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Why Apocalypse, Now?
By Catherine Keller

"So, why involve ourselves in apocalypse? Perhaps the answer must be that we are already involved in apocalypse, involved in such many-layered and multivalent complexities of image and reality, of judgment and hope, and of illusion and disillusionment that we had best meditate upon apocalypse now and again. The proliferating smorgasbord of end-of-the-world scenarios (dispensational fundamentalists, contemporary interpreters of Nostradamus and the Mayan Calendar Stone, the UFO people, and Our Lady of Fatima) warns of the perils of this last decade of the millennium and points to a pervasive atmosphere. The phenomenal rate of major historical change marking the beginning of this decade will mingle in unpredictable ways with the varieties of apocalypticism. "

Why spend energy reflecting upon images of the end of time? Why should not ethically responsible people simply envision a desirable future as clearly as possible and, then, struggle as concretely as possible to realize it? In other words, unless we are wrapped up in some literalist millennialism (fixed, with no biblical warrant, upon the year 2000), why involve ourselves in apocalypse?

One answer is neatly put by Forbes, a U.S. business magazine proudly calling itself the "Capitalist Tool." In an enormous New York Times advertisement, illustrated by a lush tropical jungle scene (Rousseau's "The Dream of Yadwigha"), Forbes asks if the greenhouse effect is "fact or fantasy." Their answer: "In the media and on Capitol Hill, one thing is sure-apocalypse sells. Doubtless this is why the greenhouse effect is now such a hot topic."¹ The ad, aimed at advertisers and, thus, spun from the inner circle of those who "sell," goes on predictably to lambaste (without argument) the environmental "alarmists." It moves swiftly to its real agenda: "[T]he cure being touted [by environmentalists] could easily result in a revolt of the poor countries against the rich and hurl the world economy into the red." "Red" here denotes debt but also suggests a nostalgic effort to wring the blood of Armageddon from the fading fear of communism. So this anti-apocalypse is itself motivated by an apocalyptic anxiety - a dread

Catherine Keller is Associate Professor of Constructive Theology at the Theological School of Drew University. She is the author of From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (1986).

¹ The New York Times, Feb. 7,1990, p. D26.

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of final confrontation of the good, rich minority by the dark, poor, and wild creatures. The naked woman, the Black man, the wild beasts, romantically colonized in Rousseau's painting, are now prostituted into an advertising image meant to entice the viewer into a reassuring dream of a bountiful, unending nature, unveiled, like the woman's body, for the taking. But all of this bounty threatens revolt. Anti-apocalypse here opposes the prophetic posture of liberal environmentalists but nurtures its own apocalypse of capital, embedded within the "realized eschatology"² of heaven on earth. As we shall see, this particular (anti-)apocalypse unveils a dominant force of the nineties.

I

So, why involve ourselves in apocalypse? Perhaps the answer must be that we are already involved in apocalypse, involved in such many-layered and multivalent complexities of image and reality, of judgment and hope, and of illusion and disillusionment that we had best meditate upon apocalypse now and again. The proliferating smorgasbord of end-of-the-world scenarios (dispensational fundamentalists, contemporary interpreters of Nostradamus and the Mayan Calendar Stone, the UFO people, and Our Lady of Fatima) warns of the perils of this last decade of the millennium and points to a pervasive atmosphere. The phenomenal rate of major historical change marking the beginning of this decade will mingle in unpredictable ways with the varieties of apocalypticism.

Here theology can render a service. It may help us to locate ourselves within the mythic history of apocalypse, within the present histories in which the apocalyptic myth does or does not make sense and seek realization. I will be using the term "apocalypse" loosely, like a net to throw around the wide, disparate, and contradictory Wirkungs-geschichte that concerns me. "Myth" here does not mean untruth but rather the freefloating narrative (detached from and unaccountable to text or fact) in which "truth," "fact," and finally "text" itself, are framed.

