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Harold Camping and the Stillborn Apocalypse Radio evangelist Harold Camping predicted that the Second Coming would occur in September 1994. Edmund D. Cohen Eschatology-the study of the last events before the end of the world-is a time-honored requirement in any Christian theology curriculum. The drastic biblical end-time scenario culminating in the fiery destruction of the present Earth, and its replacement by new heavens and a new Earth exclusively for Christians with new, glorified superbodies,1 has often inspired commotion, especially toward the ends of the millennia. In the United States, historically the most influential form of eschatology has been premillennialism, which filled in gaps in the biblical end-time information so as to have a scenario calling for a thousand-year golden age between the Second Coming of Christ and the fiery end of the world. Premillennialists typically preached resignation regarding all that is wrong in the world, and counseled patient, passive waiting for Christ to return and correct it.2 From the end of World War II until the collapse of the Soviet empire, American fundamentalists generally identified themselves as premillennialists. But the seeming correspondence of an all-too-possible nuclear war with a biblical end-time scenario brought on an escalation of eschatological speculation and a frenetic reshuffling of scenarios. In 1970, Hal Lindsey set forth what became the generic, born-again end-of-the-world scenario in his best-seller, The Late Great Planet Earth.3 It furnished a common frame of reference for discussing the confrontation between capitalist and communist societies as a cosmic drama wherein heavenly and hellish forces were locked in a final struggle with a predetermined cataclysmic outcome. The presence of an actual nation of Israel as a player in the drama-converting to Christianity en masse at the last moment in some renditions and being massacred in the final Battle of Armageddon in others-helped lend an air of reality to such Armageddon scenarios.4 From time to time, some prominent figure in fundamentalist Christianity will come forward to commit himself to a specific prediction of the impending end of the world. There were several such predictions placing the end in 1988, because that year came the symbolic number of forty years after the founding of the State of Israel.5 When Pat Robertson's prediction of the end in 1982-based on a purported direct revelation by a voice-failed to come true, he felt exercised to redeem the world himself by becoming president of the United States.6

The recent, widely reported prediction by radio evangelist Harold Camping7-that the Second Coming would occur in September 1994-on its face does not seem particularly unusual or important. The Camping episode is, however, very different from all the other cases where an end-time prophecy was uttered and failed. I find the episode uniquely helpful in understanding other developments in conservative Christianity, and it has bearing on some issues of special interest to secular humanists and skeptics. Once respected and well-accepted in Christian fundamentalists circles, Camping has been ostracized to a much greater degree than other failed date-setters before him. Somehow, he embarrasses his peers more than he would have a few years earlier. The fundamentalists have good reason for wanting Camping to be forgotten without the implications of his case being understood. It falls to secular humanists not to let that happen. Harold Camping, now seventy-three years old, is president and general manager of Family Stations, Inc., operating a chain of thirty-nine listener-supported Christian radio stations scattered through the most populous areas of the United States. These stations relay uniform programming fed to them by satellite from the headquarters in Oakland, California. The programming is also broadcast in shortwave8 from Okeechobee, Florida. Atmospherics permitting, the Family Radio network nominally fulfills the Great Commission: And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.9 All of the programming on Family Radio is designed to keep the self-indoctrination of the Christian ongoing. The teaching is strictly Calvinist-Reformed, and the music, while often bathetic, is never vulgar or totally tasteless. The success of Family Radio seems partly due to the relief it affords from the angry right-wing polemics and jangling Christian rock music now normal in Christian radio. Camping began Family Radio in 1959, after having made enough money from his building contracting business to be a full-time volunteer. Although trained as a civil engineer rather than a pastor, he became a uniquely accomplished self-taught Bible scholar, deepening his knowledge while conducting his one-and-a-half-hour Monday through Friday call-in show, Open Forum10 at 10:00 p.m. e.s.t. Using the same method as John Calvin-taking the Bible alone and in its entirety as his sole authority-he would meticulously take into consideration every verse that applied, as well as recurring themes and symbolism, to arrive at his formulations of what the Bible teaches and what is demanded of believers. Such a method inevitably produces different doctrines than the ones most popular in present-day fundamentalist Christianity. Doctrines such as predestination, God's unilateral election of who will become a genuine believer, infant baptism performed by sprinkling, etc., place Camping at odds with most of the Christian fundamentalist establishment. Much of the call-in show amounts to biblical counseling and affords a rare close look at that baleful practice taking place.11 The result has generally been austere, devoid of gimmickry, and often downright harsh. Camping also developed a keen interest in Bible chronology. An inordinate amount of Bible text is devoted to genealogies, to a number of years a certain person lived or a certain king reigned, and to other apparently irrelevant asides that state definite periods of years.

