One of the more amusing elements of the Left Behind series, which I’ve been listening to and not reading, is the reader. I was using an amateur (or at least I hope it was an amateur) reading uploaded to YouTube. The reader tried to create accents and distinct voices for all his characters, but all the Jewish characters sound alike: cliche and silly.
Listening to this guy’s Jewish characters was a real challenging to my patience.
Two ideas the evangelical Christian community holds in common are that one can be sure of the presence of God and that God answers prayers. Confirmation of God’s presence comes from what evangelicals call the “interior witness of the Holy Spirit.” God’s answers to prayers can be anything from an unexpectedly available parking place to silence, often phrased as “God isn’t ‘not answering’ your prayer; he just said, ‘No.’” In Tribulation Force, the second book in the Left Behind Series, LaHaye and Jenkins create a group prayer scene that demonstrates these two principles fairly succinctly, and the scenes also manage to highlight the logical inconsistencies in these two views.
Evangelicals often claim that they can somehow feel the presence of God. This most often happens during highly emotionally charged events: it’s one of the reasons music plays such a prominent part in evangelical worship, and it’s why the worship leaders conducting that portion of the church service encourage everyone to stand, to put their hands in the air, and to close their eyes. Tied to direct and indirect calls to move away from analytical logical thinking and a decreased level of self-awareness, It creates a physical and emotional unity tied to the music (itself a very emotive medium), and this will create warm positive emotions that believers later attribute to God’s presence.
While four of the Tribulation Force characters meet together for a bible study session, they decide to pray together, on their knees. The first thing one character realizes is “he needed to surrender his will to God” which would involve “giving up the logical, the personal, the tightfisted, closely held stuff.” He later has a “fleeting thought of how ridiculous he must look assailed him, but he quickly pushed it aside.” Thus, logical thinking has disengaged and the character has taken a step back from his normal self-awareness. All he needs is a highly-charged emotional cue, which he gets shortly thereafter:
Bruce had been praying aloud, but he suddenly stopped, and Rayford heard him weeping quietly. A lump formed in his own throat. He missed his family, but he was deeply grateful for Chloe, for his salvation, for these friends.
This reaction in the context of the novel is understandable. These two characters were left behind while Jesus whisked their families off to heaven. They’re already emotionally fragile. It would take little to bring them to tears.
Of course, in the novel, it’s difficult to deny the existence of this god: he has apparently already made several million people disappear, and given their common fervent Christian ideas and the fact that the church (at least the evangelical church in America) has been preaching the coming rapture for decades, it’s difficult to deny from logic to deny the reality of the rapture and thus of the Christian god. But that’s the reality of the novel. The reality to which the authors hold makes the same claims about their god’s presence without the looming piece of evidence the rapture would represent. With or without the rapture, they would contest that the events of this prayer group constitute proof of their god’s existence.
It’s at this point in the prayer that the character Rayford feels sure of his god’s presence:
Rayford lost track of the time, knowing only vaguely that minutes passed with no one saying anything. He had never felt so vividly the presence of God. So this was the feeling of dwelling on holy ground, what Moses must have felt when God told him to remove his shoes. Rayford wished he could sink lower into the carpet, could cut a hole in the floor and hide from the purity and infinite power of God.
In our non-rapture reality, this scenario would also count as evidence of some divine presence. Practitioners would have already given up “the logical, the personal, the tightfisted, closely held stuff” and accepted that “[w]hatever God wanted was what he wanted, even if it made no sense from a human standpoint.” Critical thinking has been disengaged and emotion rises. Everyone experiences the same emotion, and so that’s the “inner witness of the Holy Spirit.” Believers attribute it to their god because their pastors, church leaders, and friends have taught them to do so, and since critical thinking has already been bypassed and because they are looking for evidence of their god’s presence, this serves that role perfectly.
The evangelical view of answered prayer might be a tricky were it not for the fact that believers have a curious view of prayer: any coincidental event occurring within any temporal proximity to the prayer can count as an answer to the prayer. Events happening weeks, months, or even years after the prayer can count, and the petitioner might even have forgotten about the prayer until it is, in her view, answered. So anything counts as an answer to the prayer. But what happens when nothing happens that the believers can classify as an answer? It’s simple: their god did answer the prayer; it just said “No.” Thus answered prayer is a heads-I-win tails-you-lose situation: nothing counts against it, for to count something against it would be to doubt the god of Christianity.
We see this tension in the prayer scene: Rayford, one of the characters who has asked the others to pray about a decision he must make, “wished God would just tell him audibly what to do.” He wants direct, audible help from his god. Of course, he knows that’s not what he’s going to get, but surely his god will answer his prayer somehow.
When the believers are done with their tear-filled prayer session, Buck, another character with an unresolved decision hanging over him, admits that as “wonderful as that prayer time was, I didn’t get any direct leading about what to do.” Rayford admits, “Me either.” A third character, Chloe (Rayford’s daughter and Buck’s love interest), comments:
“You must be the only two.” Bruce glanced at Chloe, and she nodded. “It’s pretty clear to us what you should do. And it’s clear to each of you what the other should do. But no one can make these decisions for you.”
