Abstract
In the 1990s several incidents seemed to point to a frightening connection between millennialism and violence. For example, an obscure group of Bible students dedicated to understanding the extraordinary prophecies of the book of Revelation burst into the media glare when agents of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms botched a raid on their headquarters outside of Waco, Texas at the end of February 1993. The ensuing armed standoff reached its awful dénouement on April 19, when a fire took the lives of nearly everyone inside the Branch Davidians’ Mount Carmel Center. In October 1994, anticipating the Second Coming of Jesus, more than 50 members of The Order of the Solar Temple perished in Switzerland and Quebec in murder-suicides; in 1995 another fifteen died in France, and in 1997 another five in Canada. On March 20, 1995, an eclectic Japanese millennial group garnered the attention and opprobrium of the world when it released deadly sarin gas inside the Tokyo subway. Its leader, Shoko Asahara, had become convinced that the events prophesied by the book of Revelation concerning “Armageddon” were being played out. Finally, on March 26, 1997, 39 followers of Marshall Herff Applewhite donned purple shrouds and Nike sneakers and washed down doses of phenobarbitol mixed with applesauce or pudding.
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Notes
Catherine Wessinger, “Introduction,” in Wessinger, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 5.
I will follow the account of Chen’s life in Charles Houston Prather, “God’s Salvation Church: Past Present and Future,” Marburg Journal of Religion 9 (1999): 1–9; available at http://www.uni-marburg.de/fb03/ivk/mjr/pdfs/1999/articles/prather1999.pdf.
See also the account in Catherine Wessinger, How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2000), pp. 253–263.
Hon-Ming Chen, God’s Descending in Clouds (Flying Saucers) to Save People (Garland, TX: self-published, 1997). The text lists “God—The Supreme Being” as its author, but in my discussion I will refer to Chen as, at least, the conduit through which the text has reached human beings. At a very few points I have inserted words or a few letters into brackets to improve the clarity of the text.
On Marcion, in general, see Sebastian Moll, The Arch-Heretic Marcion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010);
see also Adolf Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma, trans. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007).
For overviews of Heaven’s Gate see John R. Hall, with Philip D. Schuyler and Sylvaine Trinh, Apocalypse Observed: Religious Movements and Violence in North America, Europe, and Japan (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 149–182; Wessinger, How the Millennium, pp. 229–252. For a review of the scholarly literature on Heaven’s Gate, see Benjamin E. Zeller, “Heaven’s Gate: A Literature Review and Bibliographic Essay,” Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review 1 (2009); available at http://www.academicpublishing. org/V1I1.php. Accessed July 22, 2013; Zeller’s forthcoming Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion promises to be the best available account of the origins, history, practices, and beliefs of the group.
Representatives of the Kingdom of Heaven, How and When “Heaven’s Gate” (The Door to the Physical Level Above Human) May be Entered (Denver, CO: Right to Know Enterprises, 1996), section 4, p. 79.
Brad Steiger and Hayden Hewes, Inside Heaven’s Gate: The UFO Cult Leaders Tell Their Story in Their Own Words (New York: Signet, 1997), pp. 100–101.
See Robert W. Balch, “Waiting for the Ships: Disillusionment and the Revitalization of Faith in Bo and Peep’s UFO Cult,” in James R. Lewis, ed., The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 137–166, esp. p. 154.
George Chryssides notes Do’s “piecemeal” use of Revelation in “‘Come On Up, and I Will Show Thee’: Heaven’s Gate as a Postmodern Group,” in James R. Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Petersen, eds., Controversial New Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 353–370, esp. p. 365.
On the origins of the Lucifer story see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
As quoted in Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 238.
Dale B. Martin, Pedagogy of the Bible: An Analysis and Proposal (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), p. 31.
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© 2014 Eugene V. Gallagher
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Gallagher, E.V. (2014). The End of the World as They Know It: Revelations about Revelation. In: Reading and Writing Scripture in New Religious Movements. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434838_8
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