The End

of the
World (Yet Again)?
T he year 2000 came and went. If we flash back for a moment,

we’ll recall that in the lead-up to 2000, chaos was predicted to envelop our
computerized and electrified civilization. It was called Y2K: a simple flaw
in computer software design was supposed to bring about the end of the
civilized world. Power stations, telecommunications, bank accounts,
billing processes were all supposed to grind to a halt or be thrown into a
state of chaos.

But it never happened. Instead, the end of 1999 and the beginning of
2000 is best remembered for the stupendous displays of fireworks in
principal cities of the world, many of them televised and shared with
viewers in all nations. The specter of doomsday was a phantom.

A decade later, where are we? Wars are being fought in Iraq and
Afghanistan using sophisticated computerized weaponry. A languishing
global economy is desperately trying to revive itself. The Internet is an
indispensable part of life for the majority in the Western world and even
for a considerable number of individuals in the developing world. And we
are being told about another approaching doomsday.

If we are to believe the latest hype, December 21 or 23, 2012, is when the
world will really come to a climactic end. This time the fear has been
sparked by an interpretation of the ancient Mayan calendar, furthered by
numerous books and documentaries. And it has spawned, perhaps
predictably, yet another Hollywood disaster movie.

The supposed cataclysm of 2012 may appear to be corroborated by some

sources, ranging from economics to science. That’s not to say that 2012 is
necessarily central to their concerns; in some cases, it’s just a convenient
peg on which to hang their hat as they rally support for other pet theories.

But does the Mayan calendar really speak of an end of the world, or is it
just the end of one calendar cycle—a recurring event according to Mayan
reckoning? Those who have studied the calendar and the culture that
developed it dismiss the entire end-of-the-world prediction as a
misinterpretation of the data: they say that it doesn’t speak of an end per se
but of a new beginning. (See “Mayan Mayhem: Is 2012 the End of the
World?”)

Still, the Mayan calendar is not the only source of current apocalyptic
angst. The words of Nostradamus also figure heavily into the latest
prognostications. In fact, an Internet search on “Nostradamus 2012” yields
nearly 1.5 million hits. Nostradamus wrote on religious themes; indeed,
the 2012 theme has become a phenomenon for the New Age movement
and thus a religious event.

But the 16th-century seer’s writings, recorded in quatrains, or poetry in

four-line format, are flexible enough to support any of several apocalyptic
scenarios that are being put forward today. One Web site that provides
resources and background material for those interested in 2012 offers this
evaluation of Nostradamus: “He is best known for his book Les
Propheties. . . . Many of his prophecies dealt with disaster such as plagues,
earthquakes, wars, floods and the coming of three antichrists. However his
predictions are vague and people tend to apply his words to many
situations.”
It’s an appropriate comment. People have often used Nostradamus to
bolster their own predictions, though so far his mystical verses have proved
most accurate when superimposed onto past events.

DOOMSDAY’S PULL

So why are so many drawn in, or at least intrigued, by apocalyptic hype

every time a new theory emerges? Average people of all descriptions tend
to be at least somewhat interested in speculating about future events and
the possible demise of civilization as we know it. Banking on this
inclination, Slate magazine (August 7, 2009) offered a chance to “choose
your own apocalypse.” Offering 144 scenarios, they asked readers to weigh
in on how “the greatest of the world’s great powers,” America, would most
likely fall.

And let’s be realistic: not all end-time scenarios are completely far-fetched.
For example, one of the phenomena that have been linked to 2012 is a
polar shift, and astronomers say that this could certainly occur in the
foreseeable future. But with our current knowledge, such an event can’t be
linked to any specific date; nor, more importantly, does it portend
disaster (see “Turning the World Upside Down”). With regard to the
economy, calamity could occur at any time, before or after December
2012, if a rash action by the government of some major power triggers a
collapse of the global financial system. But we can only speculate about the
timing or even the results.