Chloe has been arguing from the beginning how Buck and Rayford should resolve their dilemmas, and her prayer has somehow confirmed this. Her insistence that she was right all along, in turn, serves as an answer to Buck’s and Rayford’s prayer. As they’re leaving, Chloe comments that what they just experienced “was amazing.” We can see, then, that the whole prayer scene consists of little more than self-referential confirmation bias in an emotionally charged environment, yet all the characters attribute this to their god.
Again, in the book, there is substantial evidence for the existence of the evangelical god, which makes mitigates my argument a bit in the context of the novel. However, this scene echoes evangelical prayer sessions happening now.
One final observation about the source of this “inner witness of the Holy Spirit”: when Buck and Chloe are leaving, Buck comments, “I don’t know where I’d be without you people.” People and the emotional support they provide are at the heart of any religious group, an that alone makes evidence for this or that god only secondary. Through their emotional connections and highly emotional services, they themselves are the evidence for their god.
One of the most interesting elements of the first Left Behind book is its necessity to create some kind of imagined explanation that the non-Christians would come up with to explain the disappearance of so many people. This is what the authors come up with:
The world has been stockpiling nuclear weapons for innumerable years. Since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 and the Soviet Union first detonated its own devices September 23, 1949, the world has been at risk of nuclear holocaust. Dr. Rosenzweig and his team of renowned scholars is close to the discovery of an atmospheric phenomenon that may have caused the vanishing of so many people instantaneously.”
“Dr. Rosenzweig believes that some confluence of electromagnetism in the atmosphere, combined with as yet unknown or unexplained atomic ionization from the nuclear power and weaponry throughout the world, could have been ignited or triggered-perhaps by a natural cause like lightning, or even by an intelligent lifeform that discovered this possibility before we did—and caused this instant action throughout the world.”
“Sort of like someone striking a match in a room full of gasoline vapors?” a journalist suggested.
This Dr. Rosenzweig character is, in fact, a botanist, and his theory becomes the prevailing explanation among non-believers. In the Left Behind authors’ world, there are no skeptics saying, “Now, wait a minute. We stopped testing nuclear weapons decades ago. Even if your idea of ‘some confluence of electromagnetism in the atmosphere, combined with as yet unknown or unexplained atomic ionization from the nuclear power and weaponry throughout the world’ itself weren’t completely bonkers, there simply wouldn’t be any remnants decades later. The whole idea is ludicrous.”
This lack of skeptical characters is hardly surprising. The Evangelical authors don’t even understand current skepticism toward their faith. Any time any idea comes close to their religious beliefs, skepticism disappears.
Early in the first Left Behind book, Rayford Steele, whose wife was raptured away, finds himself asking how he missed the rapture coming: “Yet even Captain Steele—an organized, analytical airline pilot—had missed it, and Steele claimed to have had a proponent, a devotee, almost a fanatic living under his own roof.” He should have seen it — he’s not an idiot! But he didn’t.
But miss what? The problem with Evangelical Christian prophecy is that it’s a mish-mash of weird interpretations, bad interpretations, and wrong interpretations of various parts of the Bible, all smushed together. It comes from Old Testament books like Isaiah and Daniel and New Testament books like Revelation. Nowhere in the Bible does it say anything like this:
These are the things that will happen, in order, just before the Rapture:
- This will happen.
- Then this will happen.
- Next comes this.
Evangelicals love the Biblical passage about learning “here a little and there a little.” Take this, plus this, plus this, and you get the end times prophecy.
At one point, the characters sit in rapt awe as Bruce Barnes, their pastor (why wasn’t he raptured? another story altogether) explains everything:
But for now, let me just briefly outline the Seven-Sealed Scroll from Revelation five, and then I’ll let you go. On the one hand, I don’t want to give you a spirit of fear, but we all know we’re still here because we neglected salvation before the Rapture. I know we’re all grateful for the second chance, but we cannot expect to escape the trials that are coming.”
Bruce explained that the first four seals in the scroll were described as men on four horses: a white horse, a red horse, a black horse, and a pale horse. “The white horseman apparently is the Antichrist, who ushers in one to three months of diplomacy while getting organized and promising peace.
“The red horse signifies war. The Antichrist will be opposed by three rulers from the south, and millions will be killed.”
“In World War III?”
“That’s my assumption.”
“That would mean within the next six months.”
“I’m afraid so. And immediately following that, which, will take only three to six months because of the nuclear weaponry available, the Bible predicts inflation and famine, —the black horse. As the rich get richer, the poor starve to death. More millions will die that way.”
“So if we survive the war, we need to stockpile food?”
Bruce nodded. “I would.”
“We should work together.”
“Good idea, because it gets worse. That killer famine could be as short as two or three months before the arrival of the fourth Seal judgment, the fourth horseman on the pale horse—the symbol of death. Besides the post war famine, a plague will sweep the entire world. Before the fifth Seal judgment, a quarter of the world’s current population will be dead.”
“What’s the fifth Seal judgment?”
