Armageddon and the End Times

By Richard N. Ostling

Prophecies of the last days surface as a campaign issue

For they are demonic spirits. . . who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle on the great day of God the Almighty . . . at the place which is called in Hebrew Armageddon . . .

--Revelation 16:14,16

In one of the most peculiar twists of the 1984 campaign, St. John's apocalyptic vision of the "End Times" emerged last week as a political issue. During the final presidential debate, Panelist Marvin Kalb of NBC asked Ronald Reagan, "Do you feel that we are now heading, perhaps, for some kind of nuclear Armageddon?" While Nancy Reagan gasped, "Oh, no!" to companions, the President answered that, yes, he had chatted with people about "the biblical prophecies of what would portend the coming of Armageddon and so forth, and the fact that a number of theologians for the last decade or more have believed that this was true, that the prophecies are coming together that portend that." But, he added soothingly, "no one knows whether those prophecies mean that Armageddon is a thousand years away or day after tomorrow. So I have never seriously warned and said we must plan according to Armageddon."

Despite that disclaimer, Reagan's critics wonder whether the President's apparent belief in a particular biblical scenario for the end of the world means that he might consider nuclear war a divine instrument. Accordingly, more than 100 religious figures, many from the antinuclear left (among them the Rev. William Sloane Coffin and Pacifist Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton), held a Washington press conference last week to declare it "profoundly disturbing" that high political leaders "might identify with extremists who believe that nuclear war is inevitable and imminent." They also attacked the religious right for supposedly believing "that reconciliation with America's adversaries is ultimately futile." The statement was orchestrated by the Christie Institute, a liberal research and action agency, which drew on some enterprising research by Journalists Ronnie Dugger and Joe Cuomo that cited eleven public and private utterances by Reagan on the possible imminence of Armageddon.

One of the unnamed but presumed targets of the Christie Institute, Moral Majority Founder Jerry Falwell, dismissed the charges as "a thinly veiled attack on Ronald Reagan by liberal clergymen who have thus far found him invulnerable." Falwell said that he repudiated any "extremist world view which demands a nuclear Armageddon."

Most Christian churches teach that the end of history will be marked by Christ's return to earth to establish a perfect kingdom. A number of Old and New Testament passages describe the prelude to this event in terms of angelic battle and earthly turmoil. One of these vivid prophecies, the only one that names Armageddon,* is Revelation 16. Most scholars believe that Revelation and other prophecies refer to such epochal events as Jesus' death and resurrection and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in A.D. 70. Others see them as symbolic depictions of the spiritual struggle between good and evil. Liberal theologians tend to discount them altogether.

Some Christians, however, have always held doggedly to literal interpretations of such texts. This view flourishes in the U.S., not only in such sects as Jehovah's Witnesses and Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God but also within evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant churches. Literalists are called premillennialists because they believe Christ's Second Coming will precede an actual millennial kingdom (Revelation 20:6).

The most literal of the literalists are known as dispensationalists. They have devised elaborate systems of dividing history into divinely ordained eras. Reagan is among the millions influenced by this subculture, which is actively promoted by Bible colleges, seminaries, TV and radio preachers, and popular products of the Second Coming industry like Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, which has an astonishing 15 million copies in print.

Dispensationalists' versions of how these biblical prophecies will be fulfilled vary wildly and, to mainstream Protestants, seem forced and fanciful. Many contemporary "signs of the times" (famines, wars, earthquakes), say critical commentators, have existed in almost all historical periods. But the prophetic movement can point to the fulfillment of what they see as a major biblical prediction. Two generations before Zionism emerged, dispensationalists insisted that one prologue to the End Times would be the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. Thus when Israel was founded in 1948, says Hal Lindsey, "the prophetic countdown began!" Israel's capture of Old Jerusalem in 1967 was equally portentous, since it seemed to fulfill Jesus' words in Luke 4:24 and made theoretically possible the rebuilding of the Temple on its original site, a long-established requirement of many dispensationalists. According to some, the Antichrist will make his headquarters there prior to Jesus' last coming.

Falwell's followers believe Christians will be swept or "raptured" into heaven before the great Tribulation. A common version of the end is that the Soviet Union (the evil northern empire of Ezekiel 38-39) will swoop down upon Israel but be defeated. After a later battle at Armageddon, God will inaugurate the millennium.

Trying to put the Armageddon issue into perspective, one moderate evangelical, New Testament Professor A. Berkeley Mickelsen of Minnesota's Bethel Theological Seminary, points out that the accounts of Christ's return are rich in symbolism. Says he: "If you're not careful, pretty soon it's Buck Rogers. To take apocalyptic language and make it scientific language is wrong." He is perturbed at the prophecy hunters' emphasis on global conflict. "Scripture teaches that great nations must treat compassionately the oppressed of the earth," says Mickelsen. "When Christ really does break into this scene, there will be a lot of surprised people."

--By Richard N. Ostling.

Reported by James Castelli/Washington and Michael P. Harris/New York

* Often interpreted to mean "Hill of Megiddo," near the site of several great Old Testament battles.

With reporting by James Castelli, Michael P. Harris