In a way, the 2012 hype is only the very tip of an iceberg, in that interest
in “the end” is not a new phenomenon. For Western civilization, the roots
lie deep in Judeo-Christian aspects of eschatology—the study of “the end”
or “the last.” For millennia, writers and sages have foretold the end of the
world, and the Bible contains some of the oldest and best known of these
accounts.
But such a study is not the exclusive preserve of the Judeo-Christian
culture. The ancient Greeks also discussed the end of the world, though
for them it was in the domain of philosophy, whereas in Judaism,
Christianity and Islam it was always a religious and theological matter.
Moving farther afield, we find that Buddhism has its own variety of
eschatology, whereby a person escapes the restraints of the physical to
attain an ultimate state of Nirvana.

In the 21st century, we find all these ideas melding together. It is as

though something in the human genome makes us understand that all is
not right with the human condition; we witness, incessantly and with
glaring detail from even remote parts of the earth, the suffering and death
that are so much a part of life. We just know that some change needs to
take place for humanity to accomplish its rightful place in the universe.

Bill T. Arnold of Asbury Theological Seminary, writing in the Oxford

Handbook of Eschatology, addresses this unhappiness from the perspective
of the Old Testament prophets: “Such a conviction that the intrinsic
depravity of the present world will someday be overturned results in an
eschatological ethic, calling upon God’s people to live faithfully to the
covenant and the righteousness enjoined by the prophets.”

But people in the 21st-century developed world are surely not driven by
such mystical ideals as are contained in the writings of the prophets—are
they? As unlikely as it may seem, such appears to be the case. In fact, James
Cameron’s latest blockbuster movie, Avatar, appeals to some of these
Western sensibilities. It speaks to the fact that humanity is not satisfied
with its role within the cosmos and the handling of its responsibilities.
Analyzing Cameron’s movie in a December 21, 2009, New York Times
op-ed column, Ross Douthat observed: “Religion exists, in part, precisely
because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms [of suffering and
death as a part of nature]. We stand half inside the natural world and half
outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics,
mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.”

Perhaps another way to put it is that humanity stands above the rest of
creation and recognizes that it is to some degree responsible for it, a role
with which even the earliest biblical record of human life agrees (see, for
example, Genesis 2:15). It reinforces a concept broached by David Novak,
a rabbi and professor in philosophy at the University of Toronto. Speaking
of Jewish eschatology, he suggests: “It might well be concerned with the
final realization of both human and divine hopes for each other.”
 The end of the world, as depicted in The Great Day of His Wrath by English painter John Martin
(1789–1854).

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

Lessons of the past should help us evaluate and temper ideas such as those
surrounding 2012.
The writings of the Jewish people bear witness to the frailty of human
judgment in such matters. In the late Second Temple Period, beginning
shortly before the start of the current era, numerous groups scoured the
Scriptures seeking to understand the timing of the Messiah’s coming, and
thus the end of the age, based on prophecies recorded in Daniel.

Roger T. Beckwith, who wrote Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and

Christian: Biblical, Intertestamental and Patristic Studies, sets out the
scenarios developed during that time and recorded in various extra-biblical
writings. The potential timing of the event ranged from 10 B.C.E. to 240
C.E., a span of perhaps seven or eight generations. All the predictions
focused on the same prophecy—Daniel 9, commonly referred to as the 70-
weeks prophecy—but they used different dates for the starting point. Not
surprisingly, therefore, they reached different dates for the conclusion,
when the Messiah would appear to deliver the nation.

The whole exercise disappeared within mainstream Judaisms, however,

when Hadrian banned Jews from Jerusalem following the Bar Kochba
revolt in 132–135 C.E. That revolt was actually motivated in large part by
Messianic expectations and claims. But with Jerusalem no longer accessible
to Jews, the fulfillment of the prophecy as then understood appeared to
lose context. How could it be fulfilled when Jerusalem had been taken
from them?