“Well,” Bruce said, “you’re going to recognize this one because we’ve talked about it before. Remember my telling you about the 144,000 Jewish witnesses who try to evangelize the world for Christ? Many of their converts, perhaps millions, will be martyred by the world leader and the harlot, which is the name for the one world religion that denies Christ.”
Rayford was furiously taking notes. He wondered what he would have thought about such crazy talk just three weeks earlier. How could he have missed this? God had tried to warn his people by putting his Word in written form centuries before. For all Rayford’s education and intelligence, he felt he had been a fool. Now he couldn’t get enough of this information, though it was becoming clear that the odds were against a person living until the Glorious Appearing of Christ.
“The sixth Seal Judgment,” Bruce continued, “is God pouring out his wrath against the killing of his saints. This will come in the form of a worldwide earthquake so devastating that no instruments would be able to measure it. It will be so bad that people will cry out for rocks to fall on them and put them out of their misery.”
Several in the room began to weep. “The seventh seal introduces the seven Trumpet judgments, which will take place in the second quarter of this seven-year period.”
“The second twenty-one months,” Rayford clarified.
Where did all this come from? Here’s the original passage in Revelation:
I watched as the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals. Then I heard one of the four living creatures say in a voice like thunder, “Come!” 2 I looked, and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest.
3 When the Lamb opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make people kill each other. To him was given a large sword.
5 When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. 6 Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “Two pounds[a] of wheat for a day’s wages,[b] and six pounds[c] of barley for a day’s wages,[d] and do not damage the oil and the wine!”
7 When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” 8 I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.
9 When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. 10 They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” 11 Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers and sisters,[e] were killed just as they had been.
12 I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, 13 and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. 14 The heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.
15 Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free, hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. 16 They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us[f] from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! 17 For the great day of their[g] wrath has come, and who can withstand it?”
Some of this is fairly straightforward: the interpretation follows directly from the passage. But look at verse thirteen again: “and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind.” Stars, of course, don’t fall. An omnipotent being who created them would know that, but people 2,000 years ago wouldn’t. So we have to find a way to explain that, to interpret that. Why didn’t this omnipotent god just come out and say it? Why the need for all this interpretation? Those are questions about logic, which don’t belong in esoteric interpretation of ancient writings.
The characters even seem to realize that much of this just doesn’t make any sense. Barnes also admits, “I’m no theologian, people. I’m no scholar. I have had as much trouble reading the Bible as any of you throughout my lifetime, and especially over the nearly two years since the Rapture.” Why do even Christians have trouble understanding the Bible? These are the folks who say they have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to guide them, but they can’t make heads or tails of it sometimes.
The passage continues as they struggle with Revelation 6, quoted above:
The time is short now for everyone. Revelation 6:7-8 says the rider of the pale horse is Death and that Hades follows after him. Power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and by the beasts of the earth. I confess I don’t know what the Scripture is referring to when it says the beasts of the earth, but perhaps these are animals that devour people when they are left without protection due to the war. Perhaps a great beast of the earth is some symbolic metaphor for the weapons employed by the Antichrist and his enemies.
The thing is, while this is all taken from a book of fiction, this is the same kind of mental contortions Evangelicals put themselves through on a daily basis. They can’t understand what the Bible means sometimes, but instead of that being something that gets them questioning the whole enterprise, they double down.
I’ve always been fascinated with extremes, and for me, there is nothing more extreme in the contemporary American religious landscape than fundamentalist Evangelical Christians. They hold to some beliefs that they themselves would admit are fairly wild were another religion to espouse something similar. Few of their beliefs are more odd than their predictions about how the world will end.
Christians have been eschatological in their theology from the beginning: Jesus in the gospels is always talking about the end of the word, and a substantial percent of Christians see large swaths of the Bible (both Old and New Testament) as prophecies about the “end times.” All this prophetic postulating has led Evangelicals to a belief in the rapture: Jesus will take all true Christians to heaven just before the end time hell-on-Earth led by the Antichrist.
Christians will vanish off the face of the earth in an instant, the idea holds. Cars will suddenly become driverless; airplanes will fall from the sky as their flight crew disappears; and all the children below the ill-defined “age of reason” will disappear.
(The Evangelical god is a merciful god: he won’t send children to hell if they don’t have the mental capacity yet to make an informed choice about whether or not to “give their life to Jesus.” In other words, despite children being born with the curse of Original Sin, they still get a pass — sort of a free forgiveness-with-Jesus card. Why everyone else can’t get that is a mysterious contradiction in the whole theory, but of course, the Evangelical god is a mystery. As is the Catholic god and the mainline Protestant god — all mystery when something strange or contradictory shows up.)
In the nineties, Tim LaHaye, a Baptist minister, and Jerry Jenkins, a dispensationalist Christian, wrote a series called Left Behind that explored the reality on Earth after the rapture had taken place, leaving behind millions and providing the series with its title. Left Behind, the first book in the series, tells the story of the rapture itself. It follows four main characters.
Rayford Steele is a successful airline pilot married to Irene, a gungho evangelical Christiaion whom God takes up in the rapture and thus leaves Raford behind.
