Anyone who was a Christian kid somewhere between 1960 and 1980 in the United States is likely to have heard, at some point, about Hal Lindsey and The Late, Great Planet Earth. Depending on what kind of church you grew up in you'd be unable to sleep some night wondering if the letters of your full name added up to 666. I ended up wondering about that calculation for my name at some point when I was ten or eleven and mentally attempted to add up the numbers in my name. Other than a one-time case of inadvertantly laboring my childhood brain to sleep I can't tell if I even stayed awake and focused enough to figure out what the calculation came to. Of course it was all moot since I didn't know Greek!
I would hear how within a generation of the restoration of Israel things would begin to take place that would usher in the end of everything. This seemed like a scary and depressing thing. It meant that the world was probably going to end in the year 2000 or at least within a few years of the next Democratic president getting into office. The one world religion was probably Catholicism and the European Union was the most likely candidate for global domination. By the time I was 18 and decided to do a little research on the European Union I came to the tentative but still caustic conclusion that the European Union was too imcompetent and militarily useless to become a global threat. The United States, on the other hand, could very easily become such a force in the wake of the fall of the Soviety Union. If I were still going to be of the Hal Lindsey variety end-times pundit the United States was the only plausible option for an ability to exert global power, not China.
But it has seemed that for decades American evangelicals and futurists have always wanted to imagine the Beast and the mark of the Beast and the number of his name were all out there and not for here. Since Obama got elected and some Christians have referred to him as the Obamanation of Desolation it seems that more American Christians of a particular party allegiance are willing to consider America the seat of the Beast after all. The idea that Revelation meant something practical nad meaningful to the first recipients of the document is just not worth considering for many of these people.
Over twenty or thirty years I have come to think that while American Christians at times like to say that the Bible is God's love letter to the Church or to the individual believer exceptions will get made. If the Bible as a whole is interpreted by American evangelicals as God's love letter to the Church then Revelation is the ALL CAPS BOLDFACE TYPED OUT SPAM WARNING IN YOUR EMAIL INBOX THAT THE END OF THE WORLD IS COMING IN FOUR AND A HALF HOURS BECAUSE OF THIS HEADLINE THAT GOT PUBLISHED TWENTY SECONDS AGO!
Of course after twenty years of these kinds of freak-outs there can be a lot of people who never put together that the thing that keeps changing is what Christians in America are supposed to be afraid of. "We're living in the end times" simply becomes the mantra by which whatever we're afraid of in more earthly and temporal terms is imbued with eternal significance. Let's face it for some American Christian Republicans just about nothing is more scary than American decline, a black Democrat in office, the possibility that non-Christian religions will become more dominant in what Francis Schaeffer used to call a post-Christian society, and outsourcing of the American job sector through decades of globalization. It's more appealing to blame the "them" than to consider that some of these problems are the result of decades of policies implemented by "us".
People can approach the book of Revelation with one of two interpretive approaches, as a book to encourage and justify fear or as a book to encourage and justify long-suffering and hope. I don't suggest that this is the only set of options for interpreting such a confounding and challenging book of the Bible, I merely suggest that historically there are practically just two ways of beginning to approach the content of the book. My own journey as a Christian has, where the book of Revelation has been the subject of thought, been a path from seeing Revelation first as a book justifying fears to offering hope. Hope does not preclude caution any more than caution precludes hope.
However the hope offered by Revelation to Christians is not a hope offered in the midst of American greatness. This hope is not offered with the proviso that everything will go well. This hope is not offered with some get-out-of-the-tribulation-free-via-Secret-Rapture card. Those destined for the sword will meet the sword and this is a call for the perserverance of the saints. There may be a lot of American Christians who don't want the sword and who may run from it. You know what? I can't be so confident about my own Christian life to ever presume I couldn't be one of those. After all, we know from the Gospels that the man who was most certain he would never betray Jesus still denied Him three times.
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