Camping reasoned that God would not have put so many time-markers in the Bible without a reason. By arranging all the time-markers in chronological sequence, and using some known historical events and astronomical phenomena to confirm the correct conversion of these into our current Gregorian calendar dates, Camping was able to assemble an unbroken chain of stated periods of years from the alleged six-day creation to known historical events and fix 11,033 b.c.e. as the year of creation. In similar fashion, Camping was able to place the birth of Jesus at 7 b.c.e. and his crucifixion at 33 c.e., according to the time-markers embedded in the Bible. For their own sake, these are prodigious intellectual accomplishments. Camping has gone beyond John Calvin in distilling concise doctrinal statements from the Bible, and successfully done what James Ussher-best remembered for a faulty Bible chronology placing creation in 4004 b.c.e.-attempted unsuccessfully. There is nothing nearly so well done in contemporary fundamentalist establishment seminary academia. If Camping had stopped at these, he would have remained an almost endearing anachronistic senior sage on the margins of fundamentalist Christianity. Camping tells how twenty-two years ago he began noticing biblical information pointing to 1994 as the final year. He knew very well that all previous date-setters had been proved wrong in the end and had ended up badly. For a while, he focused on Daniel 12:8, 9, hoping to get off considering his newfound knowledge as words... closed up and sealed till the time of the end. But many other scriptures require the believer to share and to teach what he discovers in the Bible, and even that particular verse provided for opening up and unsealing at the actual time of the end. Camping's steady and unsensational demeanor over the air became a false faade, concealing his brooding over his felt obligation to join the disreputable ranks of the date-setters. From time to time, callers would ask him when the end might come. With words more artfully chosen than they appeared to be on the surface, Camping would say that he would be very surprised if the turn of the century came before Christ's return. Camping finally went public as a date-setter in 1992 by releasing his book, 1994?12 Its long, technical argument defies concise presentation, and it would be easy to get so absorbed in the theological details as to neglect the more important psychological significance of the episode. We can cover a few highlights to get an idea. The one historical event that fundamentalist Christian eschatologists-Camping as well as the premillennialists13-agree to be biblically significant is the found of the State of Israel. The parable of the fig tree,14 a tree in leaf but not in fruit (i.e., prospering temporally but not becoming converted to Christianity) and ultimately cursed by Jesus, is generally understood to apply to the return of the Jewish people to Israel, and their resumption of national life there. The occurrence is identified with the last days, and its date reference is the one piece of extra-biblical date information to be given equal dignity to the ones in the Bible. Because much of what is written about jubilee years-the Old Testament custom of forgiving debts, releasing slaves, and restoring property every fiftieth year-is identified

with the end, Camping reasoned that the end should occur in a jubilee year. So, because the first year that would have been a jubilee year under Old Testament customs subsequent to 1948 is 1994, that year became a candidate. An array of intriguing number-of-years relations falls into place around that year. Nineteen ninety-four makes exactly two thousand years between Christ's first and second comings, three thousand years since the anointing of David, and four thousand years since the birth of Jacob, to name a few. Nineteen ninety-four would be the fiftieth jubilee year since the custom's inception in 457 b.c.e.-a jubilee of jubilees. Still more number relations pop out if we take into account the final tribulation period described in Matthew 24. Because much of what is written about the feast of trumpetsoccurring on the first day of the seventh Old Testament month, or September 6 in 199415also Rosh Hashanah-is identified with the coming of Christ, Camping reasoned that that date should be the end of the final tribulation period. On that day, he concluded, some impressive supernatural event should signal the beginning of the end. Also reasoning that the final tribulation should be 2,300 days-shortened from twenty-three years-the beginning of the final tribulation period falls on May 21, 1988. With that date in place, the additional relation of exactly 13,000 years from creation to the beginning of the final tribulation pops out. The foregoing is a tiny fraction of the daunting complex web of calendar relations set forth in 1994? Studying them is a bit like studying unicorn anatomy or Klingon grammar. One can take it much farther than there is any use in going. As for the date when Christ would actually return, Camping was not quite sure. But he regarded the day of atonement, September 14, 1994, or the feast of tabernacles, September 27, as likely candidates. Camping repeatedly declared himself 99.9 percent sure that the end would not tarry beyond September 1994. So, the stage was set for some very interesting radio listening during August and September 1994, as the fatal dates approached. From the introduction of 1994? in 1992 through September 1994, there was hardly an evening on Open Forum without some rude, stupid person who had never before bothered to listen to the program calling in expecting to catch Camping by surprise with Mark 13:32: But of that day and... hour knoweth no man, no not the angels... neither the Son, but the Father [my italics]. What would follow is typical of what happens when unthinking critics-lay-people as well as seminary academicians-come up against Camping's careful attention to detail. The preposition of refers to the character of that hour, not to its timing: i.e., of could have been correctly translated about but not when. What all Christendom has always assumed was a time reference-excusing failure to deal with the issue of knowing and announcing the end when the conditions for its occurrence have been fulfilled-turns out, on closer reading, really to be saying something completely different.16 For all their training in Hebrew and Greek, seminary academicians rarely study Bible texts critically enough to pick up such details. And if they really took their Bible inerrancy and infallibility as seriously as they pretend, could they really have dismissed Camping's stupendous conclusions as cavalierly as all of them did?

