Waiting for Antichrist

Abstract

This book explores how members of one religious group with a strong apocalyptic tradition — Kensington Temple, a large Pentecostal church in London — reconciled doctrines of the end of the world with the demands of their everyday lives. It is shown that they subjected these doctrines to a process of scrutiny, moderating and marginalizing them in response to a so-called the “Problem of the End”, the tendency of apocalyptic discourse to predict things that do not happen. In doing so, they employed the same subjective rationality that they applied to all manner of risky religious claims, such as those relating to miraculous healing. In effect, they were testing hypotheses not in a scientific fashion, but according to the dictates of common sense. These findings are difficult to reconcile with the notion that there is a single psychological or material cause of millenarianism.