Perhaps we should speak of an apocalypse pattern operating in, and to some extent as, Western history. This pattern has as its minimal elements several beliefs: (1) that the world as it has been is unacceptably and pervasively corrupt; (2) there will be an -imminent and unavoidable catastrophe, which will bring about the end of the "age" or " world"; (3) that the one proclaiming the end is prophetic and chosen. The original and intended meaning of "apocalypse" is " unveiling" or "disclosure," hence, "revelation." It is the most extreme genre among biblical eschatologies ("words about ends"). In

² Note for non-theologians: "Eschatology" is the doctrine of "end things," whether understood as the hope for the kingdom of God to be realized within history, at the end of history, or for an after-death heaven. "Realized eschatology" refers to the belief that, in some sense, the ends have already been or are being realized in the present. This is a belief, associated with the Augustinian tradition, that the church is the kingdom of God realized on earth to whatever extent it can be realized.

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its biblical modes, at least, the pattern will always involve a fourth belief, to be added to the above three: (4) hope for a new age beyond the final showdown, in which injustice has been purged and the natural cosmos renewed. But the distance between the biblical prophetic "revelation" and the present associations of "apocalypse now" is itself revealing.

Apocalyptic anxieties and messianic hopes flow like alternating currents through the global sensorium. Some take stridently religious or emphatically secular forms. But while the more fundamentalist religious forms of messianism barely veil highly focused political interests, secular establishments and movements often get caught in the grip of apocalyptic myth. This myth involves secular predictions of "the end of 'something-capitalism or, now, communism; feminism or patriarchy; "nature" or "history." These predictions point toward the apocalyptic pattern of a final, inevitable showdown between the forces of light and darkness. (The point here, of course, is that the one declaring "the end" stands on the side of an unambiguous and saving good.)

At least since the premillennialist movements of the nineteenth century, apocalypticism has shown that it can be apolitical or engaged, revolutionary or reactionary, marginal or mainstream. Therefore, reactions against it can also take many forms. In the latter half of the twentieth century, sometimes the "bang" of the bomb (but sometimes the " whimper" of the earth and its persecuted populations) has given shape to the imagination of doom.

It is, therefore, difficult to distinguish the subjective enactments and distortions of the apocalyptic myth of a final end of history from the actual crises of present history. While religious language has forfeited its ability to give any overriding coherence to modern culture, it still seems to play a powerful performative role (at least in Gadamer's sense of "prejudice"). The eschatological assumption that history has an "end" is a presumption with a powerful Wirkungsgeschichte. Thus, it is difficult to know when some version of apocalypse is working itself out as a self-fulfilling prophecy or when biblical prophecy-apocalyptic or classical-would, in fact, provide a legitimate interpretive framework.

This difficulty infects the secular movements for peace, justice, and ecology as well as those more overtly receptive to biblical influence-conservative or liberal or revolutionary. This is not to claim that any apocalyptic influence is a bad thing - a form of alarmism, hysterical pessimism, or naive utopianism. It is dishonest, however, to be unconscious of and, thus, irresponsible about the influences of eschatological apocalyptic motifs of hope and judgment, which operate out of context and beyond accountability. But read in context as a resource for oppressed communities, the modulations of apocalypse may provide crucial dialectical correctives to the vicious cycles of

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complacent optimism and self-defeating pessimism to which life in the "first world" inclines us.

Given the fact that the very tradition of liberation as a normative ideal of justice for the oppressed and of the rights of the victim stems from the eschatological prophets, no movement for "life and peace" can, in good faith, avoid reflecting on its own roots. But what of the association of apocalypse - the sense of an ultimate either/or - with this particular point in history?

