When Time Shall Be No More

Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture

Paul Boyer

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9780674252653
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Millions of Americans take the Bible at its word and turn to like-minded local ministers and TV preachers, periodicals and paperbacks for help in finding their place in God's prophetic plan for mankind. And yet, influential as this phenomenon is in the worldview of so many, the belief in biblical prophecy remains a popular mystery, largely unstudied and little understood. When Time Shall Be No More offers for the first time an in-depth look at the subtle, pervasive ways in which prophecy belief shapes contemporary American thought and culture.Belief in prophecy dates back to antiquity, and there Paul Boyer begins, seeking out the origins of this particular brand of faith in early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writings, then tracing its development over time. Against this broad historical overview, the effect of prophecy belief on the events and themes of recent decades emerges in clear and striking detail. Nuclear war, the Soviet Union, Israel and the Middle East, the destiny of the United States, the rise of a computerized global economic order—Boyer shows how impressive feats of exegesis have incorporated all of these in the popular imagination in terms of the Bible's apocalyptic works. Reflecting finally on the tenacity of prophecy belief in our supposedly secular age, Boyer considers the direction such popular conviction might take—and the forms it might assume—in the post–Cold War era.The product of a four-year immersion in the literature and culture of prophecy belief, When Time Shall Be No More serves as a pathbreaking guide to this vast terra incognita of contemporary American popular thought—a thorough and thoroughly fascinating index to its sources, its implications, and its enduring appeal.

II

Key Themes after World War II

4 The Atomic Bomb and Nuclear War

From Christianity’s earliest days, biblical images of earth’s convulsive final cataclysm both awed and challenged prophetic interpreters. “This our city will be burned with fire from heaven,” Christian warns his family in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). A nineteenth-century American prophecy work vividly pictured a planet trembling on the brink of disintegration:

Modern science . . . teaches that this globe is an enormous “terrestrial bombshell” . . . , its hidden interior . . . an intensely heated mass in a condition of molten fluidity, agitated, restless, and rolling its fiery waves hither and thither age after age, incessantly seeking with a terrible expressive power an outlet to diffuse its igneous elements over the surface and into the atmosphere. On this thin, rocky film, or outer surface, dwells a fallen, sinful, and dying race of mortals . . . Is it any wonder that thinking, sober people have from the earliest ages looked for a final, awful convulsion and burning day?¹

Down to 1945, prophecy interpreters typically envisioned this “burning day” in naturalistic terms—earthquakes, comets, volcanic eruptions—or as an eschatological event beyond human understanding. One writer, for example, simply attributed the destruction at Armageddon to “the all-consuming ‘breath of God’” and did not speculate further.²

With the coming of the atomic bomb, everything changed: it seemed that man himself had, in the throes of war, stumbled on the means of his own prophesied doom. Beginning in autumn 1945, a chorus of preachers, Bible scholars, and paperback writers insisted that the Scriptures not only foretold atomic weapons, but also their eventual cataclysmic use. This chapter explores the nuclear theme in postwar prophecy belief and reflects on its role in shaping attitudes and influencing policy.

First Assessments

President Harry Truman’s August 1945 announcements of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki triggered a torrent of apocalyptic pronouncements, many of them explicitly biblical. “Atomic Energy for War: New Beast of Apocalypse,” headlined the Philadelphia Inquirer. William Laurence of the New York Times titled the final section of his history of the Manhattan Project “Armageddon.”³ Countless commentators quoted II Peter 3:10: “The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”

A popular culture steeped in prophecy quickly enveloped the bomb in an aura of biblical imagery. A 1945 country-music hit, Fred Kirby’s “Atomic Power,” evoking images of brimstone fire raining down from heaven and describing atomic energy as “given by the mighty hand of God,” tapped directly into this reservoir of grassroots end-time belief. Even Truman, in the privacy of his diary, responded in biblical terms to the first A-bomb test in New Mexico: “It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.”⁴

Post-Hiroshima theologians, too, displayed a quickened interest in eschatology. In an influential 1941 essay, the German theologian Rudolph Bultmann had written: “The parousia [Second Coming] of Christ never took place as the New Testament expected. History did not come to an end, and as every schoolboy knows, it will continue to run its course.” Accordingly, Bultmann insisted, eschatology must be demythologized and shifted from the future to the present—the moment when each person confronts the claims of the Gospel.⁵

