BOOK REVIEW
A work offers a numerological deciphering of the Book of Revelation.
The latest book from Torckler (The Millennial Code, 2012) takes 2014 as a pivotal year in human history. It was then that former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency’s massive, global data-harvesting policies, which had been hidden from the public until then. This now constitutes, in Torckler’s mind, a sign of “the beginning of the end of the Christian churches’ legal freedom to operate as a morals-based church entity we’ve enjoyed and assumed with the full rights of tax freedom.” The author looks to the standard biblical sources for End of Days calculations, the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. He hopes his elucidations will “switch the light on” in his readers’ imaginations, alerting them to the possibility that the apocalyptic predictions made in Scripture might be coming true at this moment. The prerequisites for these revelations should be familiar to students of Christian eschatology: a charismatic dictator will be aided in his rise to power by a mega-city called Babylon (not to be confused with the historical city of the same name) and will bring the entire world under one despotic rule. Torckler, writing “not as a professor but as a poet,” sifts through biblical clues using a simple cipher that assigns a number value to each letter of the alphabet: 1 for a, 2 for b, etc. This cipher gives the author an obviously generous amount of interpretational leeway, and in the nature of such analyses, he makes the most of that latitude when rolling out his speculations (“beast is used fourteen times in chapter 13 and thirty-seven times in the book of Revelation”—and many pages of the like).
Christian readers should find Torckler’s energetic prose engaging, and his underlying contentions about a looming global hive mind (he notes Google’s recent prediction that the entire world will be online by 2020) add contemporary spice to his conjectures.
A warning derived from hidden biblical codes should prove irresistible to Christian fans with a Da Vinci Code sweet tooth.