Chloe Steele is one of Rayford’s children. A student at Stanford, she is logical and skeptical, thus rejecting God’s call and failing to become a true Christian. As a result, she too is left behind.
Most interesting of all is Bruce Barnes, the associate pastor at New Hope Village Church (the church Rayford’s wife Irene attends). Though he is a minister in a church filled with people who are raptured, Bruce is left behind.
Finally, there’s Cameron Williams, given the ever-annoying nickname Buck because, according to other characters, he’s always bucking the system. He’s an award-winning journalist for Global Weekly, and he is on Rayford Steele’s plane when the rapture occurs. He sets out to discover the cause of all the disappearances, and in the meantime, he converts to Evangelical Christianity.
One of the most interesting questions in the book is the reasoning behind who was taken and who was left behind. There are some obvious groups that would have been left behind: non-Christians are all still around, and this group definitely includes liberals and the college elite. Chloe, a student at Stanford University, calls home after the disappearances:
“Mom? Dad? Are you there? Have you seen what’s going on? Call me as soon as you can. We’ve lost at least ten students and two profs, and all the married students’ kids disappeared. Is Raymie all right? Call me!”
There were about 13,000 undergraduate and graduate students in 1990.If the rapture took ten students, that represents only 0.0769% of the students This fairly clearly shows the Evangelical view of “secular” education. Once even True Christians enter a liberal university like Stanford, they will fall away from the faith. (Of course, most Evangelicals would argue that those who fall away from the faith were never True Christians to begin with. This No True Scotsman fallacy is one of Evangelicalism’s favorite arguments.)
While many people should have expected to be left behind, many people who thought they were Christians remained on Earth, much to their confusion. In this way, the book makes it clear that not all who call themselves Christians will make it in the end. There exists such a thing as “Christians so-called.” Rayford starts to see this quickly. When he lands and is waiting for a phone to call home, he gets to watch a little news:
Rayford was second in line for the phone, but what he saw next on the screen convinced him he would never see his wife again. At a Christian high school soccer game at a missionary headquarters in Indonesia, most of the spectators and all but one of the players disappeared in the middle of play, leaving their shoes and uniforms on the ground. The CNN reporter announced that, in his remorse, the surviving player took his own life.
But it was more than remorse, Rayford knew. Of all people, that player, a student at a Christian school, would have known the truth immediately. The Rapture had taken place. Jesus Christ had returned for his people, and that boy was not one of them.
This poor soccer player thought he was one of God’s elect, that he’d given his life to Jesus and completed all the requirements to be saved from the hell of end times only to discover at literally the last moment that he’d deceived himself.
Even the hardened skeptical reporter Buck Williams, who “never claimed any devotion to the faith,” remembers during a conversation with his father that his family “had [Buck] in church and Sunday school from the time [he was] a baby.” In exasperation, Buck’s father declares, “You’re as much a Christian as any one of us.”
Even Rayford Steele was something of a nominal Christian:
For years he had tolerated church. They had gone to one that demanded little and offered a lot. They made many friends and had found their doctor, dentist, insurance man, and even country club members in that church. Rayford was revered, proudly introduced as a 747 captain to newcomers and guests, and even served on the church board for several years.
However, it wasn’t true Christianity. Irene learns this when she discovered the Christian radio station and what she called ‘real preaching and teaching.’” Rayford found the sermons at the new church “a little too literal and personal and challenging” and so he stayed away. Therefore, when the events of the novel actually begin, he’s at best a nominal Christian though more likly a lapsed Christian or even an apostate nonbeliever altogether.
Bruce, the associate pastor, is a much trickier case. In telling his story to Rayford, he explains that the “Bible says that if you believe in Christ you have eternal life, so [he] assumed [he] was covered.” Evangelicals like to say that’s all one has to do: believe in Jesus, believe in the efficacy of his sacrifice to cleanse you of your sins. If you do that, you’ll be saved from the consequences of your sin (i.e., hell).
Bruce, however, finds that there’s more to it.
I especially liked the parts about God being forgiving. I was a sinner, and I never changed. I just kept getting forgiveness because I thought God was bound to do that. He had to. Verses that said if we confessed our sins he was faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us. I knew other verses said you had to believe and receive, to trust and to abide, but to me that was sort of theological mumbo jumbo. I wanted the bottom line, the easiest route, the simplest path. I knew other verses said that we are not to continue in sin just because God shows grace.
According to Left Behind, then, believing in Jesus is not enough. One has “to trust and to abide.” But what does that mean? And how do you know if you’ve done that? For Bruce, it’s “sort of theological mumbo jumbo,” which correctly suggests that there’s nowhere in the Bible that lays out what this trusting and abiding might look like. Indeed, there’s nowhere in the Bible that says, “In order to be saved from hell and spend an eternity with God, do this, this, and this.” Indeed, this is why we have so many Christian denominations: it’s just not clear what it takes to get right with the god of this religion.
Bruce goes on to explain,
I told my wife that we tithed to the church, you know, that we gave ten percent of our income. I hardly ever gave any, except when the plate was passed I might drop in a few bills to make it look good. Every week I would confess that to God, promising to do better next time.