Apart from Kabbalah, the mystical branch of Jewish study, attempts to

chart the coming of the Messiah are now largely lost. It is not that Jews
don’t believe in it anymore, but their belief is tempered by an appreciation
that they can’t establish the timing of the event. This has not prevented
some Jews from claiming Messiahship themselves (for example, Sabbatai
Zevi, 1626–1676) or, now that Jerusalem is again the center of the Jewish
world, attempting to precipitate events to bring about the appearance of
the Messiah.
Most Jews, of course, rejected Jesus Christ as the Messiah. Those who did
follow Him came to understand after His death that He would return to
the earth at some future time. But He warned His followers not to be
caught in debates over the timing of His second coming. Matthew and
Mark recorded Jesus’ words in their Gospels, to the effect that no human
being could know the day or time of His return. Jesus continued by
showing His disciples what was important as they waited: they were to
focus on honoring God and treating one another with godly respect and
with a sense of responsibility for each other (Matthew 24:36–51; 25:1–46;
Mark 13:32–37). This reinforced concepts previously established by the
prophets, as noted by Asbury’s Bill Arnold.

Sadly the lesson has been learned by too few of those who have claimed to
be Christ’s followers. Some at the time of the Protestant Reformation,
discarding Roman Catholic notions of the church as the kingdom of God,
and possibly learning from certain Jewish kabbalists, set the scene in
Western society by once again fixing dates for the end of the world. From
the late 16th century onward, many Christians, especially those of Puritan
or Calvinistic leanings, have actively sought to establish that date. It need
hardly be pointed out that all attempts so far have failed miserably.

Regular readers of Vision will appreciate that we accept the Bible as the
Word of God. Accordingly we understand that an end-time apocalyptic
event will happen in the future, and that it will heal the rupture that
occurred between the Creator God and His creation. The timing of that
event is not given to human understanding, but the responsibility of
people who await it is clearly spelled out.

History shows, however, that humanity wants to know the particulars of

the event on its own terms, without considering the demands placed on us
by our Creator. To such people, the Bible issues a warning: it will occur at
a time when they least expect it (Matthew 24:44; Mark 13:33).
Come December 2012, the proclaimed end will most likely turn out to be
just like all the other ends of the world that people have predicted over the
centuries. Meanwhile, aren’t our energy and attention better devoted to
caring for what we have been given and to treating one another as we
would treat ourselves and as God treats us?

PETER NATHAN

SELECTED REFERENCES:

1 Edward Adams, The Stars Will Fall from Heaven: “Cosmic Catastrophe” in the
New Testament and Its World (2007). 2 Bill T. Arnold, “Old Testament
Eschatology and the Rise of Apocalypticism” in The Oxford Handbook of
Eschatology, edited by Jerry L. Walls (2008). 3 Roger T. Beckwith, Calendar
and Chronology, Jewish and Christian: Biblical, Intertestamental and Patristic
Studies (1996). 4 Paul Boyer, “The Foreordained Future: Apocalyptic Thought
in the Abrahamic Religions” in The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on
Contemporary Culture (Spring 2008: Imagining the Future). 5 Victoria Clark,
Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism (2007). 6 David Cook,
“Apocalypse During Our Time?” in The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections
on Contemporary Culture (Spring 2008: Imagining the Future). 7 Lawrence E.
Joseph, Apocalypse 2012: An Investigation Into Civilization’s End (2007). 8
David Novak, “Jewish Eschatology” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology,
edited by Jerry L. Walls (2008).
 Mayan Mayhem:
Is 2012 the End of the
World ?
Reading through the current literature on modern man’s predicament, the
question of how to achieve a balance between doomsday pessimism and
irresponsible optimism emerges as a central theme. It seems to be in man’s
nature to produce polarized viewpoints. . . . To maintain the view that the
unrestrained growth of today can be perpetuated for any length of time is
unjustifiable. . . . Such growth has taken place in the past, but extinctions
are also a fact of the past. In other words, growth will be checked, and the
checking by nature involves unpleasant consequences for those being
checked. It would be too much to expect any lower form of life to take
preventive action. This kind of forethought requires the level of
consciousness developed only in humans.

Peter Gretener, geologist.

The Vanishing of a Species?
T he concept of an end-time apocalypse punctuates human history.
From the book of Revelation to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) report, we gravitate toward anything that seems to give
insight into the future.

End-time connotations inevitably draw our interest. Thus, like a newly

discovered celebrity, the Mayan Calendar’s 2012 phenomenon is taking
hold—first with a notable documentary in 2008 and accompanying book,
2012 Science or Superstition, in 2009 (both published by the
Disinformation Company) and also with the recent major Hollywood
release, 2012. Despite its company name, the documentary does give some
measure of informative balance to the claims anthropologists make
concerning the meaning of the Maya chronology. The big-screen version
was less engaging.