Another feature that held constant during the 19921994 period was the curious mixed message Camping conveyed as to acting on the expectation that the end of the world would come so soon. The calm, slightly cheerful but otherwise unemotional tone of Camping on the air clashed with the sensational import of his words. His voice conveyed neither glee nor dread. He took great care to counsel the listeners not to behave differently than they would if they thought the end would not come for a hundred years. After all, an individual could die any time, making the timing of the world's end irrelevant for him. Camping offered no reasons, biblical or otherwise, for that incongruous advice. He would also always qualify the prediction, saying it depended upon whether or not he had done all of his calculations correctly. Since his argument involved the convergence of many lines of evidence and not just one linear deductive sequence, the qualification was somewhat disingenuous. I did not get the impression that Camping believed in his gut what he so obviously believed intellectually. To understand how that can be, one must remember that, for the Calvinist more than for other Christians, feelings are to be distrusted. Having one's actions be based totally on intellectualized obedience to scripture, suppressing and denigrating anything spontaneous or natural, is the goal of the Calvinist Bible-believer's devotional efforts. Having one's sinful nature balk at the truth is to be expected. That muting of the message-the tacit suggestion that believers should not expect to be able to assimilate the prophecy on an emotional level-surely helped keep the fear the callers were expressing from mushrooming into hysteria. There were a procession of callers in the days leading up to September 6 who expressed anxiety that they might not yet be saved. Camping would counsel them to get on their knees and beg God for salvation. (Why that could help when God supposedly had already decided, before the creation of the world, which persons would become saved is a question Calvinists are never able to answer convincingly.) A few called in to ask if they should lay in candles, emergency rations, or special items for infants. One man called in to confess his unsatisfactory attitude: he had a young wife and a small child whom he loved very much the way they were, and he was not able to work up the requisite enthusiasm for their transformation into another form of life. Camping counseled the man to get down on his knees and beg God for forgiveness for the sin of loving his family more than he trusted God. The tension was further diffused one night in a comic moment when Camping took a few minutes from the calls to retract and to express embarrassment about a mission tour offer that he had scheduled for October and thoughtlessly announced the previous night. What I had thought would develop into dire personal crises for Camping and his more involved followers was playing out more like a protracted practical joke. During August, it all reminded me of Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast. The only departure from this relatively harmless, farcical tone during August was the caller who identified himself as a penitentiary inmate serving a long sentence. Exuding malicious glee, he gushed about how a power higher than any governor or president would now commute his sentence indirectly, since he had become saved. That made me think of

people in especially wretched life situations who might be listening and feel cruelly let down when the false hope of deliverance was dashed. An outpouring of anguish and some suicides could have resulted. As the summer continued, Camping's own demeanor became lighthearted, as if he were happily anticipating the adventure of the last day. That was the only time I ever heard him crack jokes. He became more spontaneous, and his on-air technique improved to the point that he sounded like a professional broadcaster. As the fateful September 6 date neared, Camping evinced some giddiness and confusion, probably due to his coming on the air after spending all day responding to reporters' phone calls and doing radio talk-show interviews. September 7 passed without the predicted display of supernatural signs. Under that pressure, Camping proved brilliantly resourceful. In his effort to save the rest of his theory despite the non-occurrence of the signs, he focused on the word immediately in Matthew 24:29. The underlying Greek word eutheos could also be translated shortly or anon, allowing for the signs to come soon but not instantaneously. That permitted them to accompany the Second Coming, later on in the month of September. As the other key dates in September approached, Camping was able to repeat the easing of the letdown by deferring the expectation to the next key date. Probably without realizing it consciously, Camping had hit on a brilliant and psychologically sound strategy of desensitization. By having the expectations be built up and let down several times in such a controlled manner, being let down became part of his followers' normal routine, and it no longer perturbed them. After the third buildup and letdown sequence was completed on September 29 and what should have been the time for admitting error was at hand, Camping seemed to sense that one more buildup-letdown cycle would be desirable. The previous night, a lady who called in suggested that the anniversary of the birth of Jesus might be the elusive date. Camping was not immediately receptive to that idea. But on September 29, he warmed up to it and opined that October 2 was the most likely date for Christ's birthday. When that date also went by, he adopted the view that the time of the end was not relevant for believers after all, and that being ready for the end regardless when it may come is the important thing for Christians. Except for patient listening as a few dissatisfied callers dressed Camping down about the failed prophecy, the topic of the timing of the end of the world quietly vanished from the agenda of Open Forum. Throughout Camping's career, the usual motives of the fundamentalist religious broadcaster-greed, lust for political power, procurement of compliant people to gratify vices or concealed perversions-clearly were not his motives. Even during the date-setting episode, the lack of serious harm resulting to anyone except Camping himself points to enigmatic motivations strikingly different from those of any other high-profile cult leader. What obscures Camping's motives is that they do not rise directly from his psychopathology, as they do in cult leaders whose motives are more transparent.

