4 Horsemen

 December 22, 2020

From my mother’s bookshelves, I pulled a volume entitled, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” a scholarly study of, as the subtitle indicates, “Religion, War, Famine, and Death in Reformation Europe.” So far, I’m only into the introduction, but it seems particularly timely in the way the sixteenth and early seventeenth century mirrors what we are experiencing today. The authors state,

“There was a crisis in religion: Eastern Christianity...had come under the control of the Turkish Muslims, while Western Christianity...broke up after 1517 with Luther’s 95 theses being pinned to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, and the religious upheavals which followed. There was a crisis in the social structure: feudal society was in the process of breaking up, with peasants in rebellion...There was crisis in the political realm: as the medieval feudal states became obsolete, so war became endemic across Europe as new dynastic and territorial states were brought into existence. There was Chris in the economy: a money economy came to replace the feudal economy of services and exchange of goods, and inflation...brought untold hardship and starvation to many. There was a crisis in demography for the first time since before the Black Death of 1348...the European population began to expand inexorably, and people began moving in great numbers from the countryside to the towns and cities. Finally, there was a crisis in world-view, moving from the known to the unknown.”

Crises in religion, social structure, politics, economy, demographics, and world-view. Does any of this sound familiar? All this was interpreted then in religious and biblical terms, especially through the apocalyptic literature of the Revelation of St. John. The interesting thing to me is that we are experiencing the very same upheavals in our time, but without any overarching narrative to give it meaning. Yesterday, I referenced a New York Times article that attempted rather feebly to find hope in the societal darkness symbolized by the winter solstice. Talk to a dozen different people, and we’ll find at least a dozen different explanations of what’s happening and why. The difference today is that there is no universally accepted meta-narrative that helps us put everything in perspective. Even if they chose to fight and kill one another, Sixteenth century people could at least talk to, and understand each other. Listening to our current politicians and policy makers is like overhearing an intermingling babble of Swedes, Russians, Chinese, and Congolese trying to have a conversation, no one being bilingual.

I am not particularly prophetic, and thus have no inside knowledge of God’s plan in these days, but I know this much: mankind has been down this road before. Feudal Europe was one such time; so was the collapse of Rome in the fifth century. People then (and now) looked for scapegoats, and muddled through solutions that were often worse than the problem they sought to solve. I for one, derive comfort in knowing that what is, has already been, and that there is as Scripture says, “nothing new under the sun.” Even more, I take comfort in the knowledge that the Four Horsemen St. John described while exiled on Patmos were not the end of the story. Jesus Christ also rode onto the scene, ushering in the eternal Kingdom of God. This is not the time to get discouraged and give up. This is the time to look up, for our redemption draws nigh.