Apocalyptic Bodies

The Biblical End of the World in Text and Image

Tina Pippin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134673438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

Apocalyptic Bodies traces the biblical notions of the end of the world as represented in ancient and modern texts, art, music and popular culture, for example the paintings of Bosch. Tina Pippin addresses the question of how far we, in the late twentieth century, are capable of reading and responding to the 'signs of the times'. It will appeal not only to those studying religion, but also to those fascinated with interpretations of the end of the world.

1
INTRODUCTION: APOCALYPSE AS SEQUEL

Every apocalypse is a sequel. A sequel is a work which follows another work and can be complete in itself and seen in relation to the former and also what follows it. The story becomes the neverending story, in ever-evolving renditions. Perhaps as a reader of the apocalyptic I do not want the end or the ending to come. Once more this is Derrida’s apocalypse without apocalypse. This book is a sequel to my first book (Pippin 1992), which was a sequel to my dissertation, which was a sequel to my childhood in the apocalyptic South (see chapter 2), and so forth. The act of reading is a sequel to every previous reading.

What is God’s sequel to the apocalypse? What is the oldest biblical apocalypse—the Jahwist version of the flood in Genesis, Isaiah’s apocalyptic sections in Chapters 24–7, Ezekiel, Daniel? When was the first apocalyptic story told? It is impossible to know the origin, and the chaos of apocalypse cannot be essentialized. Perhaps apocalypse began at creation, out of the violence of creative chaos, and every retelling is a sequel, a trace of a trace of the journey toward the end of time.

The word “sequel” in its root is related to the words seal and sign. In apocalyptic literature the wise and prophetic words are sealed by the divine powers (Daniel 12: 9). In the Apocalypse of John the scroll of some of the visions has seven seals (5: 1–2), and only Lion/Root/Lamb is worthy to open the seals. The 144,000 are also sealed on their foreheads in order to escape the violence (Apoc. 7: 3, 4). The apocalyptic seal is protective. Seals hold back violence, but when opened unleash extreme violence, “the great day of wrath” (Apoc. 6: 17). Each of the seven seals harbors part of the destructive part of the scroll (cf. Apocalypse of Paul 41; Reddish 1990: 314). In the end John is told by the angel not to seal: “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near” (22: 10). The time is near, but the text spins around and around in constant re-readings and interpretive gestures. Billboards, evangelistic preaching, music, films, art—all these representations of the apocalyptic text in our culture break the seal on the biblical book(s). The seal on the forehead is a plague in the land. The 144,000 (in which groups like the Jehovah’s Witness—with over six times that number in the United States—claim to have membership), becomes a leaky category; fake seals are popping out all over. The seal (of approval…) will not hold, and besides, how can one tell an “authentic” seal? The seal is not a sign of safety as much as it is a sign of horror. A rereading/ replaying of the Apocalypse means a cycle of sealing, cracking open, and resealing, over and over again. The horror is replayed, reviewed, and the seal, like a closed door emanating strange noises, draws the victim toward it.

In contemporary horror films the sequel (and also the remake) is common. Wes Craven’s recent sequel, Scream 2, self-consciously exposes the rules of the sequel; the character Randy, who in Scream pronounces the rules of the horror film, proclaims, “There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to make a successful sequel.” In sequels the body count is always higher and there is more gore and more elaborate torture and killings. The killer/s always return in sequels. The same killers appear in biblical apocalypses: warrior angels, Satan, God. In the horror sequel, who survives in the end is predetermined but never certain. In postmodern horror the protagonist female survives (e.g. the character Nancy in the Nightmare on Elm Street series; Sydney in the Scream pair). The plot twists may be different but certain rules apply, since there are survivors left on earth. Apocalyptic literature breaks the rules of sequels in some sense because nothing and no one survives on the earthly plane; the surviving “winners” may suffer martyrdom on earth but gain eternal life in heaven. The losers survive in a sense, so they can suffer eternal torture. The Apocalypse of John posits a new heaven and earth (21: 1), thus there is total destruction of the old. In biblical and extra-biblical apocalypses it is clear who wins and who loses; one only need believe in God in a certain way to be saved from the apocalyptic terrors. Even with this certainty, there is disease, as exemplified in the film, The Rapture, where the central character panics at the end (the Rapture), refusing the grace of God and opting instead for hell. Performance artist Laurie Anderson (1995) also tells of this final panic in the story of her fundamentalist Christian grandmother’s worry over whether or not to wear a hat as she prepared on her deathbed to meet Jesus. The certainty is never complete; there are cracks where the horrors of hell seep in and terrify the believer. Apocalypse is a more complete, comprehensive death, the extreme genocide. The destruction of everything is part of God’s plan.