So to be a True Christian, guaranteed of salvation, you have to give ten percent of your income to the church? Christians like to say that salvation is a free gift: “You don’t have to do anything.” This sure sounds like doing something, though.
Bruce explains further: “I encouraged people to share their faith, to tell other people how to become Christians. But on my own I never did that.”
Now our list of required acts has expanded to four items:
Yet that’s not all, because Bruce’s story continues, “I hardly ever read my Bible except when preparing a talk or lesson. I didn’t have the ‘mind of Christ.’ Christian, I knew vaguely, means ‘Christ one’ or ‘one like Christ.”
Now our list is:
Later in the series (in the fourth book, Soul Harvest), when Rayford is explaining everything to a colleague named Mac, he discovers the inadequacy of the traditional explanation of what it takes to be saved.
“So, what’s the plan?”
“It’s simple and straightforward, Mac.” Rayford outlined from memory the basics
about man’s sin separating him from God and God’s desire to welcome him back.“Everybody’s a sinner,” Rayford said. “I wasn’t open to that before. But with everything my wife said coming true, I saw myself for what I was. There were worse people. A lot of people would say I was better than most, but next to God I felt worthless.”
“That’s one thing I don’t have any problem with, Ray. You won’t find me claiming to be anything but a scoundrel.”
“And yet, see? Most people think you’re a nice guy.” “I’m OK, I guess. But I know the real me.” “Pastor Billings pointed out that the Bible says, ‘There is none righteous, no, not one’ and that ‘all we like sheep have gone astray,’ and that ‘all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags.’ It didn’t make me feel better to know I wasn’t unique. I was just grateful there was some plan to reconnect me with God. When he explained how a holy God had to punish sin but didn’t want any of the people he created to die, I finally started to see it. Jesus, the Son of God, the only man who ever lived without sin, died for everybody’s sin. All we had to do was believe that, repent of our sins, receive the gift of salvation. We would be forgiven and what Billings referred to as ‘reconciled’ to God.”
“So if I believe that, I’m in?” Mac said.
“You also have to believe that God raised Jesus from the dead. That provided the victory over sin and death, and it also proved Jesus was divine.”
“I believe all that, Ray, so is that it? Am I in?”
Rayford’s blood ran cold. What was troubling him? Whatever made him sure Amanda was alive was also making him wonder whether Mac was sincere. This was too easy. Mac had seen the turmoil of almost two years of the Tribulation already. But was that enough to persuade him?
But this contradicts what Bruce later teaches as the requirements for being a True Christian. After he tells his story about how it happened that an associate pastor in an Evangelical church missed out on the rapture, he explains to Rayford what one must do to be saved:
First, we have to see ourselves as God sees us. The Bible says all have sinned, that there is none righteous, no not one. It also says we can’t save ourselves. Lots of people thought they could earn their way to God or to heaven by doing good things, but that’s probably the biggest misconception ever. Ask anyone on the street what they think the Bible or the church says about getting to heaven, and nine of ten would say it has something to do with doing good and living right.
This is the standard explanation in Evangelical circles about how to obtain salvation. But what about that list we culled from earlier portions of Bruce’s story? What role does “living right” play in all this? Bruce explains: “We’re to do that, of course, but not so we can earn our salvation. We’re to do that in response to our salvation.” In other words, once we’re saved, we should start acting like it. We should be reading our Bible, having the mind of Christ, trusting and abiding, and — lest we deprive our pastor of funds to complete his work — giving ten percent to the church.
This still leaves the question of what all these things mean. What exactly is trusting and abiding, and how can we be sure we’re doing it? What precisely does it look like to have the mind of Christ? This formulation leaves Evangelical in constant doubt of their own salvation, and so it serves as an ever-present stressor, constantly pushing the Christian to examine her life and constantly undermining that faith at the same time.This push and pull of grace versus works, salvation verses damnation is perhaps the most unhealthy aspect of Christianity.
Once Bruce is done with his story and explains how to be saved, he leaves it in Rayford’s hands. However, he does “leave [him] with one little reminder of urgency.”
You may have heard this off and on your whole lives, the way I did. Maybe you haven’t. But I need to tell you that you don’t have any guarantees. It’s too late for you to disappear like your loved ones did a few days ago. But people die every day in car accidents, plane crashes—oh, sorry, I’m sure you’re a good pilot—all kinds of tragedies. I’m not going to push you into something you’re not ready for, but just let me encourage you that if God impresses upon you that this is true, don’t put it off. What would be worse than finally finding God and then dying without him because you waited too long?”
This fear aspect of Christianity (and I guess Islam as well) is the one of the most dangerous and harmful ideas in the religion. It haunts believers even after they’ve left the faith: if I was wrong, abandoned the church, and then die, what? The answer to that question lingers: hell.
