The End Times

The “end-times” have fascinated the Christian faithful from the very beginning. Early Christians who came from the Jewish community were all very familiar with “apocalyptic literature.” Toward the end of the era before Jesus’ birth, when Judaism was under occupation from Greek and Roman forces, with their “ungodliness,” their cruelty, and religious hostility, the
Jewish people had developed a form of inspirational writing that gave them assurance of God’s final triumph. “In the end, God will overcome all our enemies and we will be vindicated.” Jesus also had used some of this literary form in his utterances concerning the judgment to come upon
the world.

The Book of Daniel contains some of this same kind of prophetic literature: apocalyptic. The Christian community, in its early experience of persecution and suffering at the hands of the Roman Empire, continued this form of literature. There are ‘apocalyptic passages’ in Matthew, Mark, and Luke where Jesus talks about the end of the world with its cataclysmic events, the return of Christ, and the eventual triumph of God. The point of an apocalypse is that God is in charge of history, and God will not be defeated!

Of course, the Book of Revelation is the final text in the Christian testament. The whole book is an apocalypse. It says once and for all that God will not allow evil to overcome good.

The Church has developed a multiplicity of traditions concerning “the end.” Some of the Catholic tradition holds that Christ will return in a physical form to judge the world. The material world will be destroyed and replaced with a totally different world. Another tradition, equally valid among Catholics, is that the whole universe will be transformed into a kind of world where all creation gives glory to God through Jesus Christ, without having the known world destroyed. In this tradition, the destruction of which the Scriptures speak applies to sin and ungodliness, not to physical creation itself.

Christian fundamentalists would say that the Book of Revelation is literally true, that the apocalyptic passages in Mark’s Gospel are also literally true — that the “stars will literally fall out of the sky.” The sun will be dimmed; the moon will be no more. There are Catholics who approach the Bible in the same way.

See: The Catechism: #668-682.