There is disease at the end of a horror film as in a biblical apocalypse; one expects a sequel, a replaying of the violence in a grander scale. One inside joke in Scream is that sequels are never as good as the first film (a reference to Wes Craven’s direction of the first Nightmare). The extra-biblical apocalypses, especially the early Christian ones, get bloodier and more detailed. How could an apocalypse get more extreme when it is already the extreme? What could be more violent than, in an example of an earlier apocalyptic prophecy, “Now the Lord is about to lay waste the earth and make it desolate, and he will twist its surface and scatter its inhabitants” (Isaiah 24: 1)? The assumption in apocalyptic literature is that there will be no one to repopulate the earth, not even an alcoholic father and his dysfunctional, incestuous family, as in the Genesis flood narrative.

The Apocalypse of John is a sequel of the Hebrew Bible and Pseudepigrapha; its details of the end time violence are more extreme. Sequels only produce more horror. Much of the Apocalypse of John (like Mark 13) comes from Daniel and other Hebrew Bible apocalypses. New Testament apocalypses are thus sequels of sequels. Some of the apocalypses in early Christianity (sequels of the earlier apocalypses) are even more descriptive than the Apocalypse of John. The best examples of these “tours of hell” are the Apocalypse of Peter (a canonical runner-up) and the Apocalypse of Paul (and much later Dante’s Inferno). Fire torture is the most popular choice of God and the angels; sinners will burn with their idols (Apocalypse of Peter 5–6; Reddish 1990: 248– 9). There is also a pit of fire filled with excrement and the most terrible things imaginable. In the Apocalypse of Peter women who commit infanticide or abortion suffer the taunts of their children “and the milk of the mothers flows from their breasts and congeals and smells foul, and from it come forth beasts that devour flesh, which turn and torture them for ever with their husbands…” (Ch. 9; Reddish 1990: 250–1). Worms eat out human intestines, angels use hot irons to burn flesh and eyes and to cut off the lips of deceivers (Ch. 9), and hang sinners up so that “flesh-eating birds” can tear the flesh (Ch. 10; Reddish 1990: 250–1). There are “wheels of fire, and men and women hung thereon by the power of their whirling” (Ch. 12; Reddish 1990: 252). In the Apocalypse of Paul the punishments increase as the story goes on, so that by the end (Ch. 51) the angel guide has to say, “Whoever scoffs at the words of this apocalypse, I will punish him” (Reddish 1990: 324). In one scene a minister who failed in his job suffers tortures in a river of fire; angels strangle him with “an iron instrument with three prongs with which they pierced the intestines of the old man” (Reddish 1990: 311). When Paul weeps at the torturous horrors, the angel instructs him, “Are you weeping, when you have not yet seen the greater punishments?” (Reddish 1990: 314). The worst horrors include the fiery masses burning in the pit of hell while others suffer from extreme, eternal cold.

In both these apocalypses, as in the Apocalypse of John, there is the tease of heaven, the place of salvation. But far more space is given to evil and the vengeful, eternal attack on sinners; the catalog of sin/sinners and the fantasy of their destruction is much more interesting than the peaceful heavenly garden. Heaven is almost an afterthought in some of these apocalypses. Or at least the heavenly realm is the frame for the main action—earthly destruction and/ or sufferings in hell.

