Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — May 22, 2011

Now that May 21 has come and gone over the entire world and there can be no trace of hope that Harold Camping's predictions of the apocalypse will come true,  most of the world, including me, is having a good laugh about it. But now that it's all over there's a very sad side to it: what will happen now to the faith, not to mention the physical welfare, of all those people who really believed it and spent the last few months preparing and preaching, some quitting their jobs and selling their houses? This is the evil done by a false prophet. There might be no harm in it if Mr. Camping had simply remained alone in his home, poring over the Bible with fanatical intensity, but he has pulled in many others, which puts one in mind of a certain remark about a millstone.

I assume he was sincere and that this isn't just a swindle, so I wonder if it was pride that led to his fall–a refusal to admit or accept that he couldn't wrest from scripture this knowledge, which the vast majority of Christians are willing to accept as not meant for us to know. He's 89 years old and will no doubt be going to God before many more years pass. I hope he repents rather than hardening his heart.

As far as I remember, I had never heard of the guy before this episode. Daniel Nichols has heard him on the radio and has an amusing post about him: "a man of great opacity." I suppose one has to give him credit of a sort for the fact that he did put himself and his teachings out there where the whole world could see whether he was right or wrong.

In calling Mr. Camping a false prophet I speak from a Christian point of view, from which one sees many like him, and among those are some who have done much more harm: Mohammed, for instance, or Joseph Smith (founder of the Mormons). It's not always polite to speak so bluntly, but that conclusion is forced upon anyone who affirms anything close to orthodox Christianity. It's simple logic: if one person says that A is true, and another says that A is false, both cannot be correct. Whether or not the one who is incorrect is innocently mistaken, or simply lying, or somewhere in between, is another matter. I'm inclined to think most are in the third category, and judging them would be too delicate a task for anyone but God. Nevertheless, I must, as a Catholic, respectfully affirm that Luther, Calvin, and many other Protestant reformers preached a doctrine that was false in important ways, as Protestants must affirm the same of the Catholic Church. Happily, our shared situation in the modern world has made us more willing and able to look at what we have in common rather than what separates us; but the separation is nonetheless real, because the divergences in teaching are significant.

People who don't believe in any God at all would naturally say that all prophets are equally wrong, and that it's absurd for one group of deluded people to quarrel with another over the details of their delusions, that it's simple "intolerance." ("Tolerant" has become for us what "respectable" once was to the bourgeoisie, an imprecise acknowledgement of social acceptability and propriety; the officially "tolerant" person is not tolerant of everything, but of the proper things.) But every human being must live his life according to the way he answers the most important questions we face: does my life have a purpose? and if so, what is it? and all the other questions that follow those. This is true for the non-religious and the anti-religious as well as the religious. The consciously anti-religious acknowledge this implicitly by the emphasis they place on it. 

Anyone who gives a false answer to these questions and persuades others to believe him is obviously doing some degree of harm, even if he is perfectly sincere. Consider it for a moment on the individual and practical level: suppose someone had convinced Mozart that he was really not meant to be a musician (which probably would have been impossible in Mozart's case, but let's consider it for the sake of argument). The world would be a far poorer place. And yes, for one who believes in God's providence, any such mistake can be seen as ultimately encompassed within it, but I'm speaking within the scope of what we can know.

What of those who follow a false prophet all the way to the grave?  C. S. Lewis, in the Narnia books, poses an answer which I think is now a pretty standard Christian response: that one who faithfully follows what he sincerely believes to be the truth is in fact following Christ, who is truth. That is not mere word play, but of the essence of what we believe about who Christ is.

Perhaps the danger faced by those who have followed a false prophet and then seen him exposed is greater. It would be a natural reaction for them to decide that everything he said must be false, and to try to rid themselves of it, root and branch. They're likely to be angry–I certainly would be. Some of the most vigorous enemies of Christianity are ex-fundamentalists. The recently exposed scoundrel Fr. Maciel was not a false prophet, exactly–what he taught was not wrong (as far as I know), but by his abominable behavior he discredited the truth, and only God knows how much harm he has done to those who trusted him.

We no longer believe, as our ancestors did, that adherence to (or at least refraining from public denial of) what we believe to be correct ideas about the great questions of life should be coerced by law, and that's a good thing. But though they were wrong in the way they dealt with the question, they were right in their understanding of its importance. To refuse to take it seriously is to refuse engagement with the heart of what it means to be human.

Come to think of it, Harold Camping may be more attuned to the apocalypse than I thought. Isn't the appearance of false prophets supposed to be one of the signs?