Vol. 25 No. 11 · 5 June 2003
pages 33-35 | 2682 words
Be Rapture Ready! The end times are nigh!
John Sutherland
- Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins
Tyndale House, 398 pp, £15.99, April 2003, ISBN 0 8423 3234 0
Religious fiction is the hot line in American bookstores. It isn’t a new genre – Pilgrim’s Progress still sells; what’s new is its popularity and profitability; and, most strikingly, its doctrinal aggressiveness. We know that eschatology has filled the vacuum where Cold War ideology used to be. But the Cold War fantasised Mutually Assured Destruction, leaving the faint hope of permanent stalemate; Christian fiction prophesies the coming of the ‘end times’. There is no escape. Prepare. The novels will help.
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[*] Multnomah, 184 pp., $11.99, March, 1 59052 251 6.
[†] Baker, 144 pp., $12.99, April, 0 8010 6479 1.
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Letters
Vol. 25 No. 13 · 10 July 2003
From Marc Hudson
I am less sure than John Sutherland that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's Left Behind is a 'rip-off' of Stephen King's 'The Langoliers' (LRB, 5 June). The idea of passengers disappearing mid-flight has been in the air for some time. In Millennium (1984) John Varley portrayed a genetically ravaged human race raiding doomed planes for spare parts. Varley may or may not have been inspired by the Troughton-era 'Doctor Who and the Faceless Ones' (1967).
Marc Hudson
Manchester
From Rachel Foxley
Perhaps if the entire Christian Right were 'instantaneously teleported into Heaven', as John Sutherland puts it, the rest of us might avoid Armageddon. Roll on the end times!
Rachel Foxley
Cambridge
Vol. 25 No. 15 · 7 August 2003
From Marilyn Bowering
John Sutherland (LRB, 5 June) had me wondering how many generations have now lived through 'the end times'? My friend John (he died in his twenties in 1975) spent a week, as an eight-year-old, in the woods near his home in British Columbia, believing he had been 'left behind'. He'd come home from school to find his minister father, his mother, his siblings, all the Christian neighbours and members of the congregation he'd tried to contact, missing – 'Raptured', he thought.
I passed many long Sunday morning sermons – the evening ones were fire and brimstone and worth staying alert for – reading the Christian romance novels written in the 1930s and 1940s by Grace Livingstone Hill, and available from the Sunday School library. It was considered one of her 'failings', I was delighted recently to learn, that she described evil in too much detail. I remember a scene in which a young woman was tortured by the Antichrist or one of his minions by being tied to a stake on the Temple Mount, covered in honey, then set upon by ants. She kept true to her faith, however, and although she died, was 'saved'.
I could never keep straight the prophetic meanings found in the Books of Daniel and Revelation. The Eagle had to be the United States and the Bear the Russians. But what did they do, and when? It was worrying. It made a kind of sense when evangelists warned that the Common Market was the first step towards World Government and domination by the Antichrist. In Canada, the introduction of social insurance numbers in the 1960s, and later of bar codes on merchandise, were seen by my parents' church as crucial steps towards the universal stamp of 666. Nowadays, politicians appear to see themselves as instruments of biblical prophecy. This doesn't seem to me much different from the woman who's told by the palm reader that her future includes a tall dark stranger, and then goes out to find one.
Marilyn Bowering
Sooke, British Colombia