With practically any dynamic religious cult leader other than Camping, the religion furnishes little more than a vocabulary for strivings that, if they had never found religion as the vehicle for their expression, would have found some other. It is not difficult to imagine any of the leaders of the well-known Bible-based murder-suicide cults-Jim Jones, David Koresh, or Luc Jouret-without their Bible parlance. They would have been about like Charles Manson. Nor is it very difficult to imagine Pat Robertson without his religious vocabulary: he would be more or less like Lyndon LaRouche.17 But for all the time I have spent listening to Camping, I cannot imagine how he might have arrived at anything remotely like the date-setting episode without the Bible. Rather, I imagine that he would have made some significant, constructive contribution to society but for his having gotten himself mired in religion. Camping's psychopathology was totally Bible-driven. Others who become fixated on the Bible typically develop depression or anxious generalized emotional distress as a result. Camping's ability to immerse himself in that content and seemingly not suffer those detrimental effects always amazed me. But doing so eventually took its toll on him in a different way. The Bible content grew into a personal delusion for him.18 He was less creative than other cult leaders in that he did not invent the content of his delusions. Rather he found it by studying the Bible. What makes his case truly unique is that the Bible scholarship involved in it is genuine. His conclusions do arise from the Bible language he so carefully studied, and he undoubtedly did uncover things that were in the minds of the men who concocted the Bible. He did not have a choice about the content of the delusion or its timing. The preoccupation of someone else who lived long ago, about the world ending two millennia after the first coming of Christ fixed how Camping's date-setting episode would play out. Although he took care to cover up the more grandiose aspects of his idea about his own role, they did show through. When he would talk about his own situation as like unto those of Noah and Jonah-and on one occasion even John the Baptist-his real opinion of himself as someone of comparable dignity to a major prophet in the Bible became evident.19 It was also clear that he regarded practically all of fundamentalist Christianity except for himself and his followers as apostate.20 He and his followers, like the little party in Noah's Ark, were the only true believers of their time and would be the only contemporaries to go to heaven. The heady experience of operating a worldwide broadcasting empire plays into this delusion, since, from that lofty vantage point one can think that one has personally fulfilled the Great Commission. Pat Robertson's date-setting episode was very similar in this respect. The entire Camping episode reflects personal motives that were rather benign, and in a peculiar way, admirable. All along, Camping was tellingly blind to some of the obvious implications of his actions. As a professional broadcaster with years of experience being sensitive to contributors, it is difficult to understand how he could be as oblivious as he appeared to the scathing publicity he was receiving. When his prophecy failed, he rationalized that getting the general media to cover a little bit about hell, damnation, and the end of the world might at least have gotten people interested in those topics. The

consequence that he might have brought his beloved Gospel into disrepute seemed not to perturb him. His obtuseness on that topic showed most clearly when callers would bring up the topic of false prophets. The only offense that the Bible regards as more serious than others, giving rise to stepped-up punishment in hell, is being a false prophet. Since receiving divine revelation in a dream, vision, voice, or tongue during the church age is the height of apostasy for Calvinists, Camping settled on that as the criterion for false prophecy he safely did not meet. Yet, by his own standards, the danger that he might be one of those who bear... bad fruit21 or who lead the elect astray22 should have given him some pause. His ease with what should have been a grave issue for him amounted to belle indifference. After a lifetime of harshly criticizing faith healing, divine revelation in dreams, visions, voices, and tongues, and every other sensational religion gimmick, he finally resorted to a gimmick just as sensational. But he did not see it that way. At some level, he must realize that the spectacle he put on is likely to have enabled many young people raised in strict fundamentalist churches to give themselves permission to see the absurdity of the beliefs in which they were raised. Perhaps Camping did by this roundabout means a thing that he could never have brought himself to do directly. Indirectly, he cut some followers whose minds were not totally dead loose from conservative churches and told them-in deeds rather than words-Go forth and get a life. The Camping date-setting episode has a genuine element of tragedy lacking in the downfalls of various crass religious hucksters. He was someone of real worth who might have realized a very high potential but was brought low by a tragic flaw. Or maybe he did realize his potential after all. Down through the years, skeptics and freethinkers seeking to resolve the supernatural truth claims of the Bible have either focused on internal text inconsistencies that Bible-believers are able to explain away, or attacked the plausibility of miracles claimed to have occurred long in the past, long since beyond the reach of empirical investigation. But Camping used biblical methods to derive an important prospective testable premise from the Bible. He put the premise to the test, and it failed. Camping labored for many years and ended up doing what skeptics have long labored in vain to do: he produced affirmative evidence that the Bible in its most essential truth claims is false. That was not what he meant to do, but that is what he did. If the Bible were true, then the world ought to have ended in 1994. Q.E.D. Notes 1. 1 Corinthians 15:4255; 2 Peter 3:12, 13. 2. There have also been postmillennialists. Their scenarios called for the thousandyear golden age to be ushered in by the believers unaided and to end with the Second Coming. Older postmillennialism forms part of the background of liberal Protestant social activism, seeking to make Christianity compatible with such American civic values as self-reliance and belief in progress. Only during the last thirty years or so has post-millennialism become identified with the reactionary

