Left Behind, the video game
"[The worldview espoused in the Left Behind series] is a weird, 19th-century American fever-dream and one of the strangest, most counter-intuitive and convoluted hermeneutic schemes ever imposed on scripture." [→ READ ]
I love Fred’s brilliant descriptive ability. Concerning the standard blurbage that the LaHaye/Jenkins Left Behind novel series “is based on prophecies from the Bible’s Book of Revelation,” Fred speaks truly:
No, no, no, no, no. …
This unrecognizable, heterodox puree includes chunks of John’s apocalypse, mixed together willy-nilly with the stranger bits of Daniel, Ezekiel and the minor prophets and slices of St. Paul’s meditations on death and Christ’s warnings of judgment. It also includes lots of other things, like numerology, an aversion to historical context and whole passages apparently taken from the AD&D Monster Manual.
Yes.
Yet many (in the U.S. anyway) seem to think the Left Behind series is practically paraphrased scripture.
My hunch is that the widespread uptake of premillennial dispensationalism, the novelists’ implied worldview, is one of the greatest triumphs of the one Jesus calls “The Enemy.” Why? Because it leads people to think that waging war (~killing the infidels) and destroying the earth (anti-stewardship) are — in direct opposition to Jesus’ teaching — sound Christian theology.
Thanks, Fred.
2006-01-05 update:
Related: Joe’s steamroller rant/essay What the ‘Left Behind’ Series Really Means sheds much light on the Left Behind apostasy errm, phenomenon, too; it’s a MONNNSTTTERRR TRRRUCK tour de force.
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