I’ve heard a lot of absurd things since coming to Lee, but one of the least intelligent statements I have ever heard uttered came from a woman I encountered in the Humanities Building.

She was talking about the end times and said, “Well, God is going to burn everything up in the end. So there’s global warming right there.”

What this woman said, as absurd as it was, seems to be an extreme form of the apocalypticism that dominates what should be our Christian hope for the end.

Rather than hope that Jesus’ coming at the end will bring peace and harmony, Christians frequently revel in the death, doom and destruction that Jesus will bring when he defeats his and our enemies, even if it means destroying all of creation to do so.

If you think I’m exaggerating, then I submit the twelve original books in the “Left Behind” series, along with the three prequels, one sequel, three movies, the video game and numerous other spin-offs as Exhibit One.  In Tim Lahaye’s and Jerry Jenkins’ violent, albeit fictional, vision of the future, all hell breaks loose following the rapture of the Church, and Satan’s hand-picked leader Nicolae Carpathia forms a one-world government that persecutes all new Christians while God in heaven pours out plagues, natural disasters and supernatural fiends to torment those remaining.

At the end of the seven years of tribulation, Jesus returns for a second time to destroy the armies of the Antichrist. His presence is enough to annihilate Satan’s army, causing “their innards and entrails [to gush] to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.”

And this is what Lahaye and Jenkins call “the glorious appearing.”

It is very difficult to reconcile this picture of the future with the crucified Jesus, who proclaimed, “Blessed are the peacemakers” and “If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”

If that was the Jesus who died, who then is this Christ who has been raised? Did the Jesus who forgave his crucifiers from the cross change his mind in the time since his ascension? Or is Jesus not really “the same yesterday and today and forever?”

I find it very hard to believe that people can claim to worship the crucified Jesus when the content of their hope for his return can draw comparison to the reigns of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot or any of the other violent tyrants in history who squashed their enemies with a heavy hand. Such prefigurations of the future would be more at home in the upcoming Saw V than in the body of Jesus Christ.

The risen and soon to be ruling Christ is more than a future Caesar. He is the Lamb who was slain for the sake of the world. He finds his embodiment in love and peace, not strife and war. And his followers find their hope not in Jesus’ vengeance, but in the expectation of the day when swords shall be beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, as all people dwell in unity with one another and with the God who is all in all.