Apocalypticism Impugned the Joys of My One Life

I grew up attending a nondenominational Evangelical church in the UK, pretty moderate in its theology and approach to social issues. I was taught to be suspicious of those who claimed to know that the end was coming, given that, y’know, Jesus said that even he himself didn’t know when it would happen. But, in spite of this friendly environment, with only a bit of glossolalia to make it seem weird to outsiders, my fear of the coming end and the nihilistic sense this raised in me still persisted throughout my tenure as a Christian, because the more I looked into the Bible the more this kind of nihilistic apocalypticism seemed inherent to Christianity, part of its DNA.
It’s the position of many scholars, including Bart Ehrman, that the figure of Jesus as God emerged from a Nazarene preacher who was heavily apocalyptic in his teachings, not unique among Jewish figures at the time, but best remembered from Jesus thanks to the New Testament. The centerpiece of such an idea is this: the world is crap and basically unable to be salvaged. The only hope we have is to do the whole thing over, by destroying the old world and all its rotten elements, to replace it with the new. As soon as the likes of Paul of Tarsus developed the concept of Original Sin, Christianity became, in its essence, a deeply misanthropic philosophy, with a twofold effect. First, it entirely devalued everything which we can experience around us, all the joys we take from life, unless we can be convinced it’s from God. I’m reminded now of the many times I feared picking up a new hobby, or investing too much in something I loved to do, just in case it was taking time away from the God I was supposed to serve. And no amount of commitment seemed too radical for Jesus: he was prepared to tell people to sell everything they owned and “leave the dead to bury their dead” (Matthew 8:22), because why not? This life was fleeting, these things would only weigh you down, you need to focus on storing treasure in Heaven, whatever that was supposed to mean. The words of Jesus in Mark 13 show that he, at least, felt that the end would occur within the lifetime of his disciples, and that kind of imminence didn’t escape me. I struggled to make plans for the future or think about what I should do with my life with much ease, given how I felt that it could all be taken from me any moment, and I should really be focusing on the right things before that happened. Though, I have to admit, I didn’t, really. Nobody else around me seemed to have the same sense of urgency, so I didn’t have any role model to imitate. Sure, I prayed for people’s souls, witnessed to my friends about as much as I could get away with without them giving me up as a dead loss and, once, I even led a Bible study. But I couldn’t commit the way Jesus did, partially because forty days of fasting would have left me delirious, and also because I didn’t entirely know what he wanted. This kind of nihilism is quite different, I think, from the kind some Christian apologists think nonbelievers should have: knowing that the life you’re living now is the only time you’ll be conscious and aware of things makes it priceless. Considering it a tiny prologue in comparison to the infinite World to Come makes it basically negligible. And yet, paradoxically, what we do in this tiny prologue determines our infinity. And this brings me to the second effect.
The concept of Hell, an eternity of the worst kind of torment, misery and despair imaginable, is one of the most sadistic concepts that has ever been mainstream. My environment was not the kind to ram it down my throat, but, in a way, the more subtle approach (by having me discover it through scrutiny of the Bible, with blunt phrases such as “weeping and gnashing of teeth”) was even worse, filling the gaps in my imagination with my own images of Hell, far more terrible than any fire-and-brimstone lunatic could make up. This dread was heralded even in the Old Testament by the ominous comment right at the very end: “See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of The Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction” (Malachi 4:5-6). Perhaps the worst thing about the concept of Hell, though, beyond its ridiculous excesses and monstrous horror, is that Christianity is predicated entirely around the concept that an eternity of torment, misery and despair is exactly what we deserve. It’s justice, most Christians will be happy to tell you, provided they don’t side-step the issue. It’s God’s perfect justice that we are not capable of understanding. But most of that is swept aside to focus on the supposed mercy, that Jesus sacrificed himself so that the judgement for our total depravity could be waived. I’m willing to bet a lot of believers don’t want to dissect the arrangement too much, because they’re too busy being grateful that they don’t have to suffer for eternity because God is so nice to them. Consider lyrics in Christian songs, like Amazing Grace’s “wretch like me”, or in Third Day’s Children of God, bluntly saying “now we are free from the judgement that we deserve”. It’s the work of a thug, to expect you to be grateful for not killing you after threatening to, but it is the work of an abuser, to mangle your mind and self-worth enough to make you think that you deserve to die. And even if I could be guaranteed I was safe from Hell, I knew there were plenty of people, many of whom I loved dearly, who would not be safe. Maybe it was my fault, because I didn’t witness to them properly. For so long, I couldn’t understand why belief was the sole criteria for redemption. Surely God knew people would reject him for sincere reasons and be understanding of this, if their hearts were good? But if you swallow the Christian narrative, nobody’s hearts are good, and so your own existence condemns you. Not only is this a calumny on Humanity, it devalues anything good you might do in this world, one of the few endeavors of this fleeting existence that might seem godly. Remember: all your good deeds are like filthy rags, even giving all your possessions away has more to do with worldly attachment than it does to do with charity. In this worldview, you are reduced to a wretched agent who might achieve post-death decency, if you remember that nothing is good except God and you can forget about anything else you hold dear to, because you cannot serve two masters. Even the moderate streams of Christianity can be reduced to this passive nihilism, if you think hard enough.