II

Unlike the authors of the first apocalypses, who wrote from the anonymity of a vision taken from beyond history, theologians today cannot escape their own historicity. Therefore, there is a salutory tendency, stimulated especially by political theologies, to write from within the articulated boundaries of a particular historical situation, the situation of our own social, sexual, ethnic embodiment.³

This means that to be theologically responsible, 1, for example, must own up to the peculiarity of my own interest in apocalypse-in images of the end and hope for a new age. This interest is rooted in my history as a woman, white, working at once in church and university, come of age during the decline and the denial of decline of Western civilization (at least of the United States version, which, I suspect, inclines toward globalization of its own apocalypse). Yet, as a feminist participating in "the insurrection of subordinated knowledges,"⁴ I greet the decline with something more hopeful and less nostalgic than regret. As a middle class, white academic, however, my situation also gives me both privileges, including the leisure to reflect on matters that for others demand immediate life or death response, and the distancing mechanisms that accompany those privileges. I foreground my "self' here in the hope that this will encourage us all to locate ourselves in our historical situations as a precondition of locating ourselves apocalyptically. This is the opposite of subjectivism: "[T]o be historical means that one is not absorbed into self-knowledge."⁵

My own consciousness has been concocted as a mix of millennial mythologems. I believe each of us could outline some such mix, sharing the minimal apocalyptic elements but differing dramatically according to our histories. I personally suffered no trace of fundamentalist Christian imagery of the end in my eclectic upbringing. Apocalypticism was first secular and spiritual rather than, in any sense, Christian. The " make love not war" communitarianism of my countercultural adolescence and the later feminist futurism that raged in judgment of the given and moved in confidence for the future have mingled from the start, with waves of due anxiety for the fate of the earth under the

³ Of course, John of Patmos, here more in the tradition of the classical prophets than of the apocalypticists and perhaps influenced by an emerging Christian sense of the embodiment of Word in Person, did remove the veil of anonymity.
⁴ Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 81.
⁵ Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr, 1960), p. 285.

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nuclear and the environmental threats (and fear of "The Earthquake" during my California sojourn).

In a more particular sense, my intellectual interest in images of the future emerging out of the ashes of a prior world developed during the Reagan eighties. This was a period during which the convergence of new right politics with a premillennial revival of fundamentalism placed the presidency under the banner of a nuclear-enthusiastic, environmentally-hostile, woman-subjugating Christianity. The literalist reading of Revelation successfully manipulated the sense of futurelessness so pervasive that children now widely suffer from the fear of some literal end for the literal world. By the mid-eighties millions of U.S. citizens believed they would be "raptured" up to be with Jesus right before the tribulations of the end time got underway. More frightening, for the first time in history the community of literalist apocalyptics had achieved access to the power of the state and the technological capacity for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Because we are creatures who are, in Bloch's words, "not yet become" and because the diminishing of the future drains our presence to ourselves, to each other, and to the earth, it is important that Christian theology labor in the vision and the praxis of a real future, a flourishing earth-future, the only alternative to this nightmare of biblicized futurelessness. Therefore, it is crucial to shake off the academic ignorance about the conservative Christian movement and to work to expose the right-wing apocalypse, with its massive grip on the American populations, as a demonic distortion of the biblical apocalypse. Properly understood, the biblical apocalypse, whatever else it may be, is one long act of protest against the powers of the state. For this reason, both the visionaries of the right wing, like Hal Lindsey, and radical theologians, such as Alan Boesak, Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, and William Stringfellow, have interpreted John of Patmos positively.⁶

Moreover, even the best visions of the biblical prophets, with their unconditional judgment of injustice and their creative hope for the " new heaven and earth, " may be flawed just so as to prepare the way for the literalization of "endtime." That is, the classical prophetic imagery portrays an unquestioningly patriarchal, male authoritarian, God. It derives directly from the ancient exodus traditions and, as such, carries with it the central image of liberation as something accomplished by a "Holy Warrior."

Thus, it is not surprising that the worst of the biblical heritage could be so readily evoked to support the bare-faced sexism and militarism of

⁶ Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, a record-breaking bestseller, set the tone for the new religious right of the eighties, William Stringfellow's An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza's two commentaries on Revelation (notably The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgment and Alan Boesak's Comfort and Protest: Reflections on the Apocalypse of John of Patmos find in the Apocalypse, shunned by the mainline, a work of profound solidarity with those suffering from persecution and injustice.

