Will Jan. 1, 2000 be the end of the world as we know it?
Although a few fringe pessimists are counting on the millennium to bring on the apocalypse, most Duke religion experts are confident that the sun will shine on New Year's Day.
And while certain religious radicals hold up their Bibles to prove their conviction that the Day of Judgment is imminent, several University professors say the Bible contains nothing of the sort.
"These groups ostensibly look to the Bible as the authority, but the Bible doesn't have anything about this [in it]...," said Grant Wacker, an associate professor at the Divinity School who studies evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity. "The millennium is much more a reporter's creation, not a religious creation."
There is some biblical basis, however, to the concept of 1,000 years as a significant time period-specifically in the apocalyptic book of Revelation in the New Testament.
"The typical idea is that Christ comes back to Earth, there is a battle between righteousness and evil, righteousness wins, then there are 1,000 years of peace and prosperity," Wacker said. "At the end of that is the last judgment, when God will judge the living and the dead, where the good will go to heaven and the bad will suffer their eternal fate."
Wacker noted that many Christians take this tradition to mean that Jesus' return to Earth will be soon, although they hesitate to pinpoint a date. During the 1840s, he explained, a sect of Christians-the predecessors to the Seventh Day Adventists-tried to predict the specific day for Christ's return. They were wrong, and when they tried again the next year, they experienced another anticlimax.
"As a result of the public disgrace the [group] faced, ever since then, conservative groups have been reluctant to set dates," Wacker said.
Instead, he continued, Christians who believe that the Day of Judgment looms in the near future tend to look at more tangible, natural signs of the impending apocalypse-not specific dates.
As another example of pre-millennial interest in Christ, James B. Duke Professor of English Reynolds Price penned last week's Time magazine's cover story on "Jesus at 2,000."
In his work, Price, the renowned novelist and biblical scholar, attempts to provide insight into Jesus' character by dramatizing several key moments in Christ's life.
Although some Christians believe that the millennium signifies the end, others see it as a new beginning. Rev. Joe Vetter of the University's Newman Catholic Student Center explained that the specific number 2,000 has little religious significance beyond being a big birthday-Jesus Christ's 2,000th: "When an anniversary ends in a zero, it's usually significant; but when it ends in three zeroes, it's really significant," he said.
Still, Vetter added, the millennium brings with it the possibility of rebirth. The pope, for example, has declared the year 2000 a Jubilee Year, which commemorates a fixed passage of time-usually every 50 years.
Although the number 2,000 carries no special weight in this context, Vetter explained, it will ensure time for both personal and community reflection. "It's the concept that once in a while we need to stop and start over, otherwise we're contributing to a system where the powerful get more powerful and the oppressed become more oppressed...," he said. "We need to stop and think about how we can change that."
The Jubilee Year also means that the centuries-old and controversial practice of indulgences-the ability to absolve sin with religious acts-are especially important, Vetter said.
"It's interesting to me that in our culture we talk about [the millennium] in terms of Y2K and what's happening to our computers," he said, "not what's happening to our lives."
Professor of Religion Kalman Bland, who studies medieval and modern Jewish thought, agreed that having technology fundamentally embedded in the concept of the year 2000 has heightened the millennial hype.
However, he attributed little religious significance-in either Christian or Jewish traditions-to a 1,000-year period. Instead, he said, the millennial furor is a function of human nature. "We get fun out of watching the odometer ringing up a bunch of zeroes," Bland said. "It's really strange.... It's a wonderful example of the public imagination at work."
Professor Bruce Lawrence, chair of the religion department and a specialist in Islamic studies and Muslim-Hindu intellectual history, also holds that the concept of the mystical millennium is primarily a secular construction.
"It is a convenient way of marking the transition from one huge symbolic referent to another, but the real lives of most people depend on the concrete tangibles of work and community, food, shelter, travel and, yes, sport," he said. "Will the millennium change any of these dependencies? No."
Although the factions counting the days until Armageddon do not make up the majority of American society, the concept of Millennium-with-a-capital-M is a distinctly American phenomenon, said Professor of Literature Kenneth Surin.
"[In the United States, there is] the kind of Protestantism that veers into fundamentalism, that takes certain books of the Bible as being hugely important and which has always found a deep affinity between religious practice and the apocalypse...," said Surin, who studies religion and critical theory.
"Europeans are bemused that we have people hunkering down... with weapons, waiting for Armageddon," he continued.
"It's so peculiarly American."
Katherine Stroup contributed to this story.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.