But it’s not just fear for oneself. When Rayford converts (“accepts Jesus as his Lord and Savior”), he instantly becomes worried about Chloe:
He felt hopeless about Chloe. Every thing he had tried had failed. He knew it had been only days since the disappearance of her mother and brother, and even less time since his own conversion. What more could he say or do? Bruce had encouraged him just to pray, but he was not made that way. He would of course, but he had always been a man of action. Now, every action seemed to push her farther away. He felt that if he said or did anything more, he would be responsible for her deciding against Christ once and for all.
What an utterly hopeless situation! This god Rayford has come to believe in might send Chloe to hell because Rayford can’t get through to her, and worse, the god is so impotent that Rayford might actually push Chloe away from his god and to his god’s hell.Overall, Left Behind presents the horrors and illogic of Evangelical Christianity in a manner that demonstrates Evangelical Christians’ complete lack of self-awareness. These issues would be plain to them if they were fervent believers of another faith looking at Christianity, but being so deeply enmeshed in the belief system, they’re completely oblivious to these issues.
I saw a meme the other day that got me thinking about the nature of faith. A high school friend, who is a pastor and lovely human being in every sense, posted the following thought:
The problem with this is simple: this god never says anything. All we have are people saying that this god has said something. The meme should read:
Man says, “Show me, and I’ll trust you.” Some people say God says, “Trust me, and I’ll show you.”
That puts things in an entirely different situation. The dichotomy is not between a supposedly-fallible self and an supposedly-infallible deity. The division is between trusting your own senses and experiences versus trusting claims someone else makes about a deity. The first quote is asking for evidence; the second is asking for blind faith.
I’ll go with evidence every single time.
Growing up, there were a lot of Bibles in our house. All were corrupt translations in one way or another, my father (on the teaching and authority of our little sect) assured me, and it was necessary to read a given passage in a number of different passages to understand it fully.
One of the Bibles we had was the Scofield Reference Bible. Our sect’s leader, Herbert Armstrong, extolled it for its important commentary. It was, in essence, the King James Version with James Scofield’s commentary and explanation.
The Scofield was a Bible out of step with what corrupt Protestants and whore-of-Babylon Catholics used. We were the only real Christians on the entire planet, see, and everyone else was corrupt in one way or another. The Protestants liked the King James Version, that’s true, and that was a redeeming point in our eyes, but too many used the Revised Standard Version, or even worse, the liberal New International Version. Like other Christians, we referred to these versions by their initials: the KJV was superior, and the RSV was acceptable, but the NIV was an abomination. Above them all, though, was the Scofield Reference Edition, which I doubted any of my Protestant friends at school had ever heard of.
It turns out, several probably had. It was the favored edition of John Nelson Darby, a nineteenth-century Evangelical who came up with the idea of the rapture, the idea that Jesus would whisk his believers away just before all hell breaks loose on Earth at the end of time. These eschatological ideas come from various places in the Bible. Passages from the Old Testament prophets are mixed with passages from the New Testament epistles of Paul and then folded into the Book of Revelation to produce a horrifying image of the end of the world with something like three-fourths of humans dying in the misery. Scofield’s ideas shaped Darby’s ideas, and the idea of the rapture is a key component of Evangelical Protestants to this day. Most of the pastors serving as “spiritual advisors” to Trump during his first term held to this idea, which is somewhat terrifying: people advising the president were expecting the literal destruction of most of humanity, thinking that they might be playing a part in the prophetic nonsense that leads up to all of that.
Our sect had its own end-of-the-world scenario, but I was always taught that our vision of the future was original and, most significantly, correct. So I grew up not knowing about the idea of the rapture and how Evangelicals interpreted the Bible to create a picture of the end of the word. I certainly didn’t realize how damn similar it was to ours. They even used terms that I thought were exclusive to our correct understanding of the Bible, terms like “The Great White Throne Judgement.”
That’s one thing I’ve learned as I study more about other sects and denominations of Christianity. Far from being unique, our beliefs were an amalgamation of just about every sect out there. Bits and pieces from the Mormons? Check. A little something from the Jehovah’s Witnesses? It’s right there. A touch of good old fashioned Evangelicalism? Got it. Our combination of these things was unique, to be sure, but there was nothing new in anything we believed. Contrary to the assurances of our ministers and leaders, we were not special or unique.
I got to thinking about all of this tonight because of a book by Bart Ehrman I’m reading. Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End takes a scholarly look at the Book of Revelation and traces the history of some of the ideas modern Christians root in that book — like the rapture. Suddenly I was reading about the Scofield Reference Bible, something I hadn’t thought about in decades.
Papa’s was in a leather cover with a zipper, and he had covered countless pages with endless annotations. When Papa moved in with us, we got rid of most of his Bibles (his choice — “How many do I really need?”), but I found myself wondering if we still had his Scofield. I walked into his old room, looked at the top row of his bookshelf where I knew the Bibles lived.
And there was a Scofield.
“I don’t think that’s his, though,” I thought, remembering the leather cover. I opened it and saw it was covered in annotations. “But that’s not Papa’s writing,” I realized. Sure enough, on the inside cover: Ruby Williams, Nana’s mother. She wasn’t a member of our sect. In fact, I think she rather disliked it. But she was an Evangelical and so shared a preference for the Scofied.
