For much of my Christian life I didn’t think eschatology mattered. That word comes from the Greek eschatos, which means last or farthest, so it means the study (ology) of last things. Since the Late Great Planet Earth 1970s, Christians have come to think of it as the study of “end times,” given the popularity of dispensational theology that believes the world is going to the proverbial hell in a handbasket; the ship is sinkin’ fast, so we have to save as many as we can, and prepare for the end. That view of eschatology isn’t as popular as it once was given the end is always around a corner never seeming to come, but it still informs much Christian understanding of “end times.” That, as the title implies, is not the subject of this post. Here I’m going to take on the secularists because in the title of the YouTube channel I contribute to, eschatology matters. In other words, how we see the end of things has an impact on how we live in the present, and everyone alive has some kind of vision in their mind of the end of things, even if most secularists suppress it with games and distractions. They want to enjoy their Nihilism until the bitter end.

What inspired this post is a TV series my wife and I recently watched on AppleTV+ called Silo (season 1 and 2). As with most of what we watch on streaming TV, it reveals the glories of secularism, or not. We enjoyed it, and I decided to read the book, the first of three in a trilogy. The story is a perfect example of something inevitable in a worldview where God is persona non grata: THE SECULAR ESCHATOLOGY OF DOOM. I don’t normally do all caps, but I want to emphasize the poverty of secularism as an exhausted vision for life. This is extremely important to understand as we do spiritual battle at the end of this secular age (see Eph. 6:12, but only in the context of Eph. 1:18-23). I write about this a lot in my work because we’re at a profound turning point in history, which is a culmination of almost 400 years of thinking and cultural change in the West (which is most of the world today). Intellectuals thought we could build societies and lives where God was a bit player, at best, and we could conquer reality to our indomitable will. It looks like reality isn’t so malleable after all; reality is winning. The liberal progressive secularists, the Western elites who ran things, the “experts,” thought they could mold reality to their wishes, but instead they have encountered the unmovable structure of God’s created order. Let’s take a look at how we got here.

A Brief History Secular Disappointment
From the beginning of the Enlightenment, and it’s development into secularism in the 17^th century, until the early 20^th century, everything was Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. Sing it with me, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood . . .” Uh, maybe not. Even as difficult as life could be in the 19^th century, an infectious optimism gripped the imaginations of all but the most downtrodden. Industrialization brought a new kind of misery to cities exploding in growth, but the blessings of technology and knowledge were undeniable. To cite only one of those blessings, clean water was brought to the masses and saved untold lives from disease because of indoor plumbing and public sanitation.

A good example of the understandable hubris of the time was the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Held around the world annually, fairs showcased some of the world’s most revolutionary inventions and concepts known at the time, and the period between 1880 and World War I was the golden age of fairs. At the Chicago fair, known as the World’s Columbian Exposition celebrating Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492, the world-changing technology of electric light made its debut. It really seemed humanity could accomplish anything, and conquer the limits imposed by nature. Without God, however, as Nietzsche prophesied, disaster loomed.

Although a staunch atheist, Nietzsche realized Christianity had created the moral framework that made Christian Western civilization possible, and without something in its place, bad things were bound to happen. Branches can’t be cut from the tree and live. According to Walter Kauffmann, Nietzsche’s writings abound in prophecies of doom.

“If the doctrines . . . of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal . . . are hurled into the people for another generation,” if mankind realizes the unique worth of the human being has evaporated, and that no up and down remains, and if the tremendous event that we have killed God reaches the ears of man—then night will close in,” an age of barbarism begins,” and “there will be wars such as have never happened on earth.”

Next to this paragraph in the book I wrote, “The 20^th Century!!!” And remember, this comes from a convinced atheist, but one who realized the West wasn’t just cutting off branches, but cutting down the entire tree! It’s safe to say, no other thinker at the time would have said anything like this, and his prescient prophecies proved disastrously true.