Fortunately, it was thinking hard enough that eventually got me out of it. In my early and mid teenage years, I spent a lot of time struggling with my fear of Hell, my battle against intrusive thoughts that felt like they were tempting me to hail Satan and blaspheme the Holy Spirit, and even a brief paranoia that I might be the Antichrist. Again, this was the result of my church not having an official position on an obscure topic and my paranoid mind filling in the blanks. All I knew was that the Antichrist was supposed to rule the world in opposition to Christianity, shortly before the Last Judgement, and there was no suggesting that they would even be aware of their role to begin with (I mean, opposing a being you know is invincible is pretty silly), and I often felt that my questioning mind meant that I was genetically predisposed to being a “Man of Sin”. But eventually, once these conflicts had become too much, I turned to Apologetics. OK, to be more accurate, I sought out one apologetic work that my sister had in her possession. This was not from one of the big names like Craig, Turek or Plantinga. It was a much more pedestrian tract, with a casual, friendly style betraying an author who was much more in touch with what mainstream Christians felt than the so-called “sophisticated theologians”, to the point that I actually got the chance to meet him a couple of years later at an event by my school’s Christian Union. In his book, he defended the character of the God of the Bible against the charges that he was unjust, nasty and all the rest by use of analogy, cherrypicked biblical references, all the usual stuff. But for me, who just needed a reason to believe that the tyrant who seemed to be in control of my destiny was actually pretty nice, I lapped it all up with some degree of relief. The book’s final chapter included a variant of the so-called Sinner’s Prayer, and though I had recited it several times in my life already, you can bet I said it again, just to be sure.
This strain of pedestrian Apologetics followed me into studying Philosophy and Ethics at A level, and my Philosophy teacher is definitely one of the best teachers I’d ever had. He was a Christian, and, by coincidence, attended my family’s church, but he took the importance of Philosophy seriously enough that he didn’t allow his personal views to affect his teaching. He taught us how to think, not what to think, and, through feeling that I had an environment to question every view that came to me, things began to change. I was introduced to the many arguments for God’s existence that supposedly the greatest Christian minds had ever come up with and found their flaws pretty quickly. I was further introduced to worldviews and ethical models of many secular thinkers, who were able to come up with sensible, self-contained moral systems that could guide me without any need to reference a deity, and these were contrasted to Divine Command Theory, which summed up morals as “It’s right because I say so!”. And on top of that, for the first time I was introduced to the Euthyphro Dilemma, a dilemma I have yet to hear a sufficient rebuttal to from any layperson or theologian, no matter how sophisticated. I was introduced to the Irenaean Theodicy, an argument against the Problem of Evil that suggested that suffering was a way of making us better able to endure it and better people with a greater understanding because of it. I liked this quite a lot, because it meant my loser-ish ways could be improved, and it lent itself to the idea of universal salvation. Of course, I knew that my preference for this narrative didn’t mean it was true, and it was pointed out to me that all humans being expected to grow better to the point of being worthy of salvation negated the need for Jesus to be sacrificed. But I did independent research as well: as my scope of thinkers was being widened, I soon found out that the God of the Bible had a history as a character, one that could be traced back to deeply flawed tribal and elemental gods found in classical mythology. For the first time, it seemed my doubts had a very reasonable comfort to them, that, despite what everyone said, there was no reason to suspect this terrifying being even existed in the first place.
I couldn’t be 100% sure, of course, but I figured that, with my inquisitive mind now detached from the fear, any being who chose to punish me for honestly pursuing the truth wasn’t worth following in the first place. This being was supposed to be omnipotent anyway, so if he wanted me saved, he could have me, but that was on him. Me, I had more important things to do. No longer a Christian, suddenly the world seemed a lot different. Brighter, maybe. It seems odd to say this these days now we have a pandemic, sure, but then, the world no longer looked like a fleeting, pointless entity on the brink of destruction. It was an always improving, multifaceted, exciting world that existed with all the certainty I could ascertain. And best of all, in spite of the odds, I was in it and could explore its bounties, unfettered by the fear that I should focus on some vague concept outside of it.
If you know that the world will continue going in some form and that there’s no being with a greater plan for it, its destiny is put in your hands. And this is the most sobering and liberating thing I have ever experienced.