With the tagline, “We were warned,” director/writer Roland Emmerich

seemed to be making a bid to portray the worst-case scenario. Adding
2012 to his stable of previous films including Independence Day, Godzilla
and The Day After Tomorrow (which brought the world, New York, and
North America respectively to ruin), Emmerich is making his mark as a
modern prophet of doom. But doom sells.

2012 is the ultimate disaster movie embodying (or disembodying) the best
of Emmerich’s penchant for destruction. According to Marc Weigert, the
film’s coproducer and visual effects supervisor, “One of the biggest
challenges is the sheer number of different types of disasters that happen in
the film: earthquakes, fissures opening in the ground, several cities are
destroyed, floods, huge volcanic eruptions. And each one of these had to
be designed. We had to do research and development for things that had
never been done before.”
Movies do have the capacity to encapsulate great themes and generate deep
conversation. According to cowriter Harald Kloser, the challenge and
opportunity of a restart, a rebirth of culture (as the Maya believed) is
intriguing, especially during difficult times. “Things are going wrong,
society isn’t working anymore, and the planet starts over. Some people get
a second chance to start a new culture, a new society, a new civilization.”

THE LONG VIEW BECOMES THE SHORT VIEW

The subject of the Maya Long Count Calendar has come to the fore in this
ongoing exploration for things of the end: the popularized understanding
has this system of timekeeping coming to a close on the December 2012
winter solstice.

Ancient peoples like the Maya did not understand the physics of the
motion of the planets and the galaxies, but they did understand the cyclical
nature of the heavens. Although most in the Western world give little
thought to the great celestial mechanism of which we are a part, to ancient
peoples, life was tied to the sky. This became incorporated into their
creation and religious mythologies. The precession, or slow wobble of the
Earth on its axis, causes the solstices to occur against a different set of
background stars each year. The plane of the tropic and the rising of the
sun will occur in what is called the “dark rift” of the Milky Way in 2012.

According to archaeologists who believe they have successfully overlaid the

modern Gregorian calendar with the Mayan, the “grand cycle” of the
world comes to completion in 2012. Vincent H. Malmström, of
Dartmouth College, writes, “Another interval of time as the Maya
conceived it was what we call a ‘grand cycle,’ composed of 13 baktuns,
which can likewise be translated as ‘a world.’ If the present world began on
August 13, 3114 B.C., then it is due to end on December 23, A.D. 2012,
according to the Maya, because that is when the 13th baktun will be
complete.”

John Major Jenkins, independent researcher of all things Maya adds, “For
early Mesoamerican skywatchers, the slow approach of the winter solstice
sun to the Sacred Tree [the “dark rift”] was seen as a critical process, the
culmination of which was surely worthy of being called 13.0.0.0.0, the end
of a World Age. The channel would then be open through the winter
solstice doorway, up the Sacred Tree, the Xibalba be, to the center of the
churning heavens, the Heart of Sky.”

THE END WAS NEARER

While there is much popular interest focused on a prophetic, end-time

interpretation of the Long Count calendar, the Maya culture itself
collapsed long ago, unraveling long before having an opportunity to see
the date that was to them a time of rebirth and renewal, the beginning of a
new era.

UCLA professor of geography Jared Diamond examines the disappearance

of the Mayans in his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed. He seeks an explanation for what he calls the overlooked but
“obvious facts that cry out” concerning the end of the Mayan
civilization—what he calls, “a collapse both of population and of culture
that needs explaining.” More than 90 percent of the population
disappeared after 800 C.E.; this included the disappearance of kings, Long
Count calendars, and other political and cultural institutions.

The Maya mythology embedded in their calendar envisions a coming time

of new birth, a refashioning of human consciousness, and an
enlightenment of symbiotic connectedness to the planet. Unfortunately,
just as many voices warn of our own global plight today, the Maya
themselves weren’t listening. They apparently did not let this hope of a
rebirth stop them from self-destruction. Diamond offers a sobering two-
stroke description to the historic Maya extinction: warfare and drought.
These too are descriptive of our time.

