zenpundit.com » Apocalyptic

Archive for the ‘Apocalyptic’ Category

Joyner and the coup

Thursday, January 16th, 2014

[ by Charles Cameron — a bit disconcerted by what I see looming in the futuristic mist — your view may of course differ ]
.

Okay, let’s begin this little tour with a recent news flash, to keep us grounded. This comes to you from Indiana:

Indiana guardsman stopped for speeding in Madison County had 48 bombs, prosecutor says

An Indiana National Guardsman was arrested outside Columbus on New Year’s Day after a state trooper found nearly 50 bombs and the blueprints for a Navy SEAL training facility inside his car, the Madison County prosecutor said yesterday.

Targeting the SEALs, hunh? Not, I’d imagine, a soft target.

**

I guess there’s something like a buzz or ripple going on, and it concerns me. It crops up in various forms in various places, in fact it’s very various indeed, and varied, and variegated too no doubt. Let’s see…

There are calls in certain circles for a coup of some kind in the US of A. Here’s the televangelist pastor Rick Joyner

One of Joyner’s closest military friends is Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin — ex Delta Force, Mogadishu guy, also ex Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence — seen here talking with Joyner:

**

Joyner is one of the more prominent pastors associated with C Peter Wagner‘s New Apostolic Reformation, so it’s worth noting that Wagner doesn’t limit his ambitions to “Christendom” but is working for Christian dominion over the entire world, much as certain trends in the Islamic world look for global Islamic dominion:

My favorite term is “dominion eschatology.” Why? Because Jesus did not give His Great Commission in vain.

The battle will be ferocious, and we will suffer some casualties along the way. However, we will continue to push Satan back and disciple whole nations.

We are aggressively retaking dominion, and the rate at which this is happening will soon become exponential. The day will come when “‘The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever’” (Rev. 11:15, NKJV)!

So that’s one part of the context for Messers. Joyner and Boykin, and Joyner’s thoughts about a coup — also for Boykin’s proffered scenarios for foreign policy, which I addressed in a recent post.

**

Then there are the Oathkeepers

Oath Keepers is instructing its 30,000 members nation-wide to form up special teams and sub-teams in each Oath Keepers chapter, at the town and county level, modeled loosely on the Special Forces “A Team” (Operational Detachment A ) model, and for a similar purpose: to be both a potential operational unit for community security and support during crisis, but also, as mission #1, to serve as training and leadership cadre, to assist in organizing neighborhood watches, organizing veterans halls to provide community civil defense, forming County Sheriff Posses, strengthening existing CERT, volunteer fire, search-and-rescue, reserve deputy systems, etc., and eventually to assist in forming and training town and county militias (established by official act of town and county elected representatives). We want our chapters to organize themselves as a working model that we can then take to other veterans organizations, such as the VFW, American Legion, Marine Corps League, etc. in each town and help them establish such teams within their already existing veterans halls. And likewise, to serve as a model and training cadre to help churches, neighborhood watches, and any other civic organization organize.

These guys are more about resisting government oppression than endorsing a coup, eh? — but there’s morphing potential between one and the other.

What I’m up to here, y’see, is not about presenting a coherent argument starting from a premise and arriving at a conclusion, but creating a mini-topography, manpping a landscape if you will, by identifying certain features, with the suggestion that they are somehow related.

Somehow, I said.

I am not defining the relationships, which may be quite varied, and also subject to individual interpretation. I am suggesting they may be, very likely are, all features of a common terrain — and worth considering as such.

**

Picking up on the theological side of things, we have many people, including legislators like Rep. Michelle Bachmann, who view current events at home and abroad as fulfilling one of the various “end times” scnarios now current in both Christian and Islamic circles:

People who hold such beliefs tend to take them very seriously, as sanctioned by the supreme authority — and may therefore be strongly influenced by them when making policy decisions. But is Bachmann’s eschatology right, or Netanyahu’s, or Khamenei’s perhaps? Or one of the secular eschatologies, global warming, nuclear winter, heat death of the universe?

My most recent post on the foreign side of things, A Clash of Messianisms: now let me get this straight, fits in here somewhere, too.

Policies driven by an erroneous eschatology might make an unstable situation even worse, no?

Caveat emptor.

**

Let’s move from preachers and pols to regular folks like, well, Josie the Outlaw. What does she have to say for herself — and us all?