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the new religious right. Its agenda has depended upon the paranoid vision of the enemy and the whore: communism and feminism. This is also not surprising, since literalism is, by its very nature, paranoid and disposed to apocalyptic solutions.⁷ The ultimacy of the separation between good and evil belongs to the endtime mythos of the final solution. The Soviet Union fit well the role of the outside enemy.

But Arbatov, the leading Soviet Americanist, announced the shift in mid-1989: "We will deprive you of an enemy." What, then, is the importance of these apocalyptics of polarization now as we are moving into a new decade, one already upsetting the determinism and doomsaying and one inaugurated, above all, by the radical depolarization of world politics? Suddenly there is a notable drop in the energy of doom, corresponding to a rise in the hope for a new Jerusalem of democracy. The wind seems to have gone out of the sails of evangelical premillenialism. The question is whether that same wind is required to sustain a sense of urgency among first-world progressives.

This emerging epoch so far does not promise to eliminate the objective capacity to terminate life on earth-not even through nuclear arms, let alone through environmental destruction or genocidal oppression of the world's poor-except, perhaps, some reduction of that capacity required to dampen the apocalyptic fires within our own hearth. The new capitalist triumphalism facing the nineties has an uneasy conviction of its own invincibility different from the polarizing recklessness of the eighties in the U.S. ("We're going to McDonaldize them," says a corporate executive as the fast food chain opens its enormous Moscow restaurant.⁸ ) It may again resemble the anti-apocalypticism of the imperial eschatology of the fourth century, discouraging hopes for a universally just future within history while, at the same time, allaying fears about the imminent end of history. In the case of the end of our millennium, this means the continuation of policies systematically destroying the planet and depleting the resources out of which a "new age" might have a chance to be created (assuming that no world is created ex nihilo).

Are we entering a decade when the stimulation of apocalyptic urgency becomes as important as countering the fanaticisms and the polarizations of apocalyptic determinism? When is it valuable to hold up the high hopes of a new age against the base hopes of capitalist realism? This is not to play Cassandra (who represents a too consistent, if admirable, pessimism-perhaps because the Greek genius did not embrace either futurity or the universal horizons of history). The hope stimulated by depolarization, and indeed by other openings (such as South Africa) in situations where barbarity has been justified for

⁷ Robert Lifton, The Broken Connection and James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology make the connection between paranoia, literalism, and totalism from very different psychosocial perspectives.
⁸ The New York Times, Jan. 28,1990, p. 1.

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decades by anti-communism, is surely vulnerable, but just as surely realistic as energy for further transformation.

The urgency required now-and perhaps always-is not the roller coaster ride through optimism and pessimism, but a durable, skeptical hopefulness. ("Skepticism" comes from the Greek root for "seeing" - what it is possible to do when veils are lifted, logs removed from eyes, the call to "wake" heeded.) In my world, this spirit is most consistently exemplified among communities of women and especially in the literary outpouring of African-American women, for whom hope is not grandiose but steeped in tragedy too profound ever to fall into optimism and for whom hope is a matter of survival, memory, and community.

III

Apocalypse as a text reveals not a divine investment in catastrophe but a hermeneutic of crisis (krisis = "judgment") enabling a beleaguered community to interpret its place within historical crisis meaningfully. The transition from classical prophecy to apocalypse cannot simply be explained in terms of imperial oppression. This oppression is accompanied and matched by an extension of the idea of the "world" as universally inclusive. This universal horizon is opened-in aching tension with the traditional ethnocentrism-by the apocalyptic vision of the inescapable interdependence of all creaturely life, bound together in apocalyptic destruction and in the new creation.