Close kin to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, Bultmann’s individualistic, “demythologized” eschatology enjoyed a postwar vogue in the pulpits and seminaries of mainstream U.S. Protestantism. But even in the liberal churches, many recognized its lack of a social and temporal dimension. The atomic threat, they sensed, demanded an eschatology that said something about history, not just about individual spiritual life. Four years after Bultmann’s assertion of what “every schoolboy” knew, Hiroshima had thrown the assurance of history’s continuity radically into question. In the atomic era, an Anglican cleric commented in October 1945, “the biblical declaration that the end of the world will come suddenly is driven home to us with fresh meaning.” An American theologian made the same point in the liberal Christian Century:

A function of Christians is to make preparation for world’s end. For generations this fundamental aspect of the Christian faith has been ignored or relegated to the subconscious. But now eschatology confounds us at the very center of consciousness . . . We need to consider the meaning of first century eschatology for our scientific era and the role of Christians as they face the threat offered by the atomic bomb.⁶

The post-Hiroshima theological crisis would eventually be fully articulated in Klaus Koch’s 1970 work, The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic. Meanwhile, as an evangelical leader observed in 1948, “the atomic bomb seems to be persuading some who delighted in ridiculing those who had earnestly tried to interpret the eschatological portions of the Word of God in a sober way, to recognize that this earth may be nigh to a disaster . . . more terrible than was ever depicted by any modern student of prophecy.” The bomb hardly set off a stampede to premillennialism among mainstream theologians; still, as John A. T. Robinson noted in 1950, it impelled many to look afresh at biblical apocalyptic in a manner that helped shape postwar religious thought.⁷

At the level of popular religious belief, the bomb’s impact was immediate and dramatic. In contrast to the secular press, where pleasure at its apparent role in ending the war counterbalanced fears about the future, prophecy writers from the first adopted an unrelievedly somber tone. “It is the devil who caused man to devote his highest and most successful potencies to the discovery of those things by which man destroys his fellows,” commented E. Schuyler English, associate editor of Our Hope, “and no greater weapon has ever been devised than this one, the A-bomb.” The ultimate cataclysm foretold in the Bible, English went on, sounded “singularly similar in its effects to those of the atom bomb.” Moody Monthly agreed: “The Bible is ahead of science again,” it said; an atomic blast offered an “exact picture” of the burning and melting depicted in II Peter 3:10.⁸

Philadelphia’s Donald Grey Barnhouse, prophecy writer and radio preacher, explored the bomb’s prophetic significance in his Eternity magazine of December 1945. Citing the New York Herald Tribune’s cautious editorial hope that global holocaust might yet be avoided, Barnhouse declared somberly: “It is already too late. The threads of inevitability have been caught in the mesh of the hidden gears of history and the divine plan moves toward the inexorable fulfillment.” Civilization, he went on, was a truck careening downhill with no brakes.⁹

Barnhouse displayed great ingenuity in finding biblical allusions to atomic energy. He suggested that Zechariah’s question “For who hath despised the day of small things?” foretold the importance of the atom. The same prophet’s prevision of a day when there would be “no hire for man, nor any hire for beast,” he speculated, forecast mass unemployment as atomic energy transformed the economy.¹⁰

Weighing the prospects of atomic war, Barnhouse diverged sharply from the self-congratulatory mood of a nation flushed with victory. The bomb, he said, had given fresh plausibility to a speculation he had long entertained: that New York City was the “Babylon” whose obliteration “in one hour” was foretold in Revelation. With atomic power, not only New York but all the nation’s great cities could be instantly wiped out. “The destruction of the United States . . . is certainly consistent with the nature of God,” Barnhouse declared implacably; the nation had sinned and faced “terrible judgment.” Barnhouse’s calm in contemplating mass slaughter reflected his conviction that believers faced a happier destiny. “If atomic bombs fall upon our cities,” he wrote, a few weeks into the nuclear age, “we shall be in heaven the next second.”¹¹