theocratic views of the Christian Reconstructionist leader Rousas Rushdoony. His revisionist postmillennialism heavily influenced Pat Robertson's Dominion Theology, which seeks to overcome a long tradition of separation of church and state. 3. With C. C. Carlson (New York: Bantam Books, 1970). It called for the Israelis, after reoccupying East Jerusalem, to fight and win a war with the Soviet Union. The European Common Market would unify, and be ruled by a charismatic dictator who would turn out to be the Antichrist in disguise. The dictator would conclude a peace treaty with Israel, which would then build the Third Temple and resume animal sacrifices there. The dictator would then enter the Temple and proclaim himself God Incarnate. Then the Soviet Union would invade Israel, expecting the dictator's ties to Arab countries to discourage him joining in on Israel's side. But he does join in, and together he and the Israelis rout the Russians. The Russians then unleash their nuclear arsenal, and just as the world is being destroyed, Christ returns. Its various publishers claim eighteen million sales of Lindsey's book. When asked about such a scenario during the 1984 presidential campaign, President Ronald Reagan admitted he had been intrigued by it. Many Christian leaders spouted variations of its Armageddon scenario. See generally Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1992). 4. The collapse of the Soviet Empire and the geopolitical changes in its wake strikingly failed to fit any of then current eschatological scenarios. Lindsey and other sensationalizers were thrown into confusion. Eschatological speculation fell out of fashion for a few years. The current furious political activism of the religious Right, and the occurrence of two cult mass murder-suicides in consecutive years, are undoubtedly connected with this upheaval in the lifelong eschatological expectations of the persons involved. 5. One Christian book to that effect, Edgar C. Whisenant, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988: New Expanded Edition (Nashville: World Bible Society, 1988) sold over two million copies. Hal Lindsey also favored 1988 as the likely final year. 6. Because recent achievements in the Middle East peace process do not meet with his eschatological expectations, Robertson vehemently disapproves of Israeli Prime Minister Rabin's peace agreement with Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Arafat. On January 7, 1994, Robertson's The 700 Club reported a trip to Israel by Ralph Reed, head of Robertson's domestic political arm, the Christian Coalition. Reed's telephone report was carried over the air: he had met with conservative members of Rabin's Knesset coalition. The Rabin government, Reed gleefully reported, was about to fall, and Likud would return to power and quickly disavow the peace agreement. Robertson received this news with equal glee. The Rabin government did not fall. A meddlesome attempt by Robertson's minion to intervene in Israeli politics would appear to be what was afoot. 7. An Associated Press story on Camping ran in many newspapers during late summer 1994. See the Los Angeles Times, July 30, 1994, p. B12. 8. 5985 and 9505 kHz.

9. Matthew 24:14. Family Radio also does considerable foreign language broadcasting over shortwave. 10. Also broadcast in purchased time on an additional twenty-seven nonFamily Radio stations, and on cable television in the San Francisco Bay area. 11. For example, Camping does not shrink from counseling the wife of a spouse abuser or child abuser that she may not leave: she must obey and be submissive, even if that leads to the martyrdom of herself or her children. Likewise, he does not shrink from telling someone who becomes a parent out of wedlock that he or she may not marry the child's other parent and create a family for that child if either has a living former spouse. 12. New York: Vantage Press. The following year, he published a sequel, Are You Ready? (New York: Vantage Press, 1993). Together, they comprise 955 concisely written pages. 13. Camping is an amillennialist as opposed to a pre- or postmillennialist, since his scenario does not include a literal thousand-year golden age. He perceives the five mentions of thousand-year periods in Revelation 20 as referring to irreconcilably different periods of time that he did not tie into any other Bible chronology. 14. Matthew 21:1822; 24:32, 33. 15. Note that the calendar presupposed in the Old Testament is not the same as the traditional Jewish calendar that makes the present year 5755. 16. Matthew 24:36, 37 is a companion verse. Another verse, Acts 1:7, does refer to believers not being able to know when foreordained events are to occur. In that verse, Jesus addresses his apostles. Since they lived long before the end times when the mystery would be revealed, there is no contradiction in their being unable to know while believers living in the 1990s can know. In addressing the issue of Jesus being unable to know while the Father knows-even though they are both God-Camping repeatedly said something I never heard him say in any other context. A number of times, he would spin out his own parable about a criminal who went before a judge to be sentenced to flogging. The judge would not explain the details of the sentence but instead would remand the prisoner over to the jailer, who knew exactly how many lashes to administer, what kind of whip to use, how hard to lash the prisoner, and other such details. Each time Camping would tell it, he would add a few more gruesome embellishments and the story would get a little more lurid. Camping apparently derived muted sadomasochistic gratification from it. Previously, he had always carefully refrained from picking up on the sadomasochistic content contained in the Bible itself. 17. See John Taylor, Pat Robertson's God, Inc., Esquire, November 1994, p. 76. 18. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Ed. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), p. 296 ff., sets forth criteria for delusional disorder, no. 297.1. In particular, it specifies Grandiose type: delusions of inflated worth, power, knowledge, identity, or a special relationship to a deity or famous person p. 301. Onset in middle or late life is typical of the disorder. 19. Camping averred that the period from the first time when Family Radio went on the air, February 4, 1959, to September 6, 1994, was exactly 13,000 days, corresponding to the 13,000 years from creation to final tribulation. He took that

correspondence as evidence of his enterprise's divine mandate. I checked the calendar calculation, and got only 12,998 days. 20. To make the period from May 21, 1988, to September 6, 1994, correspond to the final tribulation period, Camping dismissed the usual understanding of tribulation as figurative, and he identified the decline of teaching the true Gospel as the particular horror making that historical period of tribulation. With incongruously youthful overdramatization, he equated his own experience in a church that he had belonged to for many years that forbade him to teach any more after he declared himself a date-setter with the killing of the two witnesses in Revelation 11. 21. Matthew 7:1523. 22. Mark 13:21, 22. Edmund D. Cohen is the author of The Mind of the Bible-Believer (Prometheus).

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Harold Camping and the Second Stillborn Apocalypse

Edmund D. Cohen
Radio evangelist Harold Camping, who predicted that the Second Coming would occur in September 1994, is now positive it will take place on May 21, 2011. Sixteen years agoin the Winter 1994/95 issue of Free InquiryI reported on that earlier apocalyptic datesetting episode (that article is now available here). What follows is an update that takes the story from the failure of that doomsday prediction to the home stretch phase of its sequel, now in progress. In 1994, I facetiously observed that Camping had seemed to achieve something that has long eluded secularists and skeptics: he derived a testable proposition from the Bible, and its failure militated toward proving Bible truth claims false. Although he displayed much more confidence in that prediction at the time than he now lets on, he never claimed that it rose to the level of a formal proof. He left himself enough leeway to continue defending the premise after the prediction went bad. I was surprisedas he, himself, must have beenat how mild the backlash was and how readily his supporters allowed him to continue on, as if the 1994 date-setting fiasco had never happened. This time, Camping emphatically proclaims that the prediction does rise to the level of a proof, Q.E.D. He insists it is impossible for Judgment Day not to occur on May 21, 2011, and that the question is not even worth discussing. Whereas his first date-setting episode was able to expire with a whimper, this one cannot but become a watershed for Camping and his broadcasting empire.

Over the intervening sixteen years, his Family Radio has increased to comprise fifty parent listener-supported radio stations in the United States, each with its complement of range-extending translators. The network now has a footprint comparable to National Public Radio. Campings flagship Open Forum call-in show has moved up to the 8:30 to 10:00 p.m. E.D.T. time slot, Monday through Friday. Family Radio has emerged as the preeminent Christian international shortwave broadcaster. The prophecy is on the air in sixty-one regional and local foreign languages. Internet streaming and tract literature further extend the messages long reach. Little appears to have changed with Camping himself. At age eighty-ninethirteen years senior to Larry Kinghe skillfully fills at least two hours of airtime each weekday and manages his broadcast empire as he has done for fifty-two years. His process in arriving at the May 21, 2011, prophecy is a direct extension of his earlier work. That makes his contention that this prediction rests on formal proof, whereas the earlier one did not, mystifying. In all other respects, however, his hermeneutic has changed profoundly. Intricate and ingenious though they are, it is not useful to delve too deeply into the voluminous chronological calculations behind the Judgment Day predictions. The first time around, Camping had arrived at May 21, 1988, as the day when the church age ended and the final tribulation began. Because 1994 was the first jubilee year after that, Camping focused on it as the likely year for Judgment Day. Dates with Old Testament ceremonial significance during that yearespecially in Septemberbecame possible alternatives. Because twenty-three years8,400 daysis the longer of the two possible durations for the tribulation, Camping scrutinized May 21, 2011(which falls on a Saturdaythe seventh day, the last day of the week) as a promising alternative after the 1994 dates had come and gone. He had mentioned 2011 in passing as a possible alternative year as far back as in his book 1994?, published in 1992. The most interesting of the number-of-years connections that fall into place around 2011 is the exactly 7,000 years since 4990 b.c.e., the year he had previously ascertained for Noahs flood: God gave Noah seven days notice of the flood, and one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. Camping also sets great store by a complex calculation involving the symbolism of the numbers 3, 5, 10, 17, and 23 and the scientifically respectable value of 365.2422 days in a year, to produce 722,500 days: the exact number of days from April 1, 33 c.e.Crucifixion dayto May 21, 2011. After the Rapture takes place on that day, Earth will supposedly continue as an apocalyptic killing field, still peopled by the surviving unsaved, for 153 days. On the last day October 21, 2011 (a Friday)the present universe is to be incinerated and supplanted by new heavens and a new Earth. Teaching that the church age ended on May 21,1988, inevitably puts Camping at odds with the rest of the fundamentalist Christian church establishment. From his radio pulpit, Camping thunders that all organized churches have been under Satans rule from that day forward. He exhorts true believers to quit them. True believers acquire an urgent, sacred duty to join with Camping, warning the world of the oncoming apocalypse. Failure to see

the truth in the prophecy calls into question whether or not an individual is saved. Camping strenuously resists the obvious implication that only followers of his will qualify to be raptured. (He estimates the number of the saved to be approximately one out of seventy of the people who have ever lived.) He often talks about the teachers and believers who have arrived at the May 21 prediction independently of him. Inconveniently for him, there happen to be no such persons. During the forty-eight years, give or take, when Camping was not engaged in a date-setting episode and just taught the Bible, he did so with commendable objectivity. He debunked interpretations that perceived the Bible to be about social justice on Earth, meeting the physical needs of the poor, prosperity, happiness, bodily healing, taking over government, and the like. At Campings hands, the bleakness and severity of the Bibles core message of sin and stratified salvation came across intact and undiluted. It replicated what receiving biblical counseling from John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, John Bunyan, or Cotton Mather must have been like. Like all Christian fundamentalists in the 1960s and 1970s, Camping reflected Francis Schaeffers aspiration to see a generation of fundamentalist Christian intellectuals arise who would develop a biblical Weltanschauunga biblical worldviewthat could subsume all valid human knowledge. Camping presented a plausible appearance of carrying that aspiration forward. Hardly anyone else did more than pay lip service to it or recite it as a future good intention. It seems as though Camping wore himself out with that laborious, doomed effort. Isolated from anyone who could be regarded as his peer, he has transmuted into a wholesale revisionist, downplaying and even discarding large hunks of his own previous Calvinist doctrine. His study of the Bible, for all its continuing detailed finesse, has devolved into figuring out how to massage the language so as to allow the conclusions he wishes to reach. Whereas he used to attempt to synthesize all that the Bible has to saydeclarative content as well as allegorical, figurative as well as literalinto a unified whole, Camping has now opted for a more limited, piecemeal, minimalist approach. He now reads the descriptive content found in the Bibles prophetic visions, parables, and even the poetry as pertaining exclusively to the salvation plan. Having so long stood out as a commentator who refrained from projecting his own character onto his teaching, Camping has now replaced much of the Bibles angry, menacing, sadomasochistic lore with his own benign, kindly, American-bred impulses. These changes in tack revolutionize his views about life after death. Because Camping professes agnosticism regarding knowing any more about that subject than the Bibles sparse declarative statements reveal, he discards eternal punishment altogether. Eternal fire, he argues, refers to fire that incinerates totally and finally, not fire that goes on burning forever. Otherwise, tourists would be able to visit eternal fires still smoldering at the sites of Sodom and Gomorrah. He makes the death that is declared to be the wages of sin out to be merely thatnever again having conscious existence. Sometimes a death is just a death.

