The Influence of Eschatology on Western Culture

In considering how eschatology has helped shape Western culture in history, one must consider also the roots of Western culture. The traditional West has derived much of its philosophical tradition from the Greeks. Greece heavily influenced the culture of the Roman Empire, which in turn influenced the whole of Europe. Later, Europe had much cultural influence over the rest of the world, especially so in North and South America and Australia. These locations, along with Europe, are what is considered to be the Western World of today. The West has its true birth in Greece, however, with the influence of the Greek philosophers, such as Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. Their understanding of the universe helped to shape the understanding of subsequent generations and cultures. This is why so much of what we, as Christians, claim as our eschatology tends to lean towards rather Platonic ideas.

In our eschatology we tend to have a platonic world view, meaning that we embrace Plato’s idea of some sort of afterlife. However, we go beyond just that and tend to think of an afterlife as being better than the life that we live now. We tend to believe that this world in which we now live is only a shadow or a copy of what is to come. There are deeper layers to creation that have not yet been explored, however, they look a lot like what we have now, only much better. This concept is seen in the writings of such western authors as C.S. Lewis among many others. In Lewis’s book The Last Battle, he portrays both our world as well as his fictional world of Narnia as only being shadows or copies, a small glimpse of what is to come, of the real world of the afterlife. He compares this idea to an onion – one may remove layer upon layer, always going deeper inside towards the true reality. Because of this type of idea, we in the West tend to think that this physical world we live in does not really matter all that much, because it is only a bad and spoiled copy of a better world that we may experience when we die. I believe this is especially true among Christians, who often in the West tend to believe that God is going to destroy this bad copy that is his creation and take us all into the real world of “heaven” where everything will be the way it is supposed to be.

This type of thinking lent itself to the Gnostics of the early Church who were also heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. They believed that the actions done in the body were of little significance, because these body was only something bad that would one day be destroyed, and we would live on as spirits in the afterlife, because only our spirits were truly pure and good. This Gnostic idea seems to have invaded much of Western, especially evangelical, Christian thought. People, for the most part, believe that when they die their bodies will rot away and their spirits will live on. They will go up to heaven and live with God as a spirit of some kind. This vague idea of some sort of spiritual afterlife often contradicts beliefs that Christians will receive a new body in heaven. It would seem that while our culture is highly eschatological in its thought it does not really have any idea what it truly does believe about these things. Our culture seems very ignorant, and worse, ignorant of its ignorance.

What we do seem to believe is that the physical world is not too important, so we tend to do whatever we please with it – polluting both our bodies and our environment, with the underlying thought of this appearing to be that it does not matter because the world is all going to hell in the end anyway – which brings up another idea that seems very much present in the minds of the West, the ideas of heaven and hell. It seems that more people know of these two places and think of them as places where one may go after death than they know of Jesus himself. I am not sure why these particular doctrines have been raised above almost every other belief of the Church, so that even those in secular culture know about these things and yet do not understand or even know of the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ, or of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Even within many Christian circles, more emphasis is placed on heaven and hell and on how one needs to pray the sinner’s prayer so that Jesus can save them from hell and they can go to heaven when they die than anything else.

The end times seem to be a fascination of Western, especially evangelical, culture as well. Everyone seems to be fascinated by the idea that God may someday, any day now, come down and destroy this place. There have been numerous attempts made to predict the date of Christ’s return. All of which so far have been wrong. There is also a certain fascination of particular concepts of an AntiChrist figure that will supposedly rule the world just before Jesus comes back and trashes the place. Various leaders have been accused of being the AntiChrist, or the Man of Sin spoken of by the Apostle Paul. These people include such people as Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II, and Barak Obama. These types of things are really not surprising, however. Western culture has been shaped by the biblical texts as well and not just Greek philosophy. It should not be surprising that people speculate on the identity of these mysterious future figures presented in the biblical texts. It is not wrong to wonder who or what exactly Paul and John and even Jesus himself were talking about. People tend to think whoever is in leadership at the present time must be the AntiChrist. It may seem silly now to say that Gorbachev was possessed by Satan himself since he worked heavily with Ronald Reagan to help prevent Armageddon from happening. It seems foolish now, but a lot of people were convinced back then, just like it made since to believe that Hitler was the AntiChrist during WWII and that Nero was the AntiChrist in the early days of the church. This phenomenon is nothing new and not at all times without logic. It is hard to think of a better candidate for the position of AntiChrist than such evil people as Hitler and Nero. While it is okay to wonder, I believe the problem arises when we become obsessed with things like this and forget the central hope of the Gospel. I believe the apostles would agree with C.S. Lewis when he writes at the beginning of his Screwtape Letters that there are people who ignore devils and people who are obsessed with devils; and neither of these is what Lewis or the Apostles wanted for us as Christians living in Western culture, or anywhere else.