Dispensationalism and the Left Behind books

Thus far I believe I have written about dispensationalism only once in this blog. It's not something I spend a lot of time thinking or talking about, except very occasionally to indicate that I myself am not an adherent. However, as the Texas überblogger, Joe Carter, has recently mentioned the Left Behind phenomenon, I will take another opportunity to comment on it.

First, during my youthful sojourn amongst the Baptists (mentioned immediately below), one of the authors, Jerry B. Jenkins, was apparently a member of the same congregation that our family was attending in Wheaton, Illinois. I myself do not remember him, but my mother insists that he taught sunday school to my brother. I'll take her word for it.

Second, Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth was published in 1970, when I was 15 years old. I read the book and was mesmerized by its predictions for the future, finding it at least temporarily persuasive. I began to consume similar books, including, as I recall, one by Tim LaHaye, who has obviously been around for a long time. I noticed immediately that LaHaye's and Lindsey's apocalyptic scenarios did not quite mesh, though both claimed to be taking the Bible literally. My own efforts to reconcile them didn't work either, however hard I tried.

The following year Ken Taylor's Living Bible came out, and I read it from cover to cover. I have reason to think that Taylor himself, who once visited our family home when I was in high school, is a dispensationalist. All the same, as I read his paraphrase of scripture, I failed to see what Lindsey and LaHaye claimed to find. At that point I abandoned my youthful flirtation with this somewhat eccentric, but immensely popular, system of biblical interpretation.

As for the Left Behind books themselves, I freely admit that I have not read them, so I will not comment on them directly, except to say that, from what I do know of them, they sound like a bad idea all round. Perhaps someone needs to write apocalyptic novels from an amillennial perspective, but my guess is that they are likely to be far less exciting and thus less lucrative for the authors. Moving beyond the novel genre, I myself will recommend an old classic, Augustine's City of God, whose vision of history and its ultimate consummation has stood the test of time and is still being read after a millennium and a half.