This (above) was quite a hit with some of my liberal friends… who mostly didn’t notice the Gadsden Flag on its brief appearance…

They were in some cases less happy with this one…

**

And then of course, it has indeed been said that…

whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security…

The question then arising of how much prudence — prudence, the virtue — is in evidence in this day and age?

**

This is where I should really soar, with a short yet powerful invocation af all those virtues one might wish for. We’ve almost forgotten their names. Humility? Is that something to do with humiliation? Sure sounds like it. Prudence? I think I have a great aunt Pru…

Joyner and Boykin — if you believe we’re in the end times, then wait up — no need to go all guns and MRE on us — fast and pray, will you please, and wait for the new heaven and the new earth?

And the rest of you — call your great aunt, we need her STAT!!

Boykin and Furnish: be sober, be vigilant

Thursday, January 2nd, 2014

[ by Charles Cameron — some good advice from Tim Furnish, which Jerry Boykin doesn’t appear to have heard… ]
.

Gen. Jerry Boykin (upper panel, below), speaking with his visionary preacher friend, Rick Joyner, naturally has the right to voice his views, including those that see Middle Eastern geopolitics through the lens of Isaiah 17:1-3

… but he might want to listen to blog-friend Dr Timothy Furnish (lower panel, above) — a fellow Christian and conservative — first.

**

I fear that at the moment, Boykin sounds more vigilant than sober, though both are jointly scripturally mandated at 1 Peter 5:8.

Here Boykin & Joyner discuss Syria, Biblical Prophecy, And The End Times:

Rick JOYNER: And we’re seeing Biblical prophecy unfold.
Jerry BOYKIN: We are.
JOYNER: These are times in which things are unfolding in scripture, and one of the Scriptures that has never been fulfilled…
BOYKIN: Unhuh…
JOYNER: …and has to be fulfilled before this age can end, is that Damascus will be destroyed, never inhabited again.
BOYKIN: I share your concern, Rick, and as you say, certainly, and I’ve said this for a long time, one of the ways that Damascus could be destroyed, never to be reoccupied, would be through a chemical attack. So let’s just take a scenario…

Interested? You can hear Boykin’s scenario of Assad’s final gesture in utter defeat, here.

**

Sources:

  • Boykin
  • Furnish
  • I hope to discuss Boykin’s friendship with Joyner [“our only hope is a military takeover; martial law“] and what it may portend, in a subsequent post.

    Serpent logic and related

    Saturday, September 14th, 2013

    [ by Charles Cameron — where paradox begets form in phrasing, redux ]
    .

    Here for your entertainment and entrainment are some further instances where the tweet doubles back on itself, bites its tail, or otherwise embodies some form of “form” that’s noteworthy in its own right, and possibly indicative of the heart of a problem — think of these tweets as eddies in the flow of things, knots in the wood…

    Two arms crossed as in that MC Escher hand-draws-hand piece:

    And a net version of the same, aka “tit for tat”:

    Speaking of economics, here’s a bit of spiral logic — the economics of spiralling out of control?

    And here’s an example of “endless” recursion, as featured in two tweets about “end” times from Barth’s Notes:

    and its 2013 equivalent:

    **

    Okay, here are some simple sample opposites. First, the weather forecast for Syria:

    — spelled our explicitly by Andrew Stroehlein, who tweeted “Sunny with a chance of cluster bombs…” in response.

    That one seems fairly fair, but click on the links yourself to see the nuances in King‘s actual statements.

    **

    Now for some regular serpents’ tails, from the reasonably light-hearted to the heavier end of the scales:

    Okay, here are two from Mikko Hypponen, the first of which is frankly outdated, but still fun:

    Angela Watercutter caught the tide at just the right moment with her Wired piece, Skynet Becomes Self-Aware: How to Welcome Our AI Overlords:

    The time has come. According to the Terminator clock, at 8:11 p.m. Tuesday, Skynet will become self-aware. And humanity will be screwed. Going by canon set out in the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series, Judgment Day should hit Thursday.

    Never mind Mikko, this one’s funny too — if and only if one’s also familiar with Wikipedia, which seems plausible in all cases for those who follow twitter — it wins double-honors in fact, hitting it out of the self-reference ball-park and into parallelism as satire:

    **

    Namarupa, or “name and form”, has to do with parallelisms between a name and its referent — or what zen might call the “finger pointing” and the moon — always fun:

    The next one depends on your knowing that the Greek mythological creature known as a Naiad refers to “any of the nymphs in classical mythology living in and giving life to lakes, rivers, springs, and fountains”:

    — aptly named indeed.

