Tribulation

Don't I recall from my teenage reading of "The Late Great Planet Earth" that in the End Times, the Temple has to be rebuilt on Temple Mount (where the Dome of the Rock now sits), which means that something has to destroy the Muslim sanctuary first? I could be wrong, but I recall that many Hal Lindsey followers anticipated that an earthquake would first destroy the Dome of the Rock, clearing the way for the Jews to rebuild their Temple.

Well, experts say Israel is due for a major earthquake, and soon. I'm just sayin'.

Meanwhile, here's some more Tribulation-type stuff for you. I've wondered in recent years why the "Left Behind" crowd hasn't glommed onto climate change as a sign of the Apocalypse's imminence. In the End of Days, the entire earth, Scripture tells us, will be in upheaval. Well, I don't know if you have to be a subscriber to The New Republic to read this entire essay by Philip Jenkins, in which he forecasts global warming leading to calamitous religious strife. Here's the first part of the essay:

When John of Patmos listed the four horsemen of the apocalypse, he didn't have access to climate-modeling software or any of the technology used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If he had, he might have described the end of times in slightly more specific terms. And, to know what those terms would be, you just have to look at the area approximately between the latitudes of 23 degrees north and 23 degrees south over the next 50 or so years.

Over the next half-century, this equatorial swath will be broiling from global warming. Droughts will kill crops, and warming oceans will cripple the fishing industry (decimating the populations of fishing villages that will be disappearing, anyway, because water from the melting ice caps will drown them). By midcentury, water shortages could force countries already suffering from generations of ethnic and religious conflict to explode. A country like Nigeria, for example, where Christians and Muslims have self-segregated to the Southeast and the North, might erupt in a violent tug-of-war over limited water supplies. The Coptic Christians in Egypt could become a lost people, as ethnic cleansing in the name of resource protection becomes common. By the same token, Muslim minorities in places like Uganda and Kenya might be annihilated or driven out, creating vast waves of refugees that will swarm the more prosperous countries looking for aid (in response to which Western countries could see a new era of harsh border enforcement). Gradually, whole areas would become arid, uninhabitable wastelands.

The ramifications for the global warming-driven destruction of equatorial nations are frightening for everyone--but they should be especially frightening for Christians, whose numbers have been growing so explosively in those very areas. By 2050, although the world's largest Christian population will still be found in the United States, many of the other most populous communities will belong to the global South, in places like Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, the Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda, and the Philippines. Christianity is no longer synonymous with the West, and that equation will become ever less plausible as time passes. What Christianity is becoming synonymous with, however, is the most volatile and the most ecologically threatened area of the world--and the coming temperature changes could have serious consequences for the future of the religion.