Conundrums of the End: Fate, Destiny, and Apocalypse

By Albert Krueger

Western civilization is coming to an end. There is a hunger for catastrophe in the air. What this coming catastrophe looks like depends on your cultural conditioning. In Conundrums of the End, author Albert Krueger offers a spiritual guidebook examining the formation of Christian faith for the postmodern

• Language: English
• Publisher: Albert Krueger
• Release date: Nov 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781952648618

Albert Krueger

Albert Krueger earned a bachelor’s degree in philosoophy from the University of Arizona and a master of divinity degree from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, California. Krueger practiced his profession entirely in the Pacific Northwest. A retired Episcopal priest, he lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife Diana. They enjoy visiting desert places that are difficult to access.

Book preview

Introduction

I am a child of the sixties. As a bright young high school student, I was inevitably drawn to envision a career in science or engineering. I was the kind of person who assigned himself math problems to do in his spare time. Then in 1966, I went off to college intending to pursue a career in astronomy.

Life as you and I try to plan it is a kind of self-modifying chaos; life as God plans it can be even stranger. I discovered that my propensity to gaze longingly at the physical heavens was a sign of my desire to gaze longingly into the spiritual heavens.

I determined I would leave the college scene and learn to practice either the nonconcepts of Zen Buddhism or the principles of Vedanta Hinduism. I rejected my superficial Lutheran upbringing. I didn’t know the Holy Spirit in those days, yet a provocation deep in my conscience caused me to look at the Bible so I could articulate what I was rejecting and why. I enrolled in a class called The Bible as Literature offered by the English Department.

We didn’t cover much ground, just some of the stories in Samuel and Kings. But the little old white-haired lady professor’s love of biblical language became my introduction to a lifelong love affair of my own. That was my first apocalypse. The Bible became more real to me than had the other scriptures I had studied, and they were many. I shed my comparative religion instincts and focused on the specialness of this scripture.

Some religious teachers like to say that life is a journey. That’s a simplistic way of looking at it, but in my experience, it’s more like being the pinball in a pinball machine; you hope you will go through a gate that will give you some points, but you are still just that deaf, dumb and blind kid who sure plays a mean pinball.¹ You try to finish your pilgrimage to Canterbury² and end up in the lot of a junk dealer.³

But the junk dealer’s lot is beautiful; Canterbury Cathedral pales in comparison. Things grow and change and flourish in the junk dealer’s lot. Bob Dylan may have kicked off the sixties with his famous song The Times They Are a-Changin’⁴ causing a great spirit of transformation to appear in our midst, but even that spirit didn’t know that in reality, it is time itself that is changing. How we deal with the realities of this change is what also must change.

When time changes, the spirit of apocalypse becomes dominant. It’s then that things begin to mean what they have always meant and when it becomes clear that they have never meant what we had thought they meant. This is why orthodoxy and unorthodoxy are having a difficult time these days. It’s what leads me as a follower of Christ to fully embrace the idea of a postmodern age and its accompanying deconstructive methodologies.

The postmodern age is here vying for the inheritance of Western civilization even while the wild beast of the book of Revelation 11 and 13 is still striving to come out of the sea.⁵ When time itself changes, the old order becomes unreliable, and if there is a new order, its time has not yet come. We want to fix this discrepancy of values, but like the song says, The power of reason, the top of the heap, we’re the ones who can kill the things we don’t eat… We’re building the Perfect Beast.⁶

The Bible has answers for this kind of thing, but the answers aren’t always what we would like to force from it. When time changes, how we look at and see things changes too. Beauty and horror are all around us, but we aren’t called to try to choose, because in choosing the one, we often have actually chosen the other.

We squint at a rising sun in our time. I hope this little essay will help some to stop squinting and bask boldly in the light of the coming new dawn.

Unless otherwise noted, all Bible quotes are from the Holy Bible MEV, Charisma House, Lake Mary, FL, 2015.

Acknowledgments

Credit goes to my wife, Diana, who always says that writing is what I do.