I place the beginning of the end of modernism and its inevitable secularism with the sinking of RMS Titanic in April 1912. While the builders and White Star Line, the technological marvel’s operator, never actually declared it unsinkable, that was the impression in popular imagination. The sinking was a huge cultural blow to the dominant hubris of the time. A little more than two years later a war of unimaginable horror and carnage swept up the most educated and civilized nations in the world. This “war to end all wars” had many horrific unintended consequences, as all wars do, and two decades later led to an even more deadly and horrendous war. One of those consequences was the Russian Revolution, leading to Soviet communism and tens of millions more dead. The communists seemed to want to outdo each other in the mass murder sweepstakes, and Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and others gave the world by most estimates north of 100 million corpses. An “age of barbarism” only begins to describe it.

Ironically, despite all the carnage and destruction, Western cultural and political leaders were more confident than ever “progress” would continue. Technocratic man and “scientific management” would solve all problems sooner or later. The post-World War II period was an especially heady time. People in the 1950s and early 1960s pre-Vietnam believed anything was possible. Kennedy’s administration was staffed with the “best and the brightest,” young guns who never doubted their ability to do great things with their power. Kennedy’s promise of landing a man on the moon in 1961 was indicative of the can-do spirit. Under the surface, however, cracks were beginning to appear.

Technology, like anything sinful human beings create, can be used for good or evil. As Blaise Pascal put it so memorably:

Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.

The cracks leading to the eschatological doom I speak of started with the 1962 book by Rachal Carson called Silent Spring, which set the stage for the environmental movement. She exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT, and questioned humanity’s faith in unlimited technological progress. In due course, environmental doom and gloom became a staple of the left’s worldview. Global warming transmogrified into “climate change,” and is only the latest catastrophe awaiting mankind if radical revolutionary changes are not enacted. The changes just happen to conveniently require globalist, leftist, tyrannical, anti-free enterprise solutions, always top down, never bottom up.

The Influence of Christian Eschatology
It’s important to remember the concept of eschatology, of history going somewhere with an inherent telos, or purpose, is a solely Jewish/Christian concept. Prior to God calling Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans (Gen 12), history was literally going nowhere. Humanities’ conception of time and life itself changed that day.

Thomas Cahill in his The Gift of the Jews tells the story of that change. The subtitle isn’t hyperbole: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. He explores the many ways Jewish belief and practice was completely unique in the ancient world. Here are just a few of these gifts:

• Fate: Before the Hebrew people came along, life was viewed as something determined by inscrutable forces beyond any person’s control. There was nothing to be done about it but submit. That changed forever when God revealed through Scripture that He created man, male and female He created them, in His own image.
• Time: Prior to the idea of “In the beginning God,” all peoples of the world viewed time cyclically, one season moving into another, a wheel turning forever going nowhere. The people of Israel, by contrast, introduced the concept of past, present, and future; that history was going somewhere, something inconceivable to all other ancient peoples.
• A transcendent, personal Creator God: All other ancient peoples believed in gods who were visible (idols), and in fear of the forces of nature, believed they could manipulate the gods who presumably controlled those forces. The Hebrews introduced a concept no other peoples could conceive: a personal God, in some way like them, and the only true God. I can imagine an ancient person encountering these strange people saying, One God… who created everything? That’s crazy! Cahill writes that the God of Abraham, “no longer your typical ancient divinity, no longer the archetypal gesturer—is a real personality who has intervened in real history, changing its course and robbing it of predictability.”

Secularism hijacked the Jewish and Christian worldview, threw God out the door, and thought it could fly the plane of reality anywhere it wanted. Man was finally in control of his own existence without all the pesky divine interference. As Karl Marx said in his Communist Manifesto, man could now “move around himself as his own true Sun.” That was the plan anyway, but it hasn’t quite worked out as planned. Providence, however bastardized it becomes, is an inescapable influence of Christianity. Every worldview influenced by Christianity has an eschatology, a vision of the end of things, including secularism, and given the obvious dysfunction of the world, they inevitably tend towards the negative.

Which brings us to the Book of Revelation. Any providential discussion of history, as well as the present and that to come, can’t escape the most influential biblical book in Western history, eschatology or not. It’s instructive to consider the Greek word John uses for revelation as he begins his letter to “the seven churches in the province of Asia.” His first words are, “The revelation of Jesus Christ . . .” Revelation in Greek is apokálypsis and simply means unveiling, uncovering, revealing, revelation, and has no inherent positive or negative connotation. The word in English as it has come down to us, apocalypse, has only negative meaning when we see, hear, or use it ourselves. That is the influence of a certain interpretation of Revelation, but left or right, secular or religious, what often unites them all is the conviction the worst is yet to come.

