Nightmares of a Dying World and the Dream of a Counter‐Apocalypse

Catherine Keller

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2021, vol. 80, issue 5, 1475-1493

Abstract: In common parlance, an apocalypse refers to a calamity that signals the end. It represents a closure. But the original meaning in the biblical Greek is the opposite. Apocalypse means “revelation” or disclosure. It offers hope, not despair. For the early Christians facing persecution by the Roman Empire, hope was disclosed in a coded narrative that showed the hidden weakness of their tormentors. The “beast” of imperial power and the “great whore” of its global economy crash in mutual destruction. For us, the revelation we most need is reflexive: signs that will enable us to see clearly how our current civilization is self‐destructive. If the new Rome is the Pax Americana, the empire that the United States has imposed on much of the world in the name of democracy and freedom, the “whore of Babylon” is the global economy. Once again, what appears on the surface to be an unstoppable force of progress is the engine of its own destruction. Right‐wing Christians have inverted the vision, seeing, by analogy, the emperor as the one being persecuted. Rather than abandoning the apocalypse to reactionary literalizations or liberal paralysis, we may read it in terms of a counter‐apocalypse. Not a mere anti‐apocalypse, this symbolic strategy helps us to address such cataclysmic threats as climate change in the spirit of an honest hope, beyond panic or evasion.

Date: 2021
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