Can We Have Our Apocalypse Back Please?

The Doctor:                  Elizabethan England, not so different from your time. Look over there. They’ve got recycling … water cooler moment …

Street preacher:          And the world will be consumed by flame!

The Doctor:                  … global warming.

Doctor Who S3 E2, ‘The Shakespeare Code’ (2007)

This picture was given the title 'Global Warming Concept' by ponsulak at freedigitalphotos.net. I thought, that’ll do.

The second instalment of the BBC’s Ten Pieces initiative – designed to foster an interest in classical music among children by getting celebrities to talk through the context and significance of selected works by a range of orchestral composers; it’s great, you should check it out – included, as one of its ten, the ‘Dies irae’ movement from Verdi’s Requiem.¹ This component of a requiem mass draws its text from a twelfth-century Latin poem too lengthy to repeat here,² but it begins, Dies irae, dies illa / Solvet saeclum in favilla, which means ‘The day of wrath, that day will dissolve the world in ashes’ – so you’ll gather it’s pretty heavy stuff for a composer to work with. Verdi’s interpretation is suitably epic and intimidating, and is introduced in Ten Pieces II by Vikki Stone.³ I’ll give you her narration in full.

Welcome to the end of the world. This is what it sounds like. The sky seems to be ripping open with the sound of those drums, and those voices – I can’t seem to get them out of my head. They’re singing, ‘dies irae’. That’s Latin for ‘day of judgement’, and they sing it over and over and over again. It isn’t a question; it’s a statement. Life is over. It’s like disaster movie music: an orchestral storm, destroying everything in its path, including me! That’s because the day of judgement, according to some people, is the time when everyone that’s ever lived will be brought before the throne of God. They’re summoned by a fanfare, a fanfare loud enough to wake the dead, and then, each person’s soul either rises up to heaven or descends into the fiery pits of hell. There’s the trumpets! It’s starting!

This ‘Dies irae’ is by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, who knew that, for believers listening to his music in 1874, the day of judgement was no story. It was real. So Verdi brings that terrible day to life for his audience. It’s his warning, in music, of an incredible power for greater than us. And right now, it still makes me feel small, fragile, scared – maybe because there’s another vast power that we’re all at the mercy of: nature. And this music sound to me like a warning, if we don’t respect nature, of our own possible dies irae.

Well. Isn’t that interesting? And I should add, my transcription can’t communicate the fervency of her tone. Vikki Stone sounds remarkably more afraid of the impending day of judgement than just about anyone else I’ve ever heard talk about it. Which would be an extremely healthy thing: God, in his almighty power, is terrifying, and facing his wrath the most terrifying prospect there could ever be, and only once you grasp that much can you then grasp that, by Jesus’ having borne his Father’s wrath in our place, we are able to be spared the horrors of the coming dies irae, if only we repent and believe in him. It would, therefore, be an extremely healthy thing – extremely fertile ground for the gospel – except that Ms. Stone has the wrong dies irae in mind. For her, being held to account before the throne of God is just a story. The god whose impending wrath she opts to fear instead is Nature.

It’s a very clear and explicit manifestation of a step that I’d argue quite a substantial proportion of our society seems to have made. Just think about the kind of discourse employed by the modern sustainability movement. The impending end of the world; humanity bringing disaster on itself by failing to properly respect that which is greater than us as we ought; the inevitable catastrophe we will face for our greed and selfishness and complacency if we don’t change our ways; the urgent need for a radical change in what we value and how we relate to the world, in order to get off the trajectory we’re currently on; the urgent need, furthermore, to communicate this message to as many people as possible and persuade them of its truth and importance. The Doctor was right: our own time isn’t so different from the sixteenth century, or the nineteenth. People still talk about everything going down in flames. They’ve just taken God off the judgement seat and put the natural environment in his place.

Please don’t think I’m dismissing the whole sustainability movement as a bad or pointless thing. On the contrary, I very much approve of taking good care of the natural world over which God was kind enough to grant humans dominion. I very much approve of seeking contentment with what one has instead of an endless hunger to consume more and more until there are no resources left for anyone else. I very much aprrove of acknowledging that our actions have wider-reaching impacts than we can necessarily see, and therefore warrant our careful consideration. And yes, I think it would be simply marvellous if we could stop chucking plastic into the sea.⁴ My point isn’t that looking after the environment isn’t an important thing. It’s that looking after the environment isn’t the most important thing. It isn’t Nature that resides on the judgement seat of the universe; it’s the LORD of hosts.

 

Because drift-plastic isn’t half as appealing as driftwood.

At some point we stopped preaching fire and brimstone because we were worried it would upset and offend and alienate people, and while our apocalypse was left gathering dust in a cupboard somewhere, the sustainability movement – not unreasonably – went and nicked it. And I think it’s high time we set about trying to claim it back.

What all this discourse about the impending end of the world from a sustainability point of view proves, is that it’s not that aspect of the proceedings that causes people to reject the God of the Bible. It’s not because Christianity urges them to change their ways to avoid coming catastrophe that people have a problem wth it, because the sustainability movement tells them more or less the same thing. So, toning down that particular facet of our faith isn’t going to help the message be accepted; it’s only going to make us lose that sense of crucialness and urgency that the sustainability movement succeeds in getting across so very well. People are perfectly content to talk about the comeuppance for humanity’s wrongdoing so long as they can put a different god on the judgement seat.