Of postwar prophecy writers who combed not only the Bible but also the interpretive literature of the past for anticipations of the atomic bomb, the most indefatigable was surely Wilbur M. Smith (1894–1976). The son of a prosperous Midwest apple grower, Smith (after failing to get into Dartmouth) in 1913 enrolled at Moody Bible Institute, where his father served on the board. A 1914 prophecy conference addressed by luminaries such as Cyrus Scofield and James Gray (Moody’s president) awakened Smith’s lifelong interest in this subject. Some newspapers scoffed at the conference, Smith later recalled, but with the outbreak of war a few months later, their tone changed. In 1938, after sixteen years as a Presbyterian pastor, Smith returned to Moody to teach. In 1947 he joined the newly founded Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. A prolific writer, conference speaker, and editor of an annual volume of aids for Sunday school teachers, Smith was not only America’s best-known prophecy expounder of the early postwar era, but also the most erudite; with a library of twenty-five thousand volumes, he was sometimes called “Christianity’s No. 1 Bookworm.”¹²

The atomic bomb immediately caught Smith’s attention. Like many others, he preached on II Peter 3:10—“the passage that was in everyone’s mind”—after Hiroshima, and in November 1945 produced a booklet, “This Atomic Age and the Word of God,” that sold fifty thousand copies and was condensed in the January 1946 Reader’s Digest. His much-expanded book of the same title appeared in 1948.¹³

In the manner of prophecy writers from time immemorial, Smith strove for a tone of up-to-the-minute contemporaneity. The Greek word luo in II Peter 3:11, translated as “dissolved” in the King James Version (“Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved . . .”), he suggested, in fact meant to unfasten or release and thus explicitly foretold “the principle involved in nuclear fission.” God may have destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah with nuclear power, he speculated, foreshadowing the judgment now confronting all humanity. Smith scoured the press for doomsday pronouncements by scientists. “The very phrases that were formerly used by Bible students and laughed at by the world,” he observed, “are now being used by our outstanding thinkers without any reference to the Scriptures and without any knowledge of prophetic truth.” Documenting the somber mood, he cited the clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, poised a few minutes before midnight, and a Collier’s article by physicist Harold Urey entitled “I’m a Frightened Man.” Never in history, he said, had Jesus’ prophecy of men’s hearts failing them for fear been more clearly fulfilled.¹⁴

While activist scientists evoked the horrors of atomic war to rally support for world government or the Acheson-Lilienthal atomic-energy control plan, prophecy writers such as Smith marshaled the rhetoric of terror to underscore the hopelessness of humanity’s situation as the end approached. The bomb, said Smith, forced nonbelievers to consider seriously the claims of Bible prophecy. The fear aroused by the prospect of atomic annihilation, he asserted, had produced a sharp reversal in thinking about the Second Coming and endtime events. Like Barnhouse, Smith rejected world government as a panacea. Without God’s blessing, he warned, world government would lead only to global tyranny under Antichrist. The international atomic-energy control agency envisioned by the Acheson-Lilienthal plan, he said, could turn out to be the vehicle for the rise of the demonic end-time ruler.¹⁵

Combing his prophecy library for anticipations of the bomb, Smith cited Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, Adam Clarke’s 1837 Bible commentary, a treatise by Edward Hitchcock, and other works that to the eye of faith did indeed seem strikingly prescient. For example, John Cumming, the Scottish prophecy writer of the 1850s, expounded II Peter 3:10 in these words: “At that day, we infer that the air shall become one sheet of flame, clasping the earth in its burning bosom . . . The whole earth, from its loftiest hill to the depth of its deepest mine, will be penetrated by fire. The tainted air shall thus be purged. It is predestined to this.”¹⁶

Gleefully, Smith quoted fatuous comments by pre-1914 liberal theologians hailing the imminent advent of the Kingdom of God through human effort. The atomic bomb, he said, should finally quash all such “foolish dreams.” Far more on target, he suggested, was Bishop Ryle, the Anglican evangelical, who as early as 1883 had written: “The last ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue: The Hidden World of Prophecy Belief
• I. The Genre and Its Early Interpreters
• II. Key Themes after World War II
• III. The Enduring Apocalyptic Vision
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Index