The Bible does not allow the reader to stay in paradise for long. By the second chapter of Genesis the really interesting characters appear (the snake and Eve). Churches invest in performances of “tribulation trails,” not in “heavenly comforts tours.” The rash of apocalyptic films at the end of this century is another example of this rush to imagine the end—or the rush that imagining the end provides. Comets, asteroids, plagues of viruses, alien invasion, internal global war, and evil transmitted by fallen angels are all ways to imagine the worst sufferings. Some contemporary apocalyptic visions even add government conspiracies (The X-Files): “Trust no one. The truth is out there.” One film, Fallen, has as its advertising logo the phrase, “Don’t Trust a Soul.” This film further advertises itself as a “supernatural thriller” in order to distance itself from the horror genre. The assumption in this film is that anything that falls out of heaven (or paradise or Eden) is evil (cf. The Prophecy). The X-Files also touts itself as a thriller, although many of the episodes are gorefests. Its evil appears to fall out of the sky, too; alien beings in cahoots with the US government who invade human bodies (especially the bodies of women: Mulder’s sister, Scully, the women used as reproductive machines). The title of The X-Files’ feature-length film is instructive: Fight the Future. While many of these popular apocalypses mock themselves, they tap into the “unthinkable” horror that must be thought about to keep it at a respectful distance.

In biblical literature there is a conspiracy in heaven, especially in the Book of Job, where God and Satan conspire against the man Job. To what ends will such conspiring go? The depths of human sin and God’s eternal wrath are placed alongside human worth and God’s eternal love. But revenge is more interesting than grace; the twisting apart of the earth is more interesting than the re-creation of paradise.

In his study of the psychology of Christian fundamentalist “endism,” Charles Strozier defines the apocalyptic: “One might say, following Revelation, that the apocalyptic connotes the violent, the redemptive, the vengeful, and the hopeful…also the predictive…the terrible…the grandiose…and the climactic” (1994: 154). Blood hymns in some conservative Christian church traditions speak to these different aspects of the apocalyptic. The apocalyptic is the low-brow literature of the bible. It has only become popular with the “high-brow” set (e.g. Stephen Gould) with the approach of the millennium.

There is a strange need in the apocalyptic for the violence to be “over the top.” Could an argument be made that such violent literature leads to violent behavior? The “movies made me do it” defense is spoofed in Scream 2. For Mimi Rogers’ character in The Rapture, her excuse for killing her daughter was basically, “The apocalypse made me do it.” Christian militia groups, and millennial religious groups such as Jim Jones’s group at Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate, seem to be arguing the same defense.

Why is there the need for apocalpytic sequels, especially around the millennium? One immediate response could be: what kind of sick mind writes this stuff ? Is the horror genre the artistic manifestation of a sick mind? Or are horror sequels political and psychological ways of revealing evil in our society? Have these apocalyptic sequels gone on too long? Does this genre represent a virus in the theological body? Or are these narratives necessary to clear the space for hope?

Re-(w)ri(gh) ting apocalypse

In a radio interview given during the siege of his compound in Waco, David Koresh proclaimed that “theology really is life and death” (Tabor and Gallagher 1995: 99). To a theologian, too, a theological interpretation of the Apocalypse is life and death. As a theologian Keller must opt for taking the text seriously in terms of competing with fundamentalist interpretations and “on behalf of sustainable and shared life in the present” (1996: 16). There is ever a desire for hope. The theme of hope keeps this text theologially viable.

Keller’s important book on the end of the world is a cosmic reading of biblical texts; in other words, she is engaged with the very nature of the apocalyptic, with the disclosure, the revealing revelation that takes place in the texts. Is “The End” (1996: 2) an opening? Keller wants to re-open the Apocalypse, but it is not really necessary to re-open the Apocalypse; it was never closed. The Apocalypse is an open text. It opens up into our present. I agree that “we are in apocalypse” (1996: 12). Keller calls for “a scripturally grounded narrative engagement” (1996: 25), and this call and placement of apocalypse is a vital point for theological hermeneutics and ethics.