While some archaeologists view the Maya as gentle and peaceful, Diamond
contends that “we now know that the Maya warfare was intense, chronic,
and unresolvable, because limitation of food supply and transportation
made it impossible for any Maya principality to unite the whole region in
an empire, in the way that the Aztecs and Incas united Central Mexico and
the Andes, respectively.” Complicating matters, says Diamond, “around
760 C.E. there began the worst drought in the last 7,000 years, peaking
around the year 800 C.E., and suspiciously associated with the Classic
collapse.”

It is interesting that today we focus great interest on a failed civilization’s

calendar. Did the Maya believe that their survival to December 2012 was
inevitable, somehow predestined, a part of the greater cosmic scheme?
That the people who foresaw this date as significant failed to survive to see
its fulfillment is ironic. Were they really giving the rest of us an important
clue?

Maybe in some way they were. If one draws from the story that the Maya
disappeared “out-of-time” so to speak, then Diamond’s conclusion as to
the cause reverberates today. “We have to wonder,” he writes, “why the
kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious
problems [resource wars and water shortages] undermining their society.
Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of
enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with
each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all
those activities. Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya
kings and nobles did not heed long-term problems, insofar as they
perceived them.”
In their book The Dominant Animal, Paul and Anne Ehrlich provide the
follow-up to Diamond’s discussion. They hope to discover the societal
levers that could lift the focus from short-term wants to long-term
necessities. Having a better sense of how customs change, they conclude, is
at the heart of resolving “today’s human predicament, the threat posed by
the great weight of human numbers coupled with our unprecedented
technological capacity.”

“The penalties for continued ignorance, malfeasance, and folly among

opinion makers and the leaders of society—indeed, all of us—have
escalated enormously, and now those penalties may have global rather than
merely local or regional consequences. We have utterly changed our world;
now we’ll have to see if we can change our ways.”

THE TIME OF THE END

Whether one believes the biblical passages concerning a worldwide flood,

or the anthropologists’ tales of a migratory bottleneck out of Africa 50,000
years ago, events of our past may have imprinted on us a concern for the
future. Down through time we seem to be an ever-anxious species. This is
of course no different today: we are pummeled with new ways of
extinction. To believe that one is living in a time period prior to the
cataclysmic or apocalyptic hinge of history is a very contagious thought. It
is a stimulating thought, both exciting and threatening.

While this concern may lead to fearfulness about future events, the
pessimistic view is not the only view. The disciples, for instance, did not
ask Jesus for a sign of the end out of fear but out of anticipation. The
belief that one is living on the cusp of a new world is a ubiquitous and
long-lived theme found in human cultures, including the Maya. Scenarios
of the culmination of end-time events also change and mutate to take on
contemporary trappings as in the movies.
While end-time biblical passages are often dismissed for their obscure
meaning, they too are often updated and given modern contexts. For
instance, the apostle John’s startling first-century vision of “locusts” like
horses prepared for battle “their faces were like human faces, their hair like
women’s hair, and their teeth like lion’s teeth,” breastplates of iron and the
sound of their wings “like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing
into battle,” (Revelation 9:7–9) is often today reimaged as helicopter
gunships or similar modern instruments of warfare.

The good that will come from the horrific collapse that is the final
fulfillment of these prophecies—a restoration of all things, a refurbished
Earth, and an opportunity for all humans to know their potential as
children of God (Revelation 21)—is often overlooked. But this message of
a new beginning has become more compelling as the conditions of the
world and human relationships have continued to deteriorate over the
millennia. A time of rebirth, as the Maya cosmically conjured and the
Bible assures is the ultimate plan of God, will lift humankind past the
crisis of our own making.

As philosophers, religionists and scientists have recognized, we need to

change our way of living. “If the term Homo sapiens remains the
designation for a mechanical genius and a spiritual imbecile, the fate of the
species is sealed,” said the late University of Calgary geologist,
Peter Gretener. “After the agricultural and industrial-scientific revolutions,
it is now time for the Human Revolution.”