    **

    We’re almost done — here’s one with a built in time-factor:

    It it still there? Aha!

    **

    Finally, this isn’t a serpent eating its tail by itself:

    — but it becomes one, I’d suggest, when Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US from 2008 to 2011, retweets it!

    **

    Until next time…

    A follow-up piece from Furnish

    Saturday, September 7th, 2013

    [ by Charles Cameron — here Dr Furnish explores and explains the rival eschatologies afoot in the Syrian conflict ]
    .

    The New Mahdi, from http://ghareb.deviantart.com/art/Ahat-ALGhareb-107961264 via Furnish

    .

    Timothy Furnish has a new post up on Syria at his MahdiWatch blog, supplementing his recent guest post on Zenpundit, Reprehending Ignorance about Syria, in which he discussed sectarian issues, with Intervening (in Syria) Like It’s The End of the World?, in which he zeroes in on the strands of Mahdist expectation and enthusiasm on both sides of the conflict. Dr Furnish’s new post is long, so I’ll offer you some key paragraphs as a teaser, then suggest you go read the rest.

    Iraq has always been more more central to Islamic history than far-eastern or far-western peripheries like Afghanistan or Libya, albeit less so than Syria. Iraq was on the fault-line between Western and “Eastern” civilizations, going back to Roman and Byzantine times, when it was a contested buffer zone between those empires and the various Persian ones. The region of Iraq itself was divided, after the coming of Islam, into Sunni and Shi`i sections — the former often under Ottoman Turkish rule, the latter in the orbit of (or at least doctrinally sympathetic to) the Safavid , and subsequent other Shi`i, Iranian states. To this day, especially post-American occupation (which empowered the Twelver Shi`i Iraqi majority to take power), Iraq is religiously and even eschatologically important for the Twelvers of the world primarily because six of the twelve Imams’ tombs are there and, after his reappearance, the returned 12th Imam al-Mahdi will rule from Kufa, Iraq. However, despite Baghdad’s undeniable importance as a political and intellectual center from its founding in 750 AD to its demise at the hands of the Mongols in 1258, Iraq pales in importance next to Syria for the majority Sunni Muslims, particularly Arab ones.

    Syria was the first area outside the Arabian peninsula to be conquered, and not only was it taken from the superpower al-Rum (the Byzantine Christian Empire), but al-Sham, “Greater Syria” centered on Damascus included Jerusalem, the capture of which “proved” Islamic superiority to the other, corrupted monotheistic religions: Judaism and Christianity. This fervent triumphalism only intensified after the hated Crusaders were expelled from their 88-year occupation by the Syrian Kurd Salah al-Din in 1187, and the “Zionist occupation” of al-Quds (“The Holy”=Jerusalem) since 1948 is seen by many Arab (and other) Muslims are merely a temporary setback, which the Mahdi and Jesus will rectify. Thus many hadiths predict eschatological events transpiring in what the French and Brits used to call “the Levant,” the most important among them including: al-Sufyani, (a “type” of the Muslim antichrist, al-Dajjal, “the Deceiver”) will emerge from Syria; Christians will (re)conquer Syria; the Mahdi will reveal himself; the Dajjal himself appear; Jesus will return by descending into Damascus; the armies of the Mahdi and the Sufyani will battle; and Jesus will kill the Dajjal in or near Jerusalem. After all this the Mahdi and Jesus will jointly rule over a Muslim planet, and eventually both will pass away. The true end of history, and the Final Judgement, will not come for some years after that. Also: the Sunni Mahdi and the Twelver Shi`i one perform virtually the same role, the major differences being 1) the former will step onto the stage of history for the first time, whereas the latter will return from a millennium-old mystical ghaybah, or “occultation;” and 2) Sunni eschatologists prognosticate that the person whom Shi`is believe to be their 12th Imam will actually be the Dajjal—and Shi`is say the same about the Sunni Mahdi!

    Thus, Syria is the most important eschatological venue of Islam, bar none. Quoting sayings of some of their twelve Imams, at least one Iranian government official has superimposed eschatological themes on the Syrian conflict — Hujjat al-Islam (or “Hujjatollah,” a cleric ranking below Ayatollah) Ruhollah Husayniyan, who claims that the strife in Syria is the prelude to the Imam al-Mahdi’s coming and revolution. (This sort of “newspaper exegesis” has been going on for years in Tehran and Qom, actually.) And Twelver Shi`is in neighboring Iraq and Lebanon are not only enthused about this idea, but have been motivated by Mahdism to go join the fight for Bashar al-Asad and the Alawi regime over against its Sunni opponents!

