20 September 2006

The Rapture

The Times has surrendered, as I knew they would. It doesn't matter whether the Pope had a point in bringing up what it was like in a time before the Eastern Empire was put to the sword, given the choice of conversion or slavery. The Holy Father is in an awkward position. He can speak revealed truth for the whole church, ex cathedra, and he can also speak as a mortal theologian, which I think is what he was doing in his lecture.

It is a fine distinction, I will grant, but people have been very excited about it in the past.

There is no equivalent to the Pontiff in the Islamic tradition, so the fact that several clerics immediately called for the burning of Rome and the Pope's beheading cannot be held to be precisely equivalent. The Times could have noted that the principle of conversion by the sword lasted long after the fall of Constantinople. It was common in the time of the Barbary Pirates who operated out of Tripoli, and continued through last month, when the two Fox cameramen converted to Islam in Gaza and walked free from their captors.

I must remember that option as a sort of “Get out of jail free” card. I'll file it with my deathbed confession option, and hope I have my wits about me when the time comes.

Timing is everything. I was hurtling somewhere or another in town the other day, listening to news about the strange objects floating in space alongside the Shuttle, and why precisely the Thai Army had toppled the government. I have a deep appreciation for Thai politics, which are subtle and even more entertaining than the musical “The King and I.”

The Thais were left behind as a discussion of Christian Zionism began. I almost swerved into an abutment when I heard that the Rapture might happen before the end of the broadcast. That could change everything .

If you haven't been reading popular fiction of late, or listening to the further reaches of the Republican Party, you may not be familiar with the concept. The Rapture is an event that presages the End Time when all true Christians will be taken into Heaven, leaving the rest of us to sort things out in a fairly rough patch of history, which is optimistically called “The Tribulations.”

I do not know if there will be a physical floating up of the Believers, though some hold to that view. A couple years ago a Texas woman leapt from her moving auto when she saw some sex-dolls filled with helium tethered to a speeding pick-up truck. It was a natural enough mistake, though the dolls were only headed for a birthday party, not the second coming.

The Pope does not concur with the Rapture concept, if he will permit me to speak for him, since Roman Catholic doctrine says that it is not rooted in the apostolic tradition. The nature of the Rapture is subject to great debate in the fundamentalist community. The man I heard being interviewed was the Rev. John Hagee, and he was the one who said that the Rapture was getting so close that it might happen right then on the radio.

Hagee is the founder of a group called Christians United for Israel. He is the senior pastor of Cornerstone Church, one of those evangelical mega-facilities located in the pleasant town of San Antonio, Texas. He has written extensively on the subject of what is to come in these end-days. His latest is called Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World, which details how the Arab and Russian armies will destroy Israel. He says the End of Days has already begun.

I encourage anyone with an interest in the end of the world to pick up a copy. It is just as strange to most of us as President Ahmadinejad 's sincere belief that the 12th Imam is going to appear shortly and square things away. The Reverend Hagee and the President of Iran have a lot more in common than you would think, and I would like them to get together and share their views.

Not being a cleric, I have no claim on foreknowledge on how all this is going to work out. Still, I theorize that these strikingly similar visions of an apocalyptic future can be self-fulfilling, though mutually exclusive.

Unfortunately, they will continue to talk past one another, just like the Presidents of the Islamic Republic and the United States at the UN. Is it a weapons program in Iran, or peaceful power? Someone is fibbing.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of room for discussion, though there ought to be an option short of the deployment and use of nuclear weapons. The Rapture did not happen yesterday, despite the Rev. Hagee, but it would have been pretty cool to see everyone float right out up of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York.

We have tribulations enough as it is. I think we could get along without this set of world leaders just fine.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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