I am especially grateful to Bishop Robert L. Ladehoff, Portland, Oregon; Michael DiGiacomo, Phoenix, Arizona; Jay Willey, Las Vegas, Nevada; Robert F. Krueger, Mesa, Arizona; Fr. Christopher Seal, Nevada City, California; and Apostle Elbert Mondaine, Portland, Oregon, for reading and commenting on the things I write.

I acknowledge as well Charles King, from Winslow, Arizona. He was a faithful critic of my ideas and friend since junior high. May his soul and the souls of all the departed rest in peace.

I owe a debt of gratitude, also, to Rick Joyner, whose book The Harvest gave me a new way to look at the Bible, current affairs, and reality.

Part 1

The End of the World

Catastrophe

Western civilization is coming to an end. There is a hunger for catastrophe in the air. A spirit hovers over the cultural waters of the world. Who is this spirit?

What this coming catastrophe looks like depends on your cultural conditioning. For instance, in a newly developing nation, the idea of ending all fossil-fuel dependency in the next ten years would be a catastrophe. For some Americans, the confiscation of all guns would be a political catastrophe. For others, it would be catastrophic simply to have children. And for still others, it would be a catastrophe for their entire society if people stopped having children.

It’s like being in the eye of a hurricane. At first, the wind blows one way, and then it blows the other. You get blown to the left, and then you get blown to the right. Right or left, the time is right for hunkering down.

Catastrophe is an interesting word. The Palestinians refer to the creation of the Jewish state as the great catastrophe or nakba. For Jews, the Holocaust was a catastrophe beyond catastrophe. The creators of Godzilla understood the catastrophic nature of nuclear weapons. Even the dinosaurs had to have been destroyed by a catastrophic asteroid strike. If it happened to the dinosaurs, why couldn’t it happen to us?

We like to think that human history is a smoothly running evolutionary process altered by a war here and there and an innovation that works. The process transforms society and us. But what if there is no transformation? What if where we are right now is the end of the process? What might be next? Cockroach culture? Mealworm society? Dung beetles on land and sharks in the sea?

The Greek word catastrophe comes from kata and strophe. The most apparent use of the word strophe is in the arts. Here’s some info from the internet: "A strophe (stroufi) is a poetic term originally referring to the first part of the ode in ancient Greek tragedy, followed by the antistrophe and epode."⁷

The antistrophe is a turning back.⁸ In poetry, the epode is the after song part of a lyric ode.⁹ In today’s sexualized world, I suppose the epode could be compared with the afterglow of a sexual encounter. The story is ending, and we are going to sleep. We have experienced our longed-for catharsis.

You might recognize this strophic pattern in the theories of Hegel and subsequent progressive philosophers: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This basic pattern connects our culture directly with the artistic culture of Hellenistic Greece.

Kata is a Greek prefix that indicates the timing or placing of a literary or historical event. In the Bible, it means according to. Catastrophe then is according to strophe, the completing, fulfilling, underlying, or terminating strophe. It’s the hidden odiousness of the existential ode. In the dramatic world of Hellenism, it is revealed either as tragedy or comedy. How one perceives the catastrophe makes all the difference.

If the impending tragedy is readily apparent, the audience feels that impending crisis personally. It triggers a boundless empathy that embraces everyone on his or her own terms. This situation is heightened when the tragedy is self-made; then it is indeed a tragedy in the audience’s own terms. When a whole world is expecting tragedy, that world is fearing its own end. It is an existential catastrophe.

A world embraces the what and how of knowing. The fear of an end to the what and how of knowing demands a response. The response of a fearful society takes the form of an eschatological strophe, an end-time consciousness. This consciousness can be tragic or comedic. For those who feel it is tragic, there is no reason to laugh; for those who feel it is comedic, there is no point in worrying about it.

Strophes

The Bible makes plentiful use of odes and strophes. For instance, Jesus said, Watch, therefore—for you do not know when the master of the house is coming… lest he come suddenly and find you sleeping.¹⁰ You want catharsis, but the ode is incomplete; there is no catharsis. There is more to come. You are caught up short, and you don’t know how to proceed. This kind of antistrophe is bigger than a wake-up call. If you aren’t awake already, you’re not likely to wake up. The flood is already at the windowsill, and you live on the third floor. When you wake up, you wake up to something you hoped was just a dream.

This