What if Adventist Time of Trouble Teachings Are Just Plain Wrong?
Everybody will be out to kill you. Nobody can be trusted—not even your loved ones. The deceptions will fool God’s true followers. To be saved you must be mondo perfect. You should abandon everyone and flee to the hills (Good luck, Florida). It will be worse than you can imagine. Yes, worse than that. And worse than [shudder-ragged inhale] THAT.
So, little children, quake in your sweaty beds. Chew those fingernails to the quick. Let nightmarish scenarios consume you. Develop suspicion. Downplay the present. Dwell on a loathsome future. Be. Very. Afraid.
Fortunately, as an age-24 convert I didn’t grow up with that end-times outlook. (My West Coast childhood anxieties instead involved “duck and cover” from H-bombs and racing wildly from tidal waves.) Yet, despite my best efforts, our children were exposed to horrific traditional Adventist apocalyptic expectations. Long after the experience, I learned that one of our sons had played “Adventists and Catholics” during an Adventist elementary school recess. Imagine my joy.
Adventism’s take on the Time of Trouble has not helped one person. Ever. Not one. In addition, millions of people have carried unwarranted, septic, contagious fears to their graves.
Elite Panic
In A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (2009), Rebecca Solnit explores the human condition when faced with dire calamity. For his cover testimonial, Bill McKibben, who is anything but naïve, calls the book “the freshest, deepest, most optimistic account of human nature I’ve come across in many years.”
I thought, Human nature? Optimism? Are you kidding? Pol Pot’s killing fields? Rwandan genocide? Festive lynchings? Merciless purges? Unbridled gang violence? Pandemic political deceptions? But I was in for a welcome revelation.
Solnit’s book supplies contrary evidence to humankind’s depravity as she examines surprising glimpses of utopia uncovered in five catastrophes: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1917 Halifax explosion, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, and 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.
For me, the most fascinating account was of Katrina, in particular elite panic in New Orleans:
In the hours, days, and weeks after Katrina, those with one set of beliefs were responsible for many deaths; those with another saved many lives. Fear fed by rumors and lies and lurking unexamined beliefs about human nature hit New Orleans like a second hurricane. Ray Nagin and Eddie Compass, respectively the mayor and police chief of New Orleans (and both African Americans), contributed to the atmosphere of fear and turmoil. About twenty thousand people had taken refuge in the downtown Superdome sports arena, which had been opened up as a shelter as a last resort but was not stocked with anything near the needed quantity of food and water or backup power. The hurricane had ripped off part of the roof, the restrooms backed up and the plumbing failed so that sewage seeped out into the rest of the facility, and without air-conditioning and adequate electricity the place became a dark, fetid, chaotic oven. Much of the area surrounding its raised concrete perimeter was flooded. People were not allowed to leave, prisoners of the fears of those in power. Rumors of savagery inside abounded. Compass told the television talk show host Oprah Winfrey, “We had little babies in there. . . . Some of the little babies getting raped.” He was overwhelmed by sobs on television and eventually had a breakdown. Nagin reported that there were “hundreds of gang members” in the Superdome, raping and murdering (236).
Almost no stores were open after the hurricane, and money was useless to get provisions. Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco had called off the emergency police and about 40,000 National Guard from search and rescue—including for the survivors in the Superdome—to “focus on combating looting. They had chosen protecting property over saving lives” (236).
“The media took its cue from these hysterical, gullible leaders. CNN declared, ‘On the dark streets, rampaging gangs take full advantage of the unguarded city. Anyone venturing outside is in danger of being robbed or even shot. It is a state of siege.’ No evidence exists that anyone was shot or killed by the supposed gangs” (237).
As people were trapped without resources in New Orleans, essentials such as food, water, diapers, and medicine ran out and were replenished from stores. “News photographs of African Americans gathering necessities were titled looting, while whites doing the same thing were ‘gathering supplies.’ Opportunistic theft and burglary are historically rare in American disasters, rare enough that many disaster scholars consider it one of the ‘myths’ of disaster” (238).
Where was governmental support? “All during those days, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was turning away volunteer rescuers, buses, truckloads of supplies . . . FEMA had been folded into the new post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security, and the DHS had been so preoccupied with terrorists that it neglected all the other dangers facing the citizens it was supposed to serve” (240).
Many of the people left behind in New Orleans were elderly, ill, or extremely poor, without a personal car, gas money, or a viable destination. Some had remained behind to stay with the sick. Thousands were stranded when their flights out of New Orleans were canceled. Yet these victims became suspects, with guns pointed at them instead of offered aid. A police officer said, “At this point it’s like four days into it, and we’re trying to explain to the captain, these people are so tired and thirsty and hungry they couldn’t flip over a lawn chair if they wanted to riot” (242).
Fortunately, many ordinary citizens stepped up. “There was a group of people, Good Samaritans, who pilfered the Convention Center for handcarts and walked out to where food and water was and brought it back to the people” (243).
There had been reports of 200 bodies in the Superdome. The actual body count was six, including four natural deaths and a suicide. In the end, the official report showed that “the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees—mass murders, rapes, and beatings—have turned out to be false” (244). However, by the time the errant rumors and reports were retracted, the damage had been done.
One prevailing narrative was of roving gangs in the Superdome dispensing mayhem. What were the gangs actually doing? A survivor relates, “They were the ones getting juice for the babies. They were the ones getting clothes for people who had walked through that water. They were the ones fanning the old people, because that’s what moved the guys, the gangster guys the most, the plight of the old people. . . . We were trapped like animals, but I saw the greatest humanity I’d ever seen from the most unlikely places” (244).
Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you” (Matthew 21:31, NRSV).
Our Adventist Time of Trouble narrative itself foments problems. We ought to be trumpeting the sheer decency that arises when people are in crisis. If panic does ensue, God’s faithful followers stick around to help others. Jesus says, “The love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved” (Matthew 24:12, 13, NRSV).
How do we endure? It’s by keeping our godly love warm.
A Different Outlook
The end times are about advocacy and courageous love. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when [Jesus] appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2, RSV).
What is Jesus like? He was never a survivalist. Are His followers content with trying to survive the Second Coming? John the Baptizer certainly wasn’t about surviving. Peter, James, and John tried to merely survive when they deserted their Master. The kin-dom of new earth people is more. We are living, breathing sanctuaries for God and for God’s creation. “Making paradise is the work that we are meant to do” (312).
Christianity has never been about isolationism, and never will be. During (and outside of) disasters, let the followers of Jesus transition to new models of transforming grace in community—accepting, sharing, forgiving, trusting, and merciful through the end. As Solnit notes, “The constellations of solidarity, altruism, and improvisation are within most of us and reappear at these times” (10). Justice and love can be present always.
While others may hoard and lie, our homes and church doors will open to the dispossessed and vulnerable. We remain true to our only King and to each other. We provide a refreshing oasis. We model a hopeful humanity that Jesus liberates from grasping greed and mindless dread.
No anxious imaginings. No quivering in sweaty beds. No abandoning anyone. And no need to run to fearsome mountains made of molehills.
Relax, Florida.