The annotations themselves are fascinating. On one page, there are all the signs of the interpretative practices we borrowed from Evangelicalism.
“The Bible is a jigsaw puzzle!” Herbert Armstrong, our sect’s founder and leader, taught countless times. One had to piece together bits from here and bits from there to see the true picture. In serious (i.e., scholarly) study of the Bible, there’s a term for this: proof-texting. The idea is simple: if you take bits randomly from the Bible (i.e., get your proof from throughout the text), you can prove anything.
On the above page of text from the Old Testament prophetic Book of Zechariah, we see my grandmother connected it to the Book of Revelation (chapters 17 and 18) as well as Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (chapter 1 verse 4). The vast majority of the text is underlined to indicate its importance.
And along the foot of the page, the reason for everyone’s love (or hatred) of this particular edition: James Scofield’s commentary. He patiently explains that “Symbolically, a ‘measure’ (or ‘cup’)” is something that’s full and “God must judge it.” These are not usual study notes for a Bible. It’s not explaining some ambiguities of the original Hebrew. It’s not discussing the translation difficulties of a given term. It’s telling readers what this particular passage symbolizes. It is interpreting the Bible, putting ideas in readers’ heads that really don’t come from the Biblical text but rather from Scofield’s vision of the whole sweep of Biblical history.
Along the top, we also see it connected to contemporary social commentary: “Big business worships ‘almighty dollar.'” On that single annotated page is the story of the Evangelical approach to the Bible, and while it would have pained me to admit it as a child (who doesn’t want to be special? called out? unique?), it is the story of our interpretative technique as well.
Few things about religion are as interesting to me as fundamentalist Christians’ ideas about how “the world” (i.e., anyone who is not a fundamentalist Christian, but most specifically anyone they deem “secular”) views them. I recently watched bits of Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist, the latest in the whole Left Behind movie series. It’s about what will supposedly happen when all the true believers are whisked away to heaven and the heathen are — here comes the title — left behind.
The main protagonist, whose wife and young son were raptured away, decides to visit the church she attended. The voice-over narration explains that as soon as the Christians disappeared, churches were the target of violent protest. This included the graffiti below: “All souls matter!”
The thinking behind this seems to be that those left behind would be angry at the remaining Christians (though not true Christians because, you know, they got left behind) as they proclaimed that those who disappeared were Christians, that the fact they disappeared is proof a god favored them. The reaction: those left behind who didn’t think they were Christian (i.e., the true heretics) would be angry at this perceived sense of Christian superiority and would adopt a slogan like “All souls matter!”
I’m not even sure what they’re suggesting with this little detail. Do they think the dumb liberals left behind (because you can’t be a liberal and a true Christian) would be highly offended at the sense of Christian superiority that they would adopt an altered slogan from the right and throw it back at the remaining Christians? Do they think the dumb liberals would be so self-contradictory that they would argue about the equality of all souls even though they don’t believe in a god (because you know all liberals are atheists)?
I just don’t get this little detail. I don’t think they do either.
This image was making some rounds on social media. On Twitter, I’m sure it went unchecked, but other platforms (read: platforms not yet run by megalomaniacal Nazi idiots) took the image down. It’s fairly clear why: it’s obvious AI.
Why do right-wingers fall so easily for conspiracy theories?
They even have conspiracy theories about their conspiracy theories:
Why would there be any way to see hate in a text written by a completely benevolent deity?
Why would there be any way to see prejudice in a text written by a completely benevolent deity?
Why would there be any way to see malice in a text written by a completely benevolent deity?
During our three trips to Florida this summer, I noticed a lot of interesting billboards. I also saw a sign on the the trailer of several semi trucks.
I’m not sure what that image is supposed to evoke. There are hints of Uncle Sam draft posters in the overall design, but the wording would have been something like “I want you to pray.” Additionally, given the right’s strong feelings about the necessity for clear gender boundaries, this person seems unexpectedly androgynous. Finally, there’s the feeling of aggression inherent in the shadows and pointing finger. It’s like it’s daring you not to pray.
The bruhaha about the opening ceremony in Paris offers an instructive insight into the minds of fundamentalist Christians. It was everywhere. On friends’ feeds:
It was on public figures’ streams:
It was on Polish streams:
Even the parish K attends got into the action:
And those public figures not posting about it were commenting to the media.
Robert Barron, a Catholic bishop with a large online platform, said,
France felt evidently as it’s trying to put its best cultural foot forward, that the right thing to do is to mock this very central moment in Christianity where Jesus at his last supper gives his body and blood in anticipation of the cross.
It’s presented through this gross or flippant mockery. France which used to be called the oldest daughter of the church. […]
France has sent Catholic visionaries all over the world. France whose culture and I mean the honouring of the individual, in human rights and of freedom is grounded very much in Christianity. […]
What’s interesting here is this deeply secularist, post-modern society knows who its enemy is, they’re naming them, and we should believe them, because this is who they are.
But furthermore we Christians, Catholics, should not be sheepish. We should resist, we should make our voices heard.’
