Doomsday: The End of the World-A View Through Time

by Russell Chandler

This is the Story about
How the World Ends

Throughout history, men and women have tried to predict how and when this will happen. With a bang? With a whimper? IN fire? Or in ice? We humans have been thinking and talking, wondering and worrying, about the end of the world since the very beginning.

Doomsday follows the story of the world's end, as it has been told through the centuries--a story with many strands and a cast of colorful characters, ranging from Greek mythology, to Noah, Augustine, William Miller, and the gurus of the New Age.

As the 20th century races toward its end, the conviction grows that many things are ending with it. Chandler looks back at the thoughts and fears of prominent saints and sinners that were all certain the end was near. He also looks forward, focusing on what the prophesies of the Old and New Testaments tell us about the final day.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Randy Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very broad look at all things Apocalypse, from the new age to native Americans to Catholic to Jewish to Fundamentalist to dispensationalist to Mainline Meanderings to plagues to all of the last two thousand years of date setters, white robed believers standing on hill tops wait for the end of the world. There were times when I wished Chandler had shown his hand a little more (but that's not like a newspaper writer) and in a couple of cases I thought he needed to lay sound orthodoxy out a little more, (for instance, in the books' strangest chapter, "Just Say Nostradamus") he lets the fact go by fairly unscathed that a true prophet of God is correct one hundred percent of the time. But this book is very good, especially in its wide view (one does not get the feeling that one is reading a particular view, say a preTrip dispensationalist fundamentalist or an amillennialist Baptist. The sections of the history of the phoneme of end times hysteria were particularly enlightening, especially the year of 999 and the turn of the first millennium. Most telling was our seemingly inclination for following "prophets" who come up with some "divine" knowledge which tells them something new or that they have figured out when Christ is coming and/or the end of the world is at hand. And Chandler covers a ton of them, from current TV evangelists like Jack Van Impe to the Millerists of the last century to Joseph Smith and Ellen G. White to seemingly endless others, particularly the craziest of all, "Armageddon Incorporated" The Jehovah Witnesses. All of them seem to follow a very distinct pattern: set a date, following grows, date proves false, followers leave, leaders re-define the meaning of the date and proceed to set a new date, which starts the cycle over again. One of things I took from this book was our love for following things which get us away from the true areas of Christianity which is holiness and discipleship and growing and getting to know Christ better. As Dave Barry said of the false doomsayers, "Hey it's not the end of the world."