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John's apocalyptic vision in the Book of Revelation first caught my attention as a young student at UCLA in the late sixties. It was a wild, wonderful, worrisome time to be in school. The war in Vietnam was raging, and war protests regularly punctuated a day at the university. I remember the daily hum of police helicopters hovering over hot spots in Westwood, periodic sweeps by the Los Angeles Police Department across campus, and the agitated, turbulent, urgent words of speakers on the free-speech platform just off Bruin Walk. The issue of the day might be the war itself or it could range across topics from economics and politics to philosophy, music, or sex.

What I most vividly recall, though, is the deeply felt urgency of the times. Many students sensed they stood on the edge of history; discussions and debates, religious or not, often had an apocalyptic tone. The world seemed tilted on edge, off-kilter, out of balance. The conflict over the war in Vietnam revealed cracks in American moral underpinnings, at least from the perspective of the young. Students opposed to the war insisted that it end immediately. Others felt just as strongly that those opposing the war were disloyal, cowardly sentimentalists, unaware of political realities. Whether for or against the war, many students sensed that life in America was changing: politically, morally, spiritually.

It was a time of extremes, of deep darkness and bright light and, surprisingly, of opportunity for the gospel, for unexpectedly, in the midst of this screwy, sexually overheated, violent world the gospel found a ready audience. Where? Precisely among young people who were longing to find a point of moral and spiritual clarity and stability, a rock in the midst of the storm, truth in the midst of the falsehoods of both the Right and Left, forgiveness in the midst of an increasingly jaded culture. Christ presented himself in the guise of street preachers such as "Holy Hubert" at Berkeley and singers like Larry Norman in Los Angeles. More conventional ministries, such as Campus Crusade for Christ, attracted some. Some less conventional groups, such as the Christian World Liberation Front at Cal, reached others. The revival known as the Jesus movement broke out on college campuses and rippled through the counterculture.

What I learned from Hal
I first heard the gospel in a context, manner, and form I could understand from a former tugboat captain named Hal Lindsey. Every Wednesday night, students from UCLA gathered at the Light and Power House, a former college fraternity house on the fringes of the campus, to hear Hal teach the Bible. Some students came from evangelical backgrounds. Many more were from nominal Christian or secular homes. Hal, often dressed in a tank top, blue jeans, and leather boots, walked us through the Bible. I recall, almost wistfully, the sense of excitement, intensity, and urgency we felt as Hal linked the Scripture to our world, our dilemmas, our questions. He possessed a gift for linking the simplicity of the gospel to our longing for truth and our interest in discerning how Christ's work and words were connected to life in the wacky world of the sixties. And of course, Hal's interest in biblical prophecy fed into the wider apocalyptic fervor of the youth culture and American culture at large.

As a young Christian, I possessed only vague recollections from childhood that Jesus had said he would come again. Words, phrases, and symbols such as Rapture, Great Tribulation, pretribulation, posttribulation, millennium, Antichrist, Beast, and 666 were entirely new to me. As Hal interpreted apocalyptic images from Daniel and Revelation, a new world opened up—a world that God controlled, even in its worst moments, and promised both to redeem and judge. Tremendous hope and fervor enveloped me and other students.

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October 25 1999, Vol. 43, No. 12