Born of revolutions whose inspiration stems from apocalyptic protest movements in the early centuries of this millennium, modernity fantasizes control but accelerates crisis. Thus, for the modern philosophy of history, "history has ever since [the French Revolution] been experienced as a permanent state of crisis, or as permanent, irresistible, and unrestrainable revolution."⁹ This crisis level naturally stimulates apocalyptic fantasy, both in the sense of the final catastrophe for which human evil is responsible and of the utopic expectations for the overcoming of all human problems. It stimulates them so readily because they are, in older forms, its own matrix. I am here presuming upon Ernst Bloch's contention that apocalypticism is the source of all modern revolutions¹⁰ - those resulting in both sides of the East-West polarization now in a state of detumescence. If we add to this the famous formula that "apocalypticism is the mother of Christianity," we realize the importance of coming to grips with both the destructive and the constructive operations of the endtime narrative. The narrative of Western history, especially in its moments of destabilization, despair, and transformation, is incomprehensible except as embedded within the apocalyptic narrative - a narrative that extends indefinitely beyond any particular text.

⁹ Jürgen Moltmann, The Theology of Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 232.
¹⁰ Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Boston: MIT Press, 1986).

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The last decade of this century may reveal to us not the end of apocalypse but the accelerating, near simultaneous encounter with its many faces: judgment and promise, secular and religious, patriarchal and egalitarian. The crisis of ethnic diversity and separatism discloses something critical about this kairos - a moment of the crisis of converging difference. The apocalypse of ethnicity seems to be opening as multilateralism begins to replace bilateralism.

The crisis of postmodernity seems to be revealing itself, in theory and in history, as the threat and the opportunity of pluralism. Perhaps the depolarization of the superpowers has not so much disempowered the apocalypticism of this epoch-conclusive or creative-as much as it may allow its diversification and its contextualization in the real life of real communities, who, in their communing and in their antagonisms, do indeed create the future. The struggles for national-ethnic identity, peoplehood, nonracialism, and liberation all manifest the insurrection of difference against the hierarchies of sameness. In this sense, they are apocalyptic revolutions of what is becoming, over against the establishment eschatologies of those committed to the world as it has been. The postmodern high value of "difference,"¹¹ when it does not merely celebrate difference for its own sake, sounds a positively apocalyptic theme for the not-yet-being of a small and overpopulated planet.

Political depolarization may also open a space to attend to the disappearing presences of nature. Here we may find bodily-cosmic forms of energy and resources which Christian and Western anthroporphism had purged from history and from hermeneutics. It may require a new global outbreak of the creative apocalypse of women, whose theologies tend to move away from the deadly deadlines of terminal timelines toward a new "conversion to the earth."¹²

IV

The least theologians can do these days (I will refrain from using the fundamentalist formula "in these last and evil days!") is to enter knowingly into the confusion and profusion of apocalypse, seeking a clearing - seeking dis/closure. Only in this way can we draw upon the precious and scarce resource of hope, for which the planet is indebted to prophetic eschatology. We can help to recognize apocalyptic constructions as such and, thus, help the creation of the future to proceed i n greater historical accountability. So far, the eschatology accompanying this century from the school of consistent theology (especially associated with Schweitzer) onward has been done most

¹¹ At least in the United States context, so-called postmodern thought, especially in its poststructuralist forms (structured by Derrida and Foucault above all) is exercising tremendous influence on academic theology, salutory in its radical pluralism and anti-imperialism, disturbing in its radical relativism and anti-eschatology, that is, its opposition to any sense of purposive agency in history.
¹² Rosemary Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk (Boston: Beacon, 1983).

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persuasively in the theology of hope, first articulated amidst the more hopeful apocalypse of the late sixties.

