Word: armageddons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Reagan ignored his homework on the eve of a summit meeting because, he explained to an aide, "The Sound of Music was on last night." Reagan's fascination with Armageddon theology fueled his enthusiasm for the Star Wars missile-defense system. Decision making occasionally stagnated not only because of intra-Cabinet disputes, but also because his advisers often had to rely on the President's body language as a code for intentions Reagan refused to articulate. The supporting cast speaks candidly in these pages. Jeane Kirkpatrick recalls an agonizing conflict over policy toward Nicaragua, and Reagan's role: "Just absent...
Consider the evidence. Zondervan, a leading U.S. publisher of Fundamentalist and Evangelical literature, has issued an updated version of John F. Walvoord's 1974 best seller, Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis, with an initial print order of -- get this -- 1 million copies. (Nine were reportedly ordered by the White House, whose previous occupant was a confessed believer in Armageddon theology.) Walvoord is chancellor of Dallas Theological Seminary, where Charles H. Dyer is associate professor of Bible exposition. Dyer's new book, The Rise of Babylon, which argues that Saddam's announced plan to build a replica of that...
...Armageddon is a serious game that any number can play. The electronic bulletin boards offered by such computer networks as CompuServe and Genie are stuffed with doomsday speculations. And one need not be born again to experience a frisson of apocalyptic concern. Also enjoying a new spasm of popularity is the 16th century astrologer Nostradamus, one of whose gnomic utterances predicts the arrival in 1999 of the "Great King of Terror" -- easily identifiable as Saddam, to those with vivid imaginations...
...Armageddon is a fine, thumping word, almost onomatopoeic in its evocation of finality. This metaphor for ultimate conflict probably gets its name from Mount Megiddo, a scraggly hill on a great plain in northern Israel where, as many conservative Protestants believe, a great battle will end history's most terrible war. According to scenarios drawn from prophetic passages in Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Revelation, a number of nations, including Babylon (read Iraq) and led by an evil Antichrist, will invade Israel during this conflict. But then the Son of God will return to halt the slaughter and, according to some...
Ultimately, Christian critics of the millenarians can argue that they are guilty of two errors. One is emulating Abbot Joachim's egotistic heresy: falsely assuming that the age in which they live is unique. The other mistake -- an undertone in some of the Armageddon literature but overt in much of the computerized End Days babbling -- is to interpret events in the gulf with eschatological glee, as if the real message were "Hey, fellas, our troubles are almost over." No one has the right to that assumption. History unfurls as God's secret, wrote the French novelist Leon Bloy...