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No, not Apocalypto, Mel Gibson's Mayan epic. I'm not a Gibson fan. Never saw The Passion of the Christ, and don't plan on seeing his latest either. Apocalypso is a different film—one that you won't find at the Cineplex, alas, since it exists only in my mind, where it has gestated for all of several days now.
The film holds two truths in tension. On the one hand, it's true that apocalyptic thinking often goes off the rails, on scales ranging from the fate of the two-party system in American politics (on Planet Krugman, there has been a lot of huffing and puffing about a Republican Reich, "one-party" rule such as our nation has before never seen) to the Last Judgment (fervent believers keep saying that the Second Coming is imminent, but the world totters on, century after century). So the film starts by establishing the pervasiveness of apocalyptic thinking in many different settings, with some captured footage (à la Michael Moore) mixed in. At the outset, such juxtapositions may give the impression that the point is merely to debunk. The radical imam who rants in Arabic about the imminent downfall of the United States and the extermination of the Jews (we'll be reading subtitles) and the woman who warns about the fate of songbirds will appear along with loony survivalists, right-wing preachers, and tenured professors such as I encountered last year at AAR/SBL in Philadelphia, who deplored America's descent into fascism while they waited in line at Starbucks.
On the other hand, apocalypses large and small are hardly limited to the fevered imagination of doomsayers. Languages die. Species become extinct. Histories are erased. Men, women, and children are ruthlessly taken into servitude, driven into exile, murdered, their villages destroyed, their cities occupied. And we are indeed headed for a Last Judgment, if what we affirm when we say the Apostles' Creed is congruent with reality. Gradually it becomes clear that generic talk about apocalyptic thinking doesn't take us very far. Some "apocalyptic thinking" needs to be taken seriously, for better or worse. (Who else is listening to the imam? And songbirds are indeed imperiled.)
Doesn't sound like much of a movie, you say? It looks great in the theater inside my head. (And the sound track is terrific: Rev. Charlie Jackson, Rev. Dan Smith, and of course Blind Willie Johnson doing "John the Revelator.") What got me thinking about this was hearing Bill McKibben speak about global warming (in chapel at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota) just as I was reading Jonathan Kirsch's new book, A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization (HarperSanFrancisco).
Kirsch is a lively writer and—as I learned when I met him at a book convention several years ago—a genial conversation partner. His book, which is devoted to the Book of Revelation and its influence down through the centuries—"the history of a delusion," Kirsch calls it—is certainly worth reading, learning from, and arguing with. He is frank about his distaste for John's vision. "Above all else," he writes, "the author of Revelation is a good hater." Rather predictably, Kirsch contrasts the "black-and-white morality of Revelation" and its "particularly heartless theology" with the love-centered teaching of Jesus, conveniently omitting any mention of Jesus' own hard sayings.
Kirsch appears to assume a readership that will largely share his moral disgust and incredulity at the very idea of a final reckoning such as John envisions. In this he is surely not alone. Many Christians today share his sentiments. (I have at hand a book called The Evangelical Universalist.) But what if John's symbolic narrative expresses a fundamental truth, quite apart from how that truth has been abused and distorted in sometimes absurd, sometimes terrible ways? Can Kirsch entertain that as a possibility? Can we? Reality is not conformed to our specifications, as one of Philip K. Dick's characters observes; rather it is we who must conform to it.
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