Daily Mail
Trust me, Mr. Barron, your voices are heard. Some of us are just a little bemused at the ignorance behind it all.
What makes more sense? That the organizers would choose to satirize a Renaissance painting or portray something distinctly Greek, specifically the Feast of Dyonisus?
Whatever their intent, the
[o]rganizers of the Paris Olympics have apologized for any offense caused by a skit in the games’ opening ceremony Friday that featured drag stars in what many viewers saw as a parody of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous “The Last Supper” masterpiece, a similarity that drew the ire of Catholic leaders and conservatives like Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr.
Forbes
They also pointed out that
[r]ecreations of “Last Supper” are not uncommon and have not often been met with the same kind of backlash as what followed the Olympic opening ceremony. Popular TV shows like “Lost,” “House,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “The Sopranos” and “The Simpsons,” among others, have posed their actors in similar photos, and art with celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Freddie Mercury and Bill Murray portraying Jesus are readily available online.
Forbes
Heck, the MAGA people who are so upset were decidedly less upset about a different recreation of the painting:
At its heart, though, I can’t help but see this as an example of Christian fundamentalist ignorance and hypocrisy. They are all “America first!” in everything else, but here they’re willing to refuse to support American athletes who had nothing to do with the planning of the opening ceremony because in their ignorance they’ve confused the Feast of Dyonisus and a Renaissance painting which isn’t even part of any religious canon at all. Davinci’s painting was itself a derivative and unrealistic interpretation.
We’ve been traveling back-and-forth to Florida quite a bit lately, which means we drive through almost the entirety of South Carolina each trip. Along the way, I’ve noticed yellow and red billboards along the highway with one of two messages. when simply says, “Jesus, save me.” That’s a fairly straightforward. Evangelical sentiment were used to seeing signs like that in the audiences of football games though many of them are simply the John 3.16 signs, which reference the Bible verse proclaiming that God sent his son to save us. there are certain logical issues I have with such a sentimental sense. God and the sun are supposed to be the same being thanks to the doctrine of the Trinity, and the person doing the condemning from which we need to be saved is God. This means that God sent himself to save us from a consequence that he himself was going to implement. In short, God sent himself to save us from himself, which makes absolutely no logical sense. But that’s not the most interesting sign. The most interesting sign is this one.
Critics of prayer often say that many prayers amount to nothing sentimentality: “Bless this food” does nothing to the food. It’s just a nice sentiment.
With Catholic prayers, some of them have a feeling of being nothing more than magic words. This is especially true of the prayers that the priest will say during communion, prayers which allegedly transform a bit of unsavory bread and overly sweet wine into the body and blood of Jesus, I used to think that price of prayers didn’t really have this magical word sense, but this sign makes me wonder.
Yet here with this particular formulation, we see real magic words. If this sign is to be relieved, all one has to do is say these words and salvation is a done deal.there’s nothing on the sign to indicate you actually have to mean it. There’s nothing on the sign that indicates that you have to hold this belief for any particular period of time. There’s nothing on this side that suggest you have to do anything or change anything. All you have to do is say the magic words.
No, I understand that the individuals who sponsored this sign don’t really think that it’s just a matter of saying these words. And the same font with the same color scheme there are science that simply say repent usually a few miles after the sign. Of course, repent in this case usually means For them to take a conservative point of view regarding LGBTQ issues, physical issues, death penalty abortion, and all the other right wing issues. Repent for them basically means become a republican, and a far right Republican and usually at that.
However, you can’t get all of that on a sign. What’s most important is to get them to say the words and maybe just maybe they’ll actually mean it. Or if they don’t mean it now perhaps mean it later.
There was an article in the Charleston Post and Courier about this which the AP picked up and carried. Apparently at least one of the individuals sponsoring the billboards spends 50% of his salary on them. He suggested it’s money well spent if it keeps even more in person out of hell. I find it strangely ironic though that Jesus in the Bible seems to suggest a different way ofspending one’s money: to sell all and give what give all the proceeds to the poor as he told the rich young man in one of the gospels.
This content is private.
According to the author, Bishop Robert Barron, this book is intended to help bring Catholics back to the fold in regards to the Catholic teaching that despite all appearances to the contrary, the cracker and wine of Mass become the body and blood of Jesus.
How does he do this? Does he deal with the simple fact that one reason a lot of people don’t believe this literal-bronze-age nonsense is because we’ve learned a bit about the nature of reality in the past two thousand years, and we understand that the classic explanation of substance and accident (a la Aristotle) is really just an ancient attempt at explaining the world which has now evolved into current scientific understanding? No. Does he deal with the Church’s own admission that nothing physically changes? Even more no. So how does he deal with it? The only way he can — the best way Catholics deal with anything in their faith that inherently makes no sense. He piles on the metaphors.
But why then the prohibition [in the Garden of Eden]? Why is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil forbidden to them? The fundamental determination of good and evil remains, necessarily, the prerogative of God alone, since God is, himself, the ultimate good. To seize this knowledge, therefore, is to claim divinity for oneself-and this is the one thing that a creature can never