Keller then attempts to unravel that apocalyptic thread in Christian history by taking the reader on a whirlwind tour of apocalypse in Christian history. This historical survey and commentary is valuable and puts the biblical vision/s in perspective. The best example of where this survey is the most powerful is in the chapter, “De/colon/ izing Spaces,” in which Keller discusses the apocalyptic effects of Columbus’s (Colón) landing in the Caribbean. Keller’s survey opens up the reader to creative new perspectives on the open-endedness of “The End,” especially to some of the oppressed voices silenced by dominant patriarchal history.

Keller calls for a “counter-apocalypse” that has a “drive for justice” (1996: 20). A counter-apocalypse affirms the realm of God as a realm of justice. Keller opposes Lee Quinby’s “ anti-apocalypse.” Quinby defines anti-apocalypse in terms of feminism, which she sees as:

implicated in apocalyptic desires for the end of (masculinist) time and the transcendence of (masculinist) space, including the space of the innately gendered body. Feminism can be, however, (and often is these days) anti-apocalyptic insofar as it is anti-essentialist, anti-universalist,and anti-eschatological.

(1994: 36)

An example of this type of feminism is found in the redrawing of cultural icons by the Guerrilla Girls; their approach to the apocalyptic (especially politics) is to undermine it.

Even Sallie McFague and Rosemary Radford Ruether’s more immanent god, the world as God’s body, while dealing with the problem of a transcendent, distant god, cannot “fix” the Apocalypse’s desire for the end in which a transcendent God reigns solely and supremely. The “apocalips” (Keller’s wonderful play on the word) (1996: 304ff.) speak glossolalia, fragments of a message of hope I cannot translate.

Keller is enmeshed in a postmodern apocalypse. Richard Dellamora describes it as “to be post-means to be beyond closure in the field of newly opened textual possibilities” (1995: xi). Her feminist vision is important because she speaks boldly and accurately about the postcolonial, gender, ethnic implications of the text.

Keller wants to rewrite the Apocalypse, or rather, re(w)ri(gh) te the narrative—rewriting it on her own terms and re-righting out of the clinches of fundamentalist interpreters. Violence, anti-Jewishness, misogyny, divine judgment, eternal punishment, the destruction of the earth—Keller rewrites the narrative so that the violence and exclusivity of apocalypse is transformed, so that the violent text is all right. Christianity is intact in both these readings, as it should be, given their social locations. Keller relates, “I imagine ourselves converging upon a moment of opportunity: as our species careens to the brink, it will see, it will hear, it will turn around in time…” (1996: 36). In a similar vein, Donna Haraway expresses this anxiety through her discussion of a painting by Lynn Rudolph entitled Millennial Children. In this painting small guardian angels flank two young girls who embrace in the midst of an environmental apocalypse. Haraway states, “These are the children whose witness calls the viewer to account for both the stories and the actualities of the millennium” (1997: 40). It is a nightmare vision, and the children offer hope for the future. While I hold such hope that humans will wake up and avoid self-destruction (or else I would not be involved in the peace movement), I do not think the Apocalypse desires this end. In my own state, Georgia, there is the manufacture of Trident submarines, the “White Trains,” the School for the Americas, and Newt Gingrich, to name a few disaster images.

In James Morrow’s vision of hell in his novel, Only Begotten Daughter, Jesus gives up heavenly glory to set up a soup kitchen in hell (serving a morphine soup to the damned to ease their suffering). In Morrow’s version of the second coming, the messiah is female, and she follows the devil to hell, where she meets her half-brother. Jesus says to his half-sister Julie Katz, during one of their lengthy theological debates, “I mean, how can you bring about utopia with one eye cocked on eternity?…Oh now I get it—that’s how they accommodated my not returning, yes? They shifted the reunion to some netherworld” (1990: 186). Keller wants to shift the responsibility back to earth.

In returning back to earth, she also returns to the viol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Prequel,or preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: apocalypse as sequel
• 2 A good apocalypse is hard to find: crossing the apocalyptic borders of mark
• 3 Jezebel revamped
• 4 The power of babel: spiraling out of control
• 5 Peering into the abyss: a postmodern reading of the biblical bottomless pit
• 6 Apocalyptic horror
• 7 Apocalyptic fear
• 8 Conclusion: the joy of (apocalyptic) sex
• Notes
• Bibliography