(RNS) — The Military Religious Freedom Foundation said in recent days that soldiers have been reporting that the Book of Revelation — the New Testament’s apocalyptic last book foretelling the Second Coming of Christ — had been making odd appearances at some combat briefings for attacks on Iran. More than 200 service members, the group claimed, complained the bombing campaign was being connected to the biblical battle of Armageddon or the unfolding of the “End Times.”
MRFF’s reports have not been corroborated, and even if 100 troops have heard this kind of talk, it doesn’t mean the American military as a whole views the conflict as a holy war. Nor should isolated reports be mistaken for official policy or mainstream thinking within the armed forces. But it would not be the only reminder that when war breaks out in the Middle East, the apocalypse rears its head.
Earlier this month, Pastor John Hagee rolled out a sermon in which he said, “Prophetically, we’re right on cue,” citing the Bible to compare current events to the end of days foretold by the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, and referring to biblical visions of doom as “God’s Operation Epic Fury.”
This way of interpreting world events has circulated in American religious culture for more than a century. The theology that underpins it is known as dispensational premillennialism, a relatively modern development with little clear precedent in Christian thought prior to the 19th century.
That’s not to say Christians have not long reflected on the unfolding of God’s purposes in history. The visions of the prophet Daniel and the imagery of Revelation have often prompted believers to wonder about God’s plans for history. In Daniel’s interpretation of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, a great statue composed of successive metals represents a series of earthly kingdoms that will ultimately be shattered by a stone “not cut by human hands,” often interpreted to symbolize God’s coming reign. Revelation, drawing from Daniel in its own day, depicts the end in a cascade of vivid apocalyptic images — beasts rising from the sea, cosmic upheavals, divine judgment and the final defeat of evil.
Both Daniel and Revelation were written during periods when the communities that produced them were living under political domination and persecution. In that context, apocalyptic imagery functioned less as a blueprint for forecasting distant historical events and more as a form of theological resistance — a way of affirming that the powers that appeared to rule their age would not have the final word. For us today they are not a reliable guide to recognizing the end of the world, but an assurance that that history ultimately belongs to God.
Occasionally, Christians did organize history into spiritual eras of their own devising. Most famously, the 12th-century Italian monk Joachim of Fiore proposed three great ages corresponding to the persons of the Trinity: the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son and a coming Age of the Spirit. Yet church authorities treated many of these claims with suspicion. Several reform movements inspired by Joachim’s ideas were condemned, and aspects of Joachim’s theology were criticized by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.
Dispensationalism, which began to take shape some six centuries later, was another such attempt to divide time into ages. Its most influential architect was John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish preacher associated with the Plymouth Brethren movement.
Amid the social upheavals of industrial modernity, Darby seemed to want to tame an increasingly uncertain world. The rise of biblical criticism had begun to challenge traditional assumptions about Scripture, while many theologians influenced by Enlightenment optimism argued that human progress and moral improvement would gradually usher in the kingdom of God. Darby rejected that vision. In his reading of Scripture, history was not steadily improving but moving toward crisis. The modern world’s war and social turmoil was really evidence, he supposed, that history was moving toward its divinely appointed conclusion.
Darby’s detailed interpretive framework divided history into divinely ordered “dispensations,” or eras in which God relates to humanity in different ways. The present age — the era of the church — would eventually come to an abrupt end when believers are taken up to meet Christ in what later interpreters would call the “rapture,” a word found nowhere in the Bible. A period of global turmoil, often described as the “tribulation,” would follow as divine judgments unfolded and world powers gathered in a final conflict associated with the biblical image of Armageddon. After this climactic struggle, Christ would return visibly to establish a 1,000-year reign on Earth before the final renewal of creation.
Central to Darby’s system was also a sharp distinction between God’s plans for the church and God’s continuing purposes for the nation of Israel — a feature that would later shape how many American believers interpreted modern developments in the Middle East. This framework gained enormous influence in the early 20th century through the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible, which included extensive explanatory notes written from a dispensational perspective. Embedded in Scripture, Darby’s interpretation came to be read in some places as if it were Scripture.
By the end of the century, dispensationalism had moved from the margins of Protestant theology to the center of American evangelical culture. It shaped prophecy conferences and revival movements, inspired bestselling books, such as Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth,” and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind novels, and spread into pop culture in movies and television series, most recently HBO’s “The Leftovers,” exerting a powerful influence on the American imagination.
For millions of believers, meanwhile, global politics — especially events in the Middle East and developments involving the modern state of Israel — have come to be viewed through the lens of dispensationalist prophecy.
For most of Christian history, however, wars were not mapped onto a prophetic timetable. The early church, the medieval tradition and the major theological voices of the Reformation all affirmed that Christ will come again, but the timing and manner remained in God’s hands. Even when Christians spoke of warfare in explicitly religious terms — most famously during the Crusades — the goal was not to trigger the end of history through geopolitical conflict. The expectation of Christ’s return remained a matter of divine promise rather than human strategy.
The New Testament itself counsels precisely this kind of restraint. When the disciples ask the risen Jesus in the Book of Acts about the restoration of God’s kingdom, he responds with a gentle rebuke: “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” In this light, the Christian posture toward the end of history ought to be one of watchfulness and hope, not calculation.
Indeed, in the first millennium of the church’s life, the End Times functioned primarily as a language of hope and perseverance. Early Christians lived under the shadow of political instability and, at times, outright persecution. The promise that Christ would come again was less a puzzle to decode than a source of courage. It affirmed that the powers that appeared to dominate the present age — empires, violence and injustice — would not have the final word.
The end of history was less front-and-center to these Christians because they held that history had already been decisively changed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Even if its final fulfillment still lay ahead, the kingdom of God had begun. This tension between what theologians often describe as the “already” and the “not yet” shaped the church’s understanding of the end of the world.
The idea that the war with Iran might be part of God’s prophetic plan reverses our relationship with the end of the world and our responsibility to seek peace. In rapture logic, wars are no longer tragic events, but positive signs that the final battle described in Scripture is drawing near.
Christians pray, “Thy kingdom come.” The hope in this prayer, however, has never been that conflict will bring the end of history, but that God will bring history to its fulfillment in ways that transcend human violence altogether.
Armageddon, in other words, is not a military strategy.
(The Rev. Michael W. DeLashmutt is dean of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd and senior vice president at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, where he also serves as associate professor of theology. His most recent book is “A Lived Theology of Everyday Life.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