The Inevitable Hopelessness of a God-Less World
One of the things Silo reminded me of is how important our fundamental assumptions are about the ultimate nature of reality, and in the Western mind there are only two mutually exclusive assumptions. Either God revealed to us in the first chapters of Genesis is real, or it’s all a cosmic accident, a product of chance. Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution is the creation myth for the secular eschatology of doom. If there is no God who sovereignly ordains all things for the good of is creation, then there is nothing upon which humanity can base their hope for a bright and positive future. Without God, there is nothing to counter human sin and its attendant evil. Dysfunction will always win in the end, inevitably leading to despair, and logically that leads to dystopia.

Speaking of dystopia, such a concept didn’t exist until Western culture fully embraced secularism. The idea is the flipside of “utopia,” which literally means no place, and was coined by Thomas More in his book Utopia in 1516. In it he describes a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean that is a satire on the state of England. We think of it as an impossibly idealized place that cannot exist, and those who think they can achieve it on this earth generally end up in a very bad place. Inspired by More’s writings, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill coined the word dystopia, meaning ‘bad place’ in 1868 as he was denouncing the government’s Irish land use policy. As the 20^th century developed, any kind of Utopia looked increasingly unlikely, and fiction started to embrace this concept of history inevitably going to this bad place, this dystopia. In a God-less universe man was ill equipped to overcome himself. The story behind the Silo series is a perfect example of this. I could probably write an entire post just listing the dystopian novels and movies of the last hundred years. Anyone reading or listening to this could pull numerous of them to mind. And this is only just the fiction. We’re almost daily reminded by the leftists in politics and culture that dystopia is inevitable if we don’t listen to them and give up all our freedoms and wealth so they can save us.

Why is it that God-less secular man is so given to a penchant to doom? I previously talked about the importance of ultimate assumptions for how people view the world, their worldview. Human beings are question raising animals specifically because we are not cosmic accidents, and fundamental questions about the nature of reality will be asked and answered. Nobody can remain a functional agnostic in their actual lives, and what they choose for entertainment will reflect that. I will briefly mention four that all people go through their lives asking and answering. This will of necessity be brief, but each could be developed in a post of its own, not to mention the tomes that have been written on them for thousands of years. Human beings can’t stand unanswered questions, but without God that’s all we got. Christianity is infinitely superior to secularism in the answers it provides to these questions.

• Origin – Where do we come from? How did we get here? These questions are asked a lot in Silo because 10,000 people live in a hole in the ground and have no idea why. As mentioned above it’s either Darwin or God, either we’re merely animals, clever apes who fell out of the void, or creatures lovingly created and determined to exist by an Almighty Creator God who designed the world and everything in it specifically for us. The former is inherently hope-less; we are hurdling toward death in this mist of a life, and then it’s into the void, nothingness, it’s over. How inspiring! Or God and enternal life in paradise with no more sin, suffering, or death. Let me think about it.
• Meaning – If all we are is matter in motion, so much lucky dirt, where does one get meaning? People try to squeeze it out of all kinds of things in life, but those things can’t give us ultimate meaning. Those are merely individual puzzle pieces that have no puzzle within which to fit, no big picture to give them meaning, and thus they never ultimately satisfy.
• Morality – All human beings long for justice, for wrongs to be righted. They know intuitively, deeply, that right and wrong are not merely like preferences in ice cream. There has to be some kind of transcendent moral standard beyond matter, some kind of ultimate straight line that tells us when all the other lines are crooked and by how much.
• Destiny – And finally, our destiny is either Utopia or Dystopia. It can be nothing in between. People read the book of Revelation and come to the wrong conclusion because they’re stuck on not only the wrong definition of the word apocalypse, but also on the wrong interpretation of the story. It doesn’t end in a bleak and dreary lifeless landscape, but a glorious place of God living with his people. We’re told what it will be like in Revelation 21:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. ² And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. ⁴ He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

Only God in Christ offers us answers to all our questions and satisfies all our deepest longings. As Augustine put in most memorably, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”