To the vast majority of people, it will come as absolutely no surprise that the predictions of Harold Camping that the Rapture would occur at 6pm on 21st May 2011 didn't quite pan out into reality. After all, in our recent memories, the omens have been detcted on the horizon portending the world's end. This can be expressed in religious terms (as in Camping's predictions), or as the revival and distortion of earlier generations' prophetic activity (c.f. Nostradamus) or indeed as a technological apocalypse (as in the feared "Y2K" or "millennium" bug). Society and culture (at least in the Western world) truly has eschatology (or, to use a less jargonistic term, events, theories or expressions relating to 'the End' or 'end times', from the Greek adjective eschatos meaning "last" or "latter") on the brain.
Camping's specific method of determining the date of the apocalypse, namely extrapolating dates from numerical information contained within the Bible and calculating a date, is not necessarily all that new. The Enlightenment saw an explosion of activity scrutinising biblical prophetic texts such as the books of Daniel and Revelation and attempting to find contained within the biblical text God's "plan" for contemporary history. One such influential study of the Apocalypse (the book, not the event) was Joseph Mede's Clavis Apocalyptica (published in English in 1643 as Key of the Revelation Searched and Demonstrated), but he wasn't the only one to try and map the cycles of destruction outlined in Revelation onto the events of history. Even Isaac Newton (yes, he of the 'proving gravity exists' fame) got in on the act, with his Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John being published after his death in 1733. Harold Camping, on the face of things, stands in a long tradition.
His specific focus on the Rapture too, has a long tradition within biblical interpretation. Based upon a number of New Testament texts (e.g. Matthew 24:40-41; Mark 13:27; I Thessalonians 4:16-17), believers in the Rapture expect that at the beginning of the End, God will save a number of his most faithful believers by "rapturing them" or suddenly collecting them up into heaven, whilst those on Earth will face the tribulations of the world's final days (in the book of Revelation this is predicted to last for 1000 years: Revelation 20:4-5). This doctrine has its roots as far back as the 17th Century, but was most famously expressed in English the 1800s by John Nelson Darby (part of the Plymouth Brethren and the founder of modern Dispensationalism) and Edward Irving (founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church) who were in turn influenced by a Chilean Jesuit Manuel Lacunza who died in 1801. Their predictions that God was bringing history into its last stages have been enormously influential in setting the tone of the religious discourse which Harold Camping's predictions participate in.
On the face of it, the failure of the eschaton to materialise ought to mean the end for Camping. And, indeed, we may well ask why we haven't just given up on this notion of a Rapture and the End of the world given that it has been debunked and has failed to come to pass time and time again? There are a number of possible answers to this. Firstly, some eschatological/messianic movements do just die out (Richard Brothers spent his final days in an insane asylum drawing plans and making flags for the New Jerusalem which all but his most ardent followers had given up hope for).
Secondly, after the initial disappointment of a prophecy's failure, attention can turn to why it didn't come to pass. Answers to these questions can be abundant. The prophet can be deemed to be a false prophet (plenty of those are predicted as coming in the end times, just look at Mark 13:22), or the failure for judgement to occur can be a sign that the believing brethren weren't quite pure or faithful enough: it is their failure, not God's.
Thirdly, as I have indicated, this idea that the world will be brought to an end by God is deeply imbued into the biblical text. Those who read the Bible with even the slightest bit of literal-mindedness can't escape the idea that time and time again, we can expect a cataclysmic final judgement, replete with natural disasters before the inception of a New Heaven and a New Earth to be created. And there is something enormously attractive about the idea that God has written into the pages of a book a plan which can help individuals and communities who feel alienated from what they perceive as the corrupt and sinful world around them. God has a plan, and their (often self-proclaimed) status as 'the Elect' means they're going to skip the horror and the torment that will befall the rest of humanity. When you factor in that mindset, it's perhaps completely unsuprising why individuals who claim they can peek beneath the divine wrapping paper keep gaining such popularity despite the long, long history of failure of such predictive activity.
Anyway, all of this strikes me as a little amusing as one of the songs I've recently been listening to on repeat is My Chemical Romance's Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na). In the context of the album which tells the story of a resistance movement (the Fabulous Killjoys) against the evil Better Living Industries, the lines
And right here, right nowStrike me as a beautifully evocative cry for "apocalypse now". The cry of the dispossessed and the outcast being answered from the heavens. More importantly, it indicates that apocalypse and eschatology is never far from the cultural zeitgeist; the final words of the song are, after all "pull this pin, let this world explode".
All the way in Battery City
Little children raise their open filthy palms
Like tiny daggers up to heaven
And all the Juvi halls and the ritalin rats
As angels made from neon and fucking garbage scream out
"What will save us?"
And the sky opened up...