Feminist theology, in particular, provides the most important single test of the capacity of Christianity to convert itself into the future of freedom - a future for which all might hope and toward which all must work. Women's emerging work in religion offers invaluable criteria because it is internal to the tradition of the apocalyptic eschatological impulse. In a certain sense, the women's movement constitutes the most radical and the most apocalyptic challenge to what is referred to as "Western civilization." Women, whose hermeneutic derives from the awareness of the radical preformative power of patriarchy in history and before biblical history, find hope in a version of the myth of apocalypse. The patriarchal world-that is, the known world-must collapse and is perceived to be collapsing. This is the presupposition of "New Woman, New Earth" and of "A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey."¹³ We are motivated to act in hope for nothing less than a "new aeon" in which the difference inflicted upon us by the history of injustice becomes the basis for a new justice of mutual relation, in which difference can be not merely tolerated but celebrated.

Here is the rub: The discontent of feminism within Christian culture is, like all modern movements for justice, profoundly indebted to the prophetic eschatological heritage. Yet the "master"-images of biblical eschatology are irredeemably male-identified and often misogynist. They cast the messianic force in the image of a raging patriarch, who in his Christian apocalypse takes the form of the bloodiest warrior-messiah of the Bible. This is a perpetual problem for Christian pacifists. There is nothing of this in Jesus' apocalyptic beatitudes or in his parables of the "realm of God." But, in the final text of the Bible, we encounter a vision of his return with a double-edged sword of destruction protruding from his mouth (like a melodramatic phallic parody of the creative word of the first creation!) to lead the angelic cavalry, clothed in whiteness and light, to a victory where blood flows to the bridles of the horses.

The divine warrior does not originate, though he does worsen, in the apocalyptic desperation. He is there at the origin of the exodus-liberation motif and of the prophetic understanding of divine judgment as the justice of liberation. These texts illumine and inspire the myth of the redemption by violence that energizes many contemporary revolutionary efforts, with whose cause we may be in solidarity. Feminism shares the apocalyptic convergence of revelation with revolution, but women do not, by and large, look forward to a violent overthrow of men. Women play a far more significant role in cooperation with oppressed men when the means of resistance are as peaceful as possible. While acknowledging that there come times when

¹³ Titles of important works by Rosemary Ruether and Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, both of whom present visionary rereadings of history from the vantage point of a feminist future.

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a failure of militancy is tantamount to death, a feminist must also take the liberty to question the way in which any messianism of violent liberation tends to glorify means that may, in the end, reproduce themselves in forms of institutionalized (and invariably patriarchal) violence. If the messiah is a warrior, the imaginative exploration of less dualistic modes of resistance and negotiation and the "wild patience" needed for non-final solutions may be undermined.

Obviously there are moments in history when a struggle for justice requires a certain provisional dualism, in which the dominated gather force to throw off the domination. Thus Boesak's reading of the Apocalypse as "Comfort and Protest" in the light of the South African situation seems not uncritical but inspired, illumining a biblical resource for the victims in a situation in which the state can aptly be read as the beast. Such political apocalypticism does not seek the annihilation of the enemies but rather the collapse of an inherently unjust, non-reformable super-system. Because of transnational and ecological interdependence of nations, the systemic forces in place and those required to dislodge them take on cosmic proportions, well anticipated by John of Patmos' account of imperial collapse.

When apocalypse moves out of the rhetorical setting of its fitness, however, when it moves beyond the context of those who "hunger and thirst for righteousness," its vision of purity, religious or political, lends itself to a will to power¹⁴ (This is, perhaps, even more the case with threatened establishments of power than with revolutionary movements.) When a community has the means to bring about some final solution, then the apocalyptic absolutism of catharsis and resistance released by the fantasy of ultimate and dualistic victory becomes aberrant. It becomes the proper subject of prophetic expose' from within and, when need be, from without. Indeed, it invites the dis-closive apocalypse upon itself. The danger of the apocalyptic impulse lies in the conclusiveness of "either/or." Any unambiguous opposition of the good versus the evil seeks final solutions. (The feminism of "political correctness" is quite capable of the totalist either /or as well.) It cannot live creatively with the ambiguity of history and, so, is willing to risk everything-and that includes everything else-for the sake of its vision of purity.

