As I recall from about 50 years ago, the movie version of The Late, Great Planet Earth began with a scene of an Old-Testament-Bible-time false prophet being pursued to death upon being found out. This filmed notion of the expected fate of a false prophet--intended obviously to attach the intimation that the uttering of prophecies was taken with utmost seriousness--has seemed to me always puzzling in the context of the bulk of prophecies warning of the end of our Late, Great Planet. After all, no "Bible times" prophet could expect to be found out--if the prophecy in question was either vague enough, or removed enough in time. One does not expect that the utterance of the prophecy of the Jews being held in Babylon 70 years was greeted with, "We'll see about that."
In our own day, when the End Times prophecies persist as ever, the most revealing questions about the matter are not about what developments are "obviously" fulfillments of this or that prophecy (to be supplanted in turn by subsequent developments which are really "obviously" such fulfillments, and then others which are really, really obvious), but rather what developments in human society can inform our understanding of prophecy in the Bible (and, indeed, our understanding of the whole of the Bible.)
To linger for a moment on the matter of prophecy, it is illustrative to glimpse a hint of the realities of human society as expressed in the ancient texts. In Deuteronomy is a passage condemning the occult practices of the other peoples of the land, followed by a prophecy of the future appearance of prophets--who would do well to speak truthfully, lest they meet an end like in the movie. To the obvious follow-up question (and one can almost hear it coming from some precocious adolescent), "How can we know if a prophet is truthful?", the Deuteronomic answer is that a prophet will be found truthful if his prophecy comes to pass. Unfortunately, the text does not include a prohibition against prophecies of shelf-lives of more than decades, and so we are stuck still with Antichrists and Marks of the Beast.
It is something more than completely childish for a person to ask, "How can we know if a prophet is truthful?", but to sit silently while given an answer that pertains obviously to a mere subset (short-term predictions) is a reaction that cannot be called completely adult. For all that Paul wants to talk about being a child and then--overnight, it would seem--being an adult, it is on the contrary true that human society (especially as it can include people living long lives of--one would hope--unending development) must involve the notion that adulthood is a continuous unfolding.
And so we must ask ourselves, if we are to hold that the Bible (or parts thereof) can be taken to have true and abiding application, whether the Bible has ever been directed toward, or widely assimilated by, the humanity that the Bible must surely have foreseen. Are we--that is, this collection of humans of this spate of generations--not the humanity to which the Bible speaks? Sheer numbers, both of human lives and of increments of human life-spans, weigh in favor of the notion that the Bible, as a potential source of inspired teaching, is only now being read for real.
The numbers are crushing--the graph of human global population rockets upwards so that if (for example) the experience of living in an age in which the apocalypse might be approximated by the push of a button is taken as a collective identifier, most of humanity since the advent of agriculture would be included (or soon will be.) I used to muse on the misfortune I experienced (particularly acute as a child) in living in an age of potential nuclear annihilation, until it dawned on me how the realities of human life-expectancy and population growth had deprived me of the claim to be among an unfortunate few to be born in my time.
And are we of the modern life-expectancies and population sizes not the preponderant audience of the Bible prophets? Or, indeed, of the Bible as a whole? How few people really lived in previous centuries, and of those few, what a slender portion were in any position to "have their feet under them," so to speak, when called to answer to the Bible's pronouncements! So much of those postulated past populations were children doomed to die or, as they grew, doomed to the intellectual cloudings of slavery or crushing labor. The modern notion of people being born and--with the exception of misadventures truly understood as "exceptions"--living full and well-filled lifetimes, is paradoxically both a new thing upon the earth, and an extremely common thing overall, if the paucity of prior population-sizes be considered.
