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The
Banta Award 1993 When
Time Shall Be No More: Prophesy Belief in Modern American Culture
The
1993 Banta Award BOOK Boyer begins his study with a review of the relevant sections of the Bible where the end of time has been prophesied and details the stages by which this end will occur: the Rapture when the saved are miraculously transported to Heaven thereby avoiding the Tribulation and seven-year reign of the Antichrist that follow; the second coming of Christ; the Millennium; the brief resurgence and final defeat of the Antichrist on the plain of Armageddon; the Last Judgment; and the final stage where the world and time as we know it will be replaced by a new Heaven and Earth where believers will enjoy eternal life. He then traces the development of apocalyptic belief throughout history and theorizes about its resiliency despite the repeated failures of predictions about the end of the world tied to specific dates and circumstances. (For example, when the collapse of the Soviet Empire deprived many apocalyptic thinkers of their leading evil agent, other candidates, Saddam Hussein, for one, quickly emerged to take its place with no resulting loss of faith in either prophesiers or believers). The Apocalypse, while horrific, is also comforting in that it offers meaning to the otherwise chaotic events of history and hope of salvation for a certain chosen group. In his final chapters, Boyer makes this book important reading for believers and non-believers alike by exploring the influence of apocalyptic thinking on public policy in America both globally and locally. James Watts, Secretary of the Interior during the Reagan Administration, based his anti-conservation stand on the environment on the belief that the world as we know it would soon disappear anyway. The state of Israel's key role in any apocalyptic scenario has affected millions of Americans' thinking about Middle Eastern politics. Polls show that prophecy belief is widespread in all ranks of society. L. Ron Hubbard's apocalyptic manifesto The Late Great Planet Earth has sold 30 million copies since 1970. It is fortunate that Boyer has provided us with such a comprehensive and understandable book on this phenomenon. The
AUTHOR Paul Boyer is Merle Curti Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a senior member of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin. He has held visiting professorships at UCLA and Northwestern University and has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. Awarded the Ph.D. from Harvard in 1966, he came to Madison in 1980 from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst where he had taught for thirteen years. In addition to When Time Shall Be No More, he has written several other books, including Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (co-authored in 1974), which won the John H. Dunning prize of the American Historical Association and was nominated for a National Book Award in history, and By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985). He currently serves on the advisory board of the PBS television series The American Experience. Professor Boyer lives in Madison with his wife, Ann, a medical reference librarian at the Middleton Health Sciences Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their son and daughter, Alex and Kate, are graduate students at the University of Minnesota and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver respectively. 1993
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