In its awareness of being at once within and beyond this aeon and in the unsettled and unsettling ambiguity of women's differences, relationships, and loyalties, feminist theology has little choice but to outgrow the conclusive apocalypse of either/or. Feminist theology joins the postmodern protest against the authoritarianism of any single end to history.

For bourgeois christendom, apocalypse means ostensibly leaving the future to God. To quote a bulletin I recently saw posted, like an ad, in front of a rich Protestant church, "Christians don't need to worry

¹⁴ cf. Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, The Book of Revelation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985) p. 25; pp. 181ff.

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about the future. God is already there." If that means that the divine is the source of relevant possibilities (Whitehead) or that we meet God at the moving horizon of our open futures (Moltmann), amen. But, almost certainly it means, "Relax, God has things under control." This is the anti-apocalypse of complacency.

Christian theologians had better help Christians worry not only about the future but about this kind of realized eschatology among us. To leave the future to God means in fact to leave it to the overpowering systemic forces, to what the apostle Paul called "the powers and principalities" (gods such as "free market principles").

Gerechtigkeit schafft Zukunft is the name of a recent text by Moltmann: We must hope but not wait for justice. To the question, Does modern society have a future?, he answers, "Its future is called repentance." (The German Umkehr, like the Greek metanoia, does not have the moralistic overtones of "repentance" or "conversion"; it means "change!") We are "to act, as though the future of all humanity depends upon us, and yet at the same time trust that God remains faithful to his[sic!] creation . . . . "¹⁵ He argues that to apply the term " apocalypse" to the results of human irresponsibility, such as a nuclear or environmental holocaust, is blasphemy.

Faith in the end of history and in the divine transcendence that guarantees it demonizes multiplicity, creates human passivity as to the fate of the earth, desacralizes the earth itself and all of its flesh-woman's flesh, colored flesh, workers' flesh, the flesh of the animals and the elements, all repressed, oppressed, and suffering flesh. The notion of a unifying and conclusive goal as the basis for meaning in history has pervaded classical and modern Christian culture. The sense of a single end, reinforced by the postbiblical dogma of a creation out of nothing, depends upon the image of a controlling and independent deity whose identity precedes "the world" and who draws it towards its end, where the same God, the God of sameness who abhors the fleshly varieties (Augustine versus James) awaits it. This image of the creator and endtime judge has fostered passive acquiescence in relation to authority and, thus, a modernism with terrifying totalitarian capacity.

Theology itself, as the systematic fixation upon the one God's one end for one history, revealed and sealed in one book, is coming to its

¹⁵ In fact the sentence in its entirety reads: "Weil wir nicht wissen konnen, ob die Menschheit uberleben wird, mussen wir heute so handeln, als ob von uns die Zunkunft der Menschheit abhinge, and doch zugleich ganz darauf vertrauen, dass Gott seiner Schopfung treu bleibt und sie nicht fallen lassen wird." Finally this position is paradoxical and, therefore, may let Christian passivity return through the back door of this "not letting fall." I prefer a thorough revision of the notion of divine causality. And the notion that "the future of all of humanity" depends upon us may be a stance possible for the first world white male, who, despite Christian pacification, takes for granted his power as the subject of history. Despite these misgivings, I find Moltmann's moves strategically important for calling first world Christian patriarchy to an "Umkehr." Jurgen Moltmann, Gerechtigkeit schafft Zukunft: Friendenspolitik und Schopfungsethik in einer bedrohten Welt (München: Kaiser; Mainz: Grunewalt, 1989), pp. 27, 28.

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end. Such an end may be embraced by the fleshly many who had been excluded from the circle of the privileged ones.