Although we will bring ourselves to the brink of destruction, the Bible

promises that our Creator will preserve us. A revolution is on the horizon;
while we can see the necessity of it, we are powerless to make it happen
and forever unaware of its timing. Nevertheless, we can individually seek
and apply the ways of God which are timeless and available to all who seek
them out. DAN CLOER
 Turning the
World Upside-
Down
“The type of electromagnetic manipulation we’ve been seeing could cause
a polar reversal.”

“I assume we’re talking about a reversal of the magnetic poles,” Adler said.

“I wish that were so,” Gamay interjected. “However, we may be facing a

geologic polar reversal where the earth’s crust actually moves over its core.”

“I’m not a geologist,” Adler said, “but that sounds like a recipe for a
catastrophe.”

“Actually,” Gamay said with a smile as bleak as it was lovely, “we may be
talking about doomsday.” – Clive Cussler, Polar Shift
I n Clive Cussler’s sensational 2005 novel, the author imagined the end of
the world as the result of a business transaction gone very wrong.

As the Mayan Calendar date of 2012 draws nearer, disastrous scenarios of

various types have been predicted. Though the Mayans actually
anticipated a time of renewal rather than an end-date for civilization (see
“Mayan Mayhem: Is 2012 the End of the World?”), if we are to believe
modern-day prophets of doom, a sudden event—initiated by physical
forces within the earth itself—is imminent and will wreak unimaginable
havoc on the planet.

That kind of prognostication tends to get some attention, especially when

proponents invoke science to back up their claims. But is there any
support for such scenarios? Apart from the occasional devastation caused
by a large volcano, earthquake or tsunami, the earth seems a rather stable,
unchanging place. Natural disasters, such as those recently experienced in
Haiti and Indonesia, may create great havoc for many thousands of people
and may cause climatic alternations for years into the future (as historic
volcanic eruptions have done), but even the largest of these geologic events
is tiny in relation to the planet as a whole. Is it scientifically reasonable to
supersize these events?

The most commonly advertised possibility for destruction is “pole

shifting.” First gaining notoriety in the 1950s thanks to history professor
Charles Hapgood, the theory describes the rocky shell of the planet slip-
sliding over the underlying interior until the North Pole and the South
Pole suddenly reverse themselves. As Cussler’s characters point out, such a
sudden shift would certainly be devastating.

Proponents of the pole-shift theory like to note that Hapgood elicited and
gained the support of Albert Einstein. “Knowledge of geological and
paleontological facts may be of decisive importance in the matter,”
Einstein wrote to Hapgood. “In any case, it would not be justified to
discard the idea a priori as adventurous.” Later he would provide a
foreword to Hapgood’s 1958 book Earth’s Shifting Crust, noting that “the
only doubtful assumption is that the earth’s crust can be moved easily
enough over the inner layers.”

Fifty years later, is such easy movement viewed as possible? Current

knowledge of seismic dynamics in fact validates Einstein’s cautionary note.
Rather than the entire crust moving as a single piece (as Hapgood
envisioned), modern tectonic theory describes the slow process of seafloor-
spreading and continental subduction, which allows plate sections to pull
apart as well as crush or thrust together. This plate contact is the origin of
most volcanoes and earthquakes.

This is very different from Hapgood’s hypothesis. Considering that the

earth’s crust does in a sense ride atop the planet’s more dense internal
material, there is a sliding of the outer across the inner, as Hapgood
suggested. And over long periods of time the continents do migrate across
the planet’s surface. But this movement is very slow, about the rate of
fingernail growth (approximately two centimeters per year). There is no
evidence that this rate might suddenly change or that it could cause a
geologic polar shift.

Independent of this motion, the earth’s magnetic poles also migrate and
rarely even flip-flop, north to south and south to north. Iron-bearing rocks
act as a kind of frozen compass revealing the timing of these magnetic
shifts, which in turn can be correlated with continental motion. But
magnetic polar shifts do not create mayhem on the planet’s surface.

While the planet is indeed a place of slow, dynamic change, it has

apparently avoided cataclysmic self-destruction for quite some time. So in
the end, those who predict that the world will be thrown into chaos by a
sudden and catastrophic polar shift may claim scientific backing, but it
would be more apt to say that in this case the science and the fiction are
poles apart. /DAN CLOER