Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World.

Catherine Keller. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. 370pp. $30.00 (cloth).

As we face the dawn of the third millennium, we are also faced with the proliferation of texts and movements - from radical environmentalists to biblical literalists - that predict the end of the world. We can anticipate that, as we come closer to the year 2000, public interest in the "signs of the times" will continue to escalate. Catherine Keller's new book serves as a guide through the morass of apocalyptic proclamations.

Keller approaches the subject of apocalypse not as an event looming on the horizon, but as a "multidimensional, culture-pervading spectrum of ideological assumptions, group identities, subjective responses, and ... historical habits" (xi). She announces that "We are already there, in apocalypse - in its narrative, its aftermath, its compulsion, its hope" (xi). She describes her work as a meditation on the Book of Revelation, the primary source of the apocalyptic imaginary that has rooted itself in Western consciousness, and as such operates as a metanarrative for Western self-understanding. When and where, she asks, has the apocalypse script functioned as a self-fulfilling prophecy?

As a metanarrative, Keller asserts, apocalypse has taken hold of us whether or not we locate ourselves in communities with biblical traditions. She identities the many ways that it invades our common consciousness. There are groups who engage in "retroapocalypse," usually conservative Christian literalists who assert that John's Revelation speaks immediately to our time. They claim that when John wrote of the tribulations of the end times he was speaking to us and of us, now, at the end of the twentieth century. Hal Lindsey's 1973 publication of The Late Great Planet Earth typifies this genre. According to Keller, however, even those who disdain such literalist claims do not escape the apocalyptic script. "Cryptoapocalypse" identifies the "subliminal margins" - those who accept it even though they don't "believe" in it. It is this space, she argues, that most of us occupy. Even if we don't participate in literalist renderings of the end of the world, we nevertheless expect it as an inevitability.

According to Keller, the book of Revelation has provided the master script for much of the oppressive triumphalism that has marked Western history, offering a pattern of thinking that rests on the either/or polarities of good and evil. This binarism has legitimated the destruction of that deemed evil, and rationalized it by reference to a future good. Faced with this "destructive habit," Keller admits she is tempted to take an anti-apocalyptic stance, yet she recognizes this as ultimately an untenable position. The announcement of "the end of the end" is yet another version of the apocalypse script: "an apocalypse of apocalypse, turns out to be an oxymoron" (15). In addition, says Keller, contained within this master script is a "hidden transcript" that constitutes the resistance discourse of the oppressed. The apocalyptic imagination is just as likely to give birth to revolution as it is to result in reactionary movements. This paradox and ambiguity of apocalypse informs much of the historical exploration of her work. Keller "claims the space of a "counter-apocalypse" which "recognizes itself as a kind of apocalypse; but then it will try to interrupt the habit" (19). Her stance in this space largely shapes the book. "Counterapocalypse dis/closes." "It would avoid the closure of the world signified by a straightforward apocalypse, and it would avoid the closure of the text signified by an anti-apocalypse" (19). The other position that informs Keller's treatment of apocalypse is that of a feminist theologian. While she asserts that "the apocalypse, as text or as effect, is a quintessentially male product" (28), she reminds feminists that they, too, must come to terms with their own dependency on the apocalyptic script. It is from this position as a feminist counter-apocalypticist that Keller begins her meditation with a midrash on the book of Revelation. Her reading is informed by two "prophetic prophets": Allan Boesak, who, as a liberation theologian, reads the text as protest literature for a resistance movement, and Mary Daly, who links the text with the patriarchal movement to destruction. "Is this the book of cosmic-historical revolution? The book of paranoid patriarchy? Or does it cut, like its own double-edged speech, both ways?" (41).

The paradox inherent in apocalypse is explored through the rest of Keller's work. She winds her way through the "helical spiral" of apocalypse, taking her reader on a journey through Time, Place, Community, Gender, and Spirit. Densely packed and brilliantly articulated, this book challenges the reader's critical engagement with the cultural habits of postmodernity. Apocalypse Now and Then demonstrates that scholarship can be simultaneously poetic and rigorous, firmly grounded in the concrete while exploring the rarefied air of the esoteric. In the face of apocalypse we need not succumb to despair but can let Keller guide us to an affirmation of hope.

ELIZABETH A. SAY