V

In summary, here is a set of criteria for a life-and-peace enhancing eschatology, that is, words about ends that join in the doxological affirmation of "world without end":

(1) If Christian theology has anything to offer, it must, yet again, be hope - a timely, not timeless, hope made credible by feminist and political transfiguration. Western culture, in its frantic centerlessness, does not need hope to buckle it around another fixed center. But we very badly do need a wisdom that will guide us through disappointment by optimism and paralysis by pessimism. Karl Barth (whom a feminist can rarely find reason to quote with approval) formulates three useful criteria for hope: (i) Regarding "the optimistic or pessimistic view which a Christian may have of a given situation," hope is "provisional" and, thus, "free in face of both possibilities"; (ii) "hope takes place in the act of taking the next step; hope is action, and as such it is genuine hope"; and (iii) "the Christian does not think or act as a private individual" but "hopes in and within the community, and in and for the world."¹⁶

This needed hopefulness will be not so much something derived from a political circumstance as brought to it. It will be, after all, an eschatological hope - a hope not in an all-consuming end in which nothing is left to be revealed or reviled and in which some holy homogeneity triumphs, a hope not as the guarantee of something a transcendent Something will do for us (and to them), but as a mystery of motivation disclosed in openness to each other and to the universe.

(2) This hope will be anti-apocalyptic inasmuch as the apocalytic imagery has frozen into archetypes of closure: the Last Word and Final Solution, deadlocked antagonism, un-self-critical moral dualism, a single aim and shutdown of history. But it will affirm a certain apocalypse of dis/closure, both as disruption (hence the "/" as a sign of discontinuity) of any closed social system of epistemic, economic, or ecological dominance and as an open-ended process of revelation. The sacredness of present life in the light of its possible future does not cease to reveal itself to us. Dis/closure draws us into the openings bounded only by the resistance and relatedness of shared difference.

(3) It will build upon the prophetic heritage of judgment not as punishment of difference but as justice for the victim.¹⁷ But it will move away from the patriarchy and ethnocentricity of the classical prophets, toward a justice of mutual relation.

¹⁶ Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/3 (second half ), pp. 938-939.
¹⁷ This is illuminated by Jose Miranda's argument for the biblical priority of "justice" as "liberation," in terms of which "judgment" and "law" are to be understood in most textual contexts.

195 - Why Apocalypse, Now?

(4) In its hope for the new earth, it practices the renewal of the earth-not as in the gross literalizations of apocalypse, hoping for a new planet which Daddy (fundamentalist or technological) will give us after we have ruined the first one.

To this end it will celebrate a new bodiliness. The earth will no longer be the external place in which souls, themselves lumped into external bodies, go on their pilgrimage toward death and heaven. Feminism has sought the revalorization of the full range of the embodied and sexual energies of earth-creatures, and political movements have insisted upon the sacrality of food, water, earth, shelter, and bodily integrity. A theology of relation will move beyond the sterile opposition of materialism and otherworldliness to a spirituality of worldly attention. Difference dis/closes itself in the flesh. And the difference between self and the others demands also the difference of a new age that is neither an empty postmodernism nor a reactionary premodernism but a space-time toward which we "take the next step."

(5) The theology of radical relation will thus claim the biblical attention to historical moment, to kairos not as the transcendence of time but as the fullness of time, the disruption of the closed time-circles and of dead-end dead-lines of patriarchal realized eschatology or apocalypse. Kairos, as in the unprecedented mode of theology presented in the Kairos documents, opens up time by declaring that the time has come, the time for the end of untimely, unjust death and destruction, the time for the actions of hope and justice. An open apocalypse will not reject "ends," only the single end at which a linear sequence runs out, supposedly into eternity. Neither a circle of mechanical repetitive time nor a linear sequence of pure succession yield the opening needed at the end of modernity. Timeliness, not timelessness, well-timed attention to historical moments of opportunity and to natural cycles of renewal will shape a new sense of the endless finitude of earth-beings in relationship. Openness to the future does not imply an undifferentiated, atelic endlessness, however. It requires commitment to "ends" as purposes, to the plurality of purposes that we affirm in our mutually accountable freedom. And these ends, if they represent global openness, will at the same time represent the (radical but not absolute) closure of "this world" and "this age," construed as modernity, as Western-Northern dominance, as operating within a patriarchy of class, race, and sex hierarchy.