Newsweek on the Apocalypse

Somebody had to say it. And it struck me as ironic that it was a heathen magazine like Newsweek that said it first. Except for the last line of copy, I should think this would make a fine cover for a Christian publication about now.

To be sure, the heathen media don't mean a word of it. It's OK for them to talk about the "Apocalypse" as long as they know that you know they just mean it metaphorically; they were winking when they wrote it. What Newsweek's editors meant to say is that if they ever did believe in God, this sure would look like what the Bible says to expect. But they are educated, so they know there are reasonable explanations for why the world is going so crazy. Right?

Now we Christians, on the other hand, do believe in God. We are principally committed to the idea of an Apocalypse. (By the way, Wikipedia, while not my only source of theological truth, defines "Apocalypse" as follows: "a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception." That's not bad.) But we got pretty tired of centuries of Nostradamus types who thought they figured out the exact date of the Second Coming. So nowadays we obviate embarrassment by not talking about the Apocalypse at all.

This leaves the job to Newsweek. They somehow managed to devote an entire double issue to the crazy gyrations of geological and political mayhem without giving a passing thought to the God of the Apocalypse. That's not exactly all-things-considered. But something tells me that somewhere in the bowels of the magazine's headquarters, a few overeducated writers are shaking in their Rockports and whistling in the dark.

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