That this modern "notion" is often just that--a perception of modern, "civilized," "developed" societies--that is not represented in reality, is not something that I have forgotten. Many millions, in our earth of billions, are deprived routinely of the chance of fruitful self-development. What I am driving at here is an appreciation that a long life of continual development, as an ideal if not a perfect reality, is the conceptuality abroad in our modern world. "Continual development," however, can take two chief forms. We can choose either to challenge ourselves continually, or to imagine that our lives are step-wise accumulations of accomplishments. The latter choice is a horrid one, and it is manifested by, among other things, people seizing upon and filing away ideological sureties, and people seizing upon the things of this world in the form of possessions and retirements.
It does not take much--if adulthood is taken merely as the movement past childhood and the movement to ever greater accomplishment--for the "Bible-believer" to squat in wealth and squat in indolence, but this is only because the continual development afforded as a prospect for we moderns (we of the burgeoning bulk to whom the Bible really speaks) is squashed down by us into layers of self-satisfactions each upon the others. In reality, every moment in which we live is but another moment (perhaps a wasted moment) in which we might realize that our lives must be shaken to the foundations.
And so we are presented with opportunities in our lives to examine the writings of ancients who were "ancients" in their own times at forty, and who wrote in the immediacy for audiences of adolescents. The staid sages of the Bible eras were old men too soon, always one cold wind or one scurrying rat from death, and they herded populations of teenagers and young adults whose chief milestones of life were watching children die, or convulsing in anguish at the first sign of their youngsters' maladies.
Only by drawing ourselves up to the challenge of imagining those past years can we begin to imbue our understandings with vitality, and it can be a frightening prospect indeed. When the Israelites returned from defeating Midian, they brought with them captured women and children--only to be told that the women and boys were to be killed. The New Jerusalem Bible has the stomach to title this section of Numbers as a "slaughter," and indeed it was. The Midian episode is scarcely imaginable, and a person of any developing and lively conscience would do well in brief intellectual forays to squint and wince at the thought--and to consider that there are abroad in the "religious" world divines of this or that sect who will imagine that one might "meditate" upon this episode.
It gets worse--at least as the notion of serene meditation is concerned. The virgin girls were to be spared, if "spared" is a word applicable to seeing one's mother, aunts, or brothers butchered like cattle. And of course, like any other females (that is, girl-children) found desirable to their captors, they could expect forced marriages (or concubinage) and forced bearing of their enemy's children.
The hideous nature of what happened to Midian is wasted upon us--again, as the Bible's preponderant audience--if we refuse to understand how truncated was life in those days. The "elders" of Israel had to herd into battle, and herd into obedience, male populations who were both painfully young and painfully deprived of opportunities for elevated self-development in their young years. Maturity meant becoming hardened brutes--who else would hack apart a six-year-old boy? Or could fail to become a hardened brute in the process? And as for the power-rape of the girls? Do we really think young men (that is, teenagers) would be denied that outlet?
And do we really think that we are going to be spared the duty of enduring--again and again and without promised ceasing--self-examination throughout our lives? Just as an example, there is the challenge of the Christian to find some way--other than besmirching the Holy Bible--to maintain that the slaughter of Midian should not have been ordered (for surely that is what was ordered by the unchanging and authoritative Scripture), when yet there is dangled before the Christian the fascinating yet nebulous fact that Jesus states that Moses' command to allow divorce was a sop to the hardened brutality of the Israelites, and not the will of God. Allowing divorce, according to Jesus, was inserted (how, in theological terms, we are not told) into the Scriptures, yet the slaughter of non-combatants by the Israelites is to be taken as God's will?
The history of humanity, and of humanity's relationship to God, is littered with shameful things. The accretion of human inventions upon the core of truly inspired Scriptures would be only indifferently comparable to other shameful things. The collection of myriad perverse readings of Scripture, and the collection of myriad rationales for not unsparingly examining Scripture, would fit into that shameful mix.
And then there is the twin shame of our failure to understand the inchoate and stunted experience-lives of our ancient forebears, on the one hand, and of our failure on the other hand to accept that growth is the response to shame, and that the result of the response is still more shame, and more challenge to grow.
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