Professor Gary Baines is a History Lecturer at Rhodes University. Two years ago he taught an interesting course entitled: “The apocalyptic imagination” in which he explored the fixation and pre-occupation that apocalyptists have over the end-times. Baines writes about his take on the 21 May 2011 end-of-the-world mis-prediction.
Professor Gary Baines is a History Lecturer at Rhodes University. Two years ago he taught an interesting course entitled: “The apocalyptic imagination” in which he explored the fixation and pre-occupation that apocalyptists have over the end-times. Baines writes about his take on the 21 May 2011 end-of-the-world mis-prediction.
The end of the world should have happened on 21 May 2010 according to Harold Camping of the California-based Family Radio group. Needless to say, doomsday has passed us by again. I say again because Camping made a similar prediction in 1994. You would have thought he would have learned his lesson; that he would have been reticent to indulge in such fantasizing after his earlier prediction proved premature.
Not so. The stunt certainly garnered an enormous amount of publicity and his church apparently received substantial donations from those who believed Camping and sold their possessions in anticipation of the end.
But it is precisely those whom he deceived that have a vested interest in seeing him vindicated. They do not recognise him for the charlatan he is.
For his part, Camping does not seem particularly perturbed that he raised the expectations of his followers that ‘the rapture’ was imminent again. Instead, he has claimed that he made a miscalculation because he was not ‘a genius’.
However, this admission of fallibility has not caused him to refrain from making further predictions. In fact, he has now proclaimed that the end of the world has been postponed until 21 October 2011!
If Camping’s predictions have the appearance of being something of a lottery, then the odds against the fulfilment thereof are rather long. For there have been many precedents for unfulfilled predictions of the end of the world.
The Family Radio ministry was following in the footsteps of the Millerites, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Branch Davidians and numerous other apocalyptic sects or millenarian movements. Some of these survived their disappointment to reinvent themselves.
Camping’s arbitrary calculations for the prediction of ‘the rapture’ seem to be based on an interpretation of select scriptures that owes a lot to pre-millennial dispensationalism.
The idea that God has mapped out a schedule for the history and future of humankind was popularised by John Darby, a 19th century evangelist affiliated to the Plymouth Brethren. According to Darby, there were seven dispensations of a thousand years. He held that the age of grace would culminate in judgement but not before God’s faithful had been rescued from ‘the tribulation’ that was to be visited upon the earth. Referencing a single verse from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, Darby invented the notion of ‘the rapture’ and reckoned that ‘the saved’ would be spirited away to heaven and so avoid God’s wrath.
In the 20th century the notion of ‘the rapture’ was advanced from the pulpits of certain Protestant and Pentecostal denominations by the use of the Scofield Reference Bible that promoted Darby’s eschatology.
It was further popularised by best-selling works of fiction such as Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series, as well as films like A Thief in the Night.
Camping’s Family Radio group apparently found adherents for its message in South Africa. This is because apocalyptic discourses have become something of a cultural idiom in our globalised world. Whereas religious doomsayers see ‘signs of the end times’ as confirmation of God’s foreordained plan, secular apocalypticists see phenomena such as global warming as causes of the end. In this respect they are correct.
The world is more likely to end as a result of humankind’s mismanagement of the environment than divine intervention. Upon this prediction I’m prepared to wager a bet.
