The others were some of Meredith's marathon documentaries.

Most of my friends laugh at my collection, because I have a thing for post-apocalyptic movies. Funny thing is, most of our culture (especially the younger folk) do as well. In a secular culture that has no narrative of a beginning... a narrative regarding the end has to be made up. Consider it the joy of living in a postmodern matrix. Our reaction of some random scientific situation beginning our world means that some other random moment will end this world.

These movies provide a secular prophetic narrative, hopefully showing the woes of societal disintegration and causing the viewer to beware of what led to it. Whether it is the war machine, a random zombie virus, or the aftermath of a culture barely functioning and feeding off itself, these three movies provide just a hint of the story that folks and trying to write. By pointing out what could happen....the hope is that we now will change to avoid it.

The genre is one of my favorite (trust me...Zombieland is very entertaining) because it is sometimes humorous, but more in how it tells the story a world without the Triune God is hoping to avoid. It is our culture trying to imagine how a world that was never created can implode.

This is why I think about these things so much. As a church, we should be telling our story...from creation to end.

Glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit;
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be

Pop Culture and Eschatology

The past few days have been some heavier material, because I want to really set the scene for why it is important for Christians to engage with Eschatology.  But today will hopefully be lighter. 

Our culture is really obsessed with all things apocalyptic.  I think the History Channel is basing most of their lineup now on various shows that do a pretty good job of making most of us want to either curl up in a blanket and cry or load a shotgun.  We can also look at the movies that are coming out this fall and see how and why we are so obsessed.  Here are just a few.





So why is popular culture so apocalyptic these days?  I think that our past society so assured itself that it could create perfection and has now realized that it wasn’t possible.  This was the whole point with 19th and early 20th century liberal (philosophical NOT political) thought.  It was believed that humanity had in its ability the answers to create the perfect world, free of hurt, pain and despair.  In the process, Western culture mowed over anything in the way...marginal cultures, antiquated ways of life and even people.  The two World Wars were tumultuous to this thought, and through Europe into “postmodernity” easily 50 years before the United States.  Modern hope had been in the rational, logical ability of man and this was destroyed by the middle of the 20th century.

Now, we have a culture that has see-sawed over to the complete other side.  Secular culture can’t imagine any way out, so the influence of chance evolutionary creation and conservative Christian theology has created the idea of an unexpected cataclysmic event that can’t be avoided.

So what we do is make up alternate stories of end.  Robert Jenson (in an article called “How the World Lost It’s Story”) describes modernity as, “having a universal story without a universal storyteller.”  The Church has allowed this "made up" story to be the point at which we revolve our world around, and made the rational defense of Christianity a primary teaching and action, instead of the biblical Kerygma.  We have forgotten our place as a sojourning people.  Christian Eschatology does involve certain events that will happen in the historical framework of Earth, but the historical events only make sense by us realizing a view of the future that revolves around God completely unifying himself back with humanity and us realizing the fullest extent of who he is.  We have to realize this in the context of promise and not threat.

So lets engage our world and its false sense of end. 

Tomorrow:
Worship and Eschatology; The Gloria Patri

Glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit:
As it was in the beginning, is now, and shall ever be, world without end.
Amen