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Apocalypse - a time of revealing

I've been meaning to write this for a while. I was thinking of it as a new year's post to reflect on 2025. But time has got away from me and we are already well into 2026 now. 

The world feels apocalyptic. Even more so now with war spreading in the Middle East. Of course it's easy to exaggerate these kinds of claims. Even generation faces challenges and every generation faces wars. When we consider the meaning of the time we live in we should do so with a sense of historic perspective. 

Nevertheless, writing purely personally I feel more a sense of the apocalyptic than ever before. I don't mean that I think "the world is ending" - what I mean is that the Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writings and insights make more sense to me than ever before. 

What has changed for me personally is a sense of the hostility of the world. What I mean is that "the world" feels like it is out to get me, and to get people like me. "The world" is not friendly. 

I have to be careful with my language here. Because what I'm saying depends a lot on what we mean by "the world." I used to sit in Anglican baptism services growing up and heard "fight against sin, the world, and the devil" and I'd think - what's wrong with the world? The world is wonderful, isn't it?

And I still believe the world is wonderful. At some fundamental level, the world/the universe is full of beauty and love and the presence of God. I have always believed and experienced that. God is supremely present in nature, in humans, in existence itself. And indeed on a personal level I would say my world is better than ever and I meet more love in rich experiences in my life than has ever been the case.

But there is another understanding of "the world" - and it's that that I feel I understand and feel more deeply. The theologian Walter Wink argues that the use of the word "world" in the New Testament (kosmos) should be understood as "the human sociological realm that exists in estrangement from God" and, he would translate it as "The Domination System." So, for example, he would translate 1 John 2: 15 as "Do not love the Domination System or things pertaining to it. If anyone loves that System the love of the Abba is not in that person." 

Apocalypse means revelation, it means something is being revealed, and I feel like the System has been revealed to me more clearly than ever in recent years. I think in 2025 it became clear to me just how disordered and wrong-headed the System is. 

Of course my privilege has protected me a lot before now, it's given me a sense that the world is basically OK and treats me well. If I had grown up in Gaza I would never have thought that, but I did in my social existence. 

But today I feel and see more than ever the wrongness of the System I live in. The world is ordered in such a way as to be profoundly anti-human, to value violence more than peace, and wealth more than human life. 

Nothing demonstrates this more than a UK government passing laws designed to protect weapons more than human life, that rushes to protect arms companies but not children being killed by those arms. My arrest last year was the most explicit moment of me personally no longer being able to tolerate the Domination System and attempting to love God more than the Domination System.

As I read Walter Wink in my police cell I definitely experienced a shift. I definitely now have a sense that the world, the Domination System, the UK government is actively hostile to myself and to the Christian values I attempt to live by. Something has broken in me and I am no longer trustful of the system, the government that I live under. Perhaps it should have happened a long time ago. 

So, for me this is a time of apocalypse, of revealing of just how disordered and violent and anti-human the Domination System is. How, when push comes to shove, it sacrifices human rights and human life to preserve itself. 

And so I am in a season of suspicion, of cynicism against the system I live in. I have little faith in it now. But it is clearer to be now that God's work is to be set against this Domination System and non-violently fight against it. But there is a clarity of purpose that comes from this realisation. The Christian faith, interpreted by people like Walter Wink, feels more alive and makes more sense to me that ever. The Domination System is revealed, and God's work is to bring it down and transform it to the peaceable kingdon, God's garden of paradise. 

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