Look what a textbook example of old-school idolatry this is: humans exchanging fear of the true God for fear of mere created things. The natural environment is not the great power Vikki Stone makes it out to be; it’s at the beck and call of God who spoke it into existence. If he says it all goes down in flames tomorrow, then tomorrow, down in flames it will all go. And beyond that, he has decreed that at some point, it will all go down in flames. The sustainability movement urges action in the hope of averting the catastrophe from ever happening; Christianity urges action in the hope of being removed from the impact zone before the catastrophe hits.⁵

The great day of the LORD is near,

near and hastening fast;

the sound of the day of the LORD is bitter;

the mighty man cries aloud there.

Welcome to the end of the world. This is what it sounds like.

A day of wrath is that day

 – dies irae dies illa –

a day of distress and anguish,

a day of ruin and devastation,

a day of darkness and gloom

a day of clouds and thick darkness,

a day of trumpet blast and battle cry

against the fortified cities

and against the lofty battlements.

I will bring distress on mankind,

so that they shall walk like the blind,

because they have sinned against the LORD.

Against the LORD, not against nature; wrath comes for abuse of the natural world only insofar as that abuse is a sin against the Creator.

Their blood shall be poured out like dust,

and their flesh like dung.

Neither their silver nor their gold

shall be able to deliver them

on the day of the wrath of the LORD.

In the fire of his jealousy,

all the earth shall be consumed.

That’s a little bit worse than whatever might have been going down in the Amazon rainforest this week just gone, don’t you think?⁶

For a full and sudden end

he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth.

Gather together, yes, gather,

O shameless nation,

before the decree takes effect

– before the day passes away like chaff –

before there comes upon you

the burning anger of the LORD,

before there comes upon you

the day of the anger of the LORD.

Seek the LORD, all you humble of the land,

who do his just commands;

seek righteousness; seek humility;

perhaps you may be hidden

on the day of the anger of the LORD.

See that? Not, perhaps you may avert the disaster, but rather, perhaps you may be hidden from it. Now, a lot of this stuff from Zephaniah kind of works on two levels, because it’s predicting the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians in 586BCE as well as the coming destruction of the entire present age, but right now, the way to seek the LORD is through his Son the Lord Jesus Christ. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus; God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep, we might live with him.⁷

This is a more radical change than anything that might be demanded of you in the name of sustainability: more radical than going vegan or carbon neutral or zero waste. This is a call to die to yourself and let Christ live in you. And it’s a more urgent call as well. Funny how certain people like setting deadlines for when the damage done to the planet will be irreversible almost as much as certain other people like predicting the precise date of Jesus’ return. I’m not in a position of sufficient education to be able to comment on the former matter, but regarding the latter, I can tell you of a certainty that the day of wrath will arrive suddenly, out of the blue, an unforeseen shock to all on whom that wrath is poured.⁸ In other words, unless you’re ready and waiting all the time already, it’s coming a heck of a lot sooner than you think it is.

While we left our apocalypse gathering dust at the back of the cupboard behind all the prettier doctrines, the sustainability movement stole it, replaced our almighty God with their favoured idol of mere created Nature, and started preaching their adapted version with a boldness and urgency that frankly puts us to shame. But there’s no variety or degree of commitment to sustainability that’ll save you from the coming wrath of God; only Jesus, by his blood shed on your behalf, can do that. So, for the sake of those around us who need to hear where genuine salvation from the coming dies irae is found, we can’t afford not to do our best to reclaim this teaching in its true form. We were here first; it’s our turf; we’ve got dibs. Can we have our apocalypse back please?

Footnotes

¹ Here’s the Ten Pieces choir performing the piece at the Proms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmWIq0rdv7M.

² Wikipedia’ll give you a nice clunky literal English translation as well as the pretty rhyming version endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_irae.

³ No, I hadn’t heard of her either, but she does a nice job of narrating.

⁴ Here’s a nice way to cut down plastic use: get yourself a safety razor. It works out a heck of a lot cheaper than any other method of hair removal as well. I have a Rockwell one, https://getrockwell.com/; what sold it for me was the promise of a special baby-steps setting where it’s literally impossible to cut yourself. And sure enough, I’ve never cut myself, even now that I’ve graduated to a setting that involves more exposed blade.

⁵ The section I’m about to quote is from Zephaniah 2 and 3, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=zeph+2&version=ESVUK. I’ve given the ESV today, because there’s quite a lot of it and I couldn’t be bothered to translate it myself this late in the evening.

⁶ Which doesn’t actually seem to be quite as catastrophic as people are making out: https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/08/30/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-the-amazon/. I’ve given you this one in particular because it also makes the point that the sustainability movement has nicked the religious idea of the apocalypse, and I probably owe some credit there. Spiked is generally a lot more sceptical of the sustainability movement than I am, but on most topics I find their articles quite a breath of fresh air.

⁷ I didn’t put that bit in italics to see if you’d spot the quotations all the same. Romans 8 and 1 Thessalonians 5, if you’re wondering. Here’s the Thessalonians: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+thess+5&version=ESVUK.

⁸ Like a thief in the night, at an hour you do not expect, said Jesus as recorded in in Matthew 24 and Luke 12 (which I will probably blog about at some point because you have to be quite careful with them); Paul also quoted that teaching in the chapter of 1 Thessalonians I mentioned last footnote.