    Here are Dr Furnish’s concluding words.

    While certain writers in the US obsess about Evangelical Christians trying to fit the Syrian Islamic civil war into a Christian eschatological blueprint, the truth is that they have no significant political power (and the ones I know are adamantly against President Obama’s proposed strikes on the al-Asad military) — they just like to opine, talk, and sell books. The true believers in the Mahdi, the Sufyani and the return of the Islamic Jesus — who comprise hundred of millions of Muslims, according to polling data — should be the real focus of concern, most especially those of their ranks putting their beliefs into practice in Aleppo, Dayr al-Zur and Idlib. The Obama Administration would do well to consider the apocalyptic aspect of the Syrian civil war, before committing our forces to helping those of the Mahdi or the 12th Imam.

    As I suggested earlier, now go read the whole thing.

    **

    ICYMI, I think that final phrase — “before committing our forces to helping those of the Mahdi or the 12th Imam” — is one we should read with care in light of his earlier sentence:

    Sunni eschatologists prognosticate that the person whom Shi`is believe to be their 12th Imam will actually be the Dajjal—and Shi`is say the same about the Sunni Mahdi!

    Whichever side we might commit our forces to, in other words, we’d be supporting one strain of Mahdism or the other…

    With one eye on the Bible, one eye on the news

    Wednesday, September 4th, 2013

    [ by Charles Cameron — in whose borrowed opinion, if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light ]
    .

    Here’s another DoubleQuote that doesn’t fit my usual format, but sets up an interesting dynamic anyway. This just in, from Joel Rosenberg:

    I find it charming that we can read the opening paragraphs of a Mother Jones piece about Joel Rosenberg on on Rosenberg’s own site. Here are the first paras — or grafs, as my friend Danielle would say:

    In early 2012, bestselling novelist Joel Rosenberg came to Capitol Hill for a meeting with an unidentified member of Congress to discuss the end of the world. “I thought the topic was going to be the possible coming war between Israel and Iran,” Rosenberg explained on his website. “Instead, the official asked, ‘What are your thoughts on Isaiah 17?’”

    For the better part of an hour, Rosenberg says, the writer and the congressman went back forth on something called the “burden of Damascus,” an Old Testament prophecy that posits that a war in the Middle East will leave Syria’s capital city in ruins—and bring the world one step closer to Armageddon. As Rosenberg put it, “The innocent blood shed by the Assad regime is reprehensible, and heart-breaking and is setting the stage for a terrible judgment.”

    But Rosenberg and his anonymous congressman aren’t alone in viewing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s actions through a Biblical lens.

    That’s my first shoe. And here’s Richard Bartholomew, the blogger at Bath’s Notes, dropping the second:

    **

    Okay, here are some observations of my own, which I wrote a while back…

    Which comes first: history or Revelation?

    Just as nature and scripture can be “read against” one another, each perhaps illuminating the other at times, so in the case of one particular scripture — the Revelation — the book is “read against” history: there’s a long history of interpreters attempting to “translate” the book into contemporary political terms.

    Luther is one who tried his hand at this:

    Since it is meant as a revelation of what is to come, and especially of coming tribulations and disasters for the Church, we can consider that the first and surest step toward finding its interpretation is to take from history the events and disasters that have happened to the Church before now and to hold them up alongside these pictures and so compare them with the words. If, then, the two fit and agree with each other, we can build on that as a sure, or at least an unobjectionable, interpretation.

    But Bernard McGinn makes a shrewd comment on Luther’s process, in his article on Revelation in Robert Alter and Frank Kermode‘s Literary Guide to the Bible:

    Earlier interpreters, such as Joachim (but not Augustine), had also claimed to find a consonance between Revelation’s prophecies and the events of Church history, but they had begun with Scripture and used it as a key to unlock history. Paradoxically, Luther, the great champion of the biblical word, claimed that history enabled him to make sense of Revelation…

    So: which direction should theologians “read” the analogy between Revelation and history in?

    Should they, like Luther, start with history and try to “shoe-horn” the Book of Revelation to fit it, or vice versa? There are two very different processes here, and the results may be correspondingly different — but when people today read accounts of Revelation which propose that the “end times” are nigh, they seldom even ask the question: which came first in the interpreter’s mind?


    Switch to our mobile site