Camping now resolves the tension between scriptures stating that who will become saved was determined before the foundation of the world and ones that apparently leave it to be determined during the believers lifetime plainly in favor of the formerso much so that he now sees the Crucifixion and Resurrection as pantomimic demonstrations carried out for the sake of the biblical narrative, not redemptive events taking place in real time. All that makes for a Judgment Day scenario weirdly unlike previous ones: in a worldwide earthquake, all the graves spring open, ejecting the remains of all the people who have ever died. The unsaved dead never resume conscious existence. Nothing resembling a judicial proceeding need take place on Judgment Day because everything has literally been decided forever. The worst that Judgment Day holds for the deceased unsaved is desecration of their remains, because they have become forever mercifully unaware. (Romans 14:1012 and 2 Corinthians 5:10 are scriptures Camping must massage particularly heavily in order to harmonize them with this scenario.) The saved, both living and dead, are caught up in the Rapture. They receive their new, glorified bodies at that point. (Their condition during the 153 days before the new heavens and Earth are ready goes unexplained.) The living unsaved are left behind, in a world crippled by the earthquake catastrophe and the sudden disappearance of all the living saved. Camping speculates that few on Earth are likely to survive the first few days of that tumult. To their credit, Christian fundamentalists by and large have not bought into the May 21 belief. It has barely penetrated beyond Campings personal following. The larger fundamentalist Christian community ignores it, preferring to regard it as irrelevant. So what is this extravagant fable really about? Why is Camping doing this? Why now? Is there a payday in it for anyone? Could Camping be a fundamentalist-Christian Max Bialystock, with hidden motives for guiding his Family Radio empire to suffer a surefire flop? Camping admits that even Family Radios staff is divided on the May 21 question. (That staff recently decided against publishing a 2011 Family Radio pocket calendar after discussing the ramifications of publishing one ending on May 21 or October 21.) The prophecy is so facially preposterous that anyone damaged by relying upon it will have little prospect of convincing a court that the reliance was reasonable. Around the world, unassuming people in poorer countries and speaking only local languages are hearing the prophecy of the worlds 2011 doom broadcast from the exalted U.S.A. That is hardly calculated to increase Americas prestigemuch less that of the Christian gospelin their eyes. No media evangelism pitch could possibly give its public less reason to contribute than this one does. It has no donor exploitation angle. Following the money leads nowhere. This is a story about madness, not venality. The answers, if any, are psychological. My clearest recurring impression of Camping is his deep, un spoken longing that his way of lifewandering obsessively in circles in the Bibles semantic wildernesswill be concluded, finished, ruled out for succeeding generations. In 1994, I speculated that he unconsciously desired to trigger a scandal to discourage others from squandering their lives enmeshed in the futility of Bible-belief in the way he had. No one would have expected

Family Radios listenership to prove so long-suffering that it would simply disregard the episode and continue on blithely as if nothing had happened. Perhaps that constituency has something to teach the rest of us about tolerance for eccentricity. Long live freedom of speech! By declaring certainty and approving a publicity campaign (with billboards, print-media advertising, missionary junkets, and touring RV caravans), Camping has raised the stakes. It is as if he were deliberately tweaking the noses of the rest of the fundamentalist Christian establishment and the public, seeking to goad us all to react. Such a motive would also explain Campings uncharacteristic foray into gay-bashing. Over all these years, he has never been given to hot button rhetoric. His current tract, Gay Pride: Planned by God as a Sign of the End is, however, a full-throated piece of hate literature. It was published under Campings name, even though comparably short Family Radio tracts are usually unattributed. It is nothing but an attention-getting stunt in terrible taste. I see it as Campings version of Springtime for Hitler. How much more outrageous must Camping become in order to provoke an outcry? The key to the whole ungainly story could lie in Campings stance toward natural science. In recent years, the terminology of formal, numerical proof has cropped up more and more in his parlance. It is easy to detect the frustrated quantitative scientist behind all that fastidious analysis of biblical chronology. How much more satisfying could he have found a life devoted to investigating something real? What a productive natural scientist this man with his meticulous attention to detail, facility with numbers, and capacity for hard work might have become had he been influenced toward higher academic aspirations in his youth. He has never really seemed to relish science-versus-religion polemics. He protests too much when he lambastes and caricatures scientists. Sometimes on Open Forum, he perfunctorily re cites stock intelligent design talking points. What sour grapes. Could that be what is really amiss in his life without his even being aware? These date-setting episodes are all about what happens when a brilliant persons urge to be creative and original is repressed. It crops out self-destructively. Camping is poised to succeed in bringing a high-profile media crucifixion upon himself. Most likely, he will find himself hastily trying to walk the prophecy back at the moment of truth. He has done that before. He might even be able to ease things back to status quo ante a second time. He can always appoint his own hundredth birthday as the next scheduled apocalypse. For him to face up to his obligationincurred on precisely his own termsto concede that he has unwittingly adduced evidence of the falsity of Bible truth claims is doubtless too much to hope for. We might as well enjoy the show.