Religious Roots of Apocalyptic Thinking

About 3,500 years ago a Persian prophet named Zarathustra asserted that Gods could not be good in some cases and bad in others which was the case, at the time, in most polytheistic mythologies. He said good is good and evil is evil - setting the stage for later beliefs that the earth is a battleground between the forces of good and the forces of evil. This world view, at the risk of being simplistic, allows evil to gain ground at times only to be pushed back by the forces of good. The tension between good and evil is at the heart of apocalyptic thinking. Even if one does not believe in good and evil as a religious doctrine, the underlying concept can also be found in secular thinking. People who believe in balance and harmony see imbalances or dis-harmonies being brought back into balance and harmony as an aspect of the natural order.

Another key religious doctrine is the concept of interventionism. This can best be understood in opposition to a well know opposite doctrine. Deism, a religious view that became popular after the enlightenment, claimed that God created the world and left it to run on its own. Their view can be summed up easily in an example. Let's say you have two clock makers. One made a clock that runs perfectly and requires no further work. The other made a clock that requires constant attention and repair. Who is the better clock maker? Clearly the first one is. The deist view of interventionism is that it is like the second clock maker. Why does God have to intervene all the time? Why couldn't he have just made the world perfect and let it run?

Despite the strengths of that argument, most people are interventionist. They believe that God has a hand in things that go on in the world and that he steps in from time to time to set things right. This notion of the forces of good stepping in to set things right provides much of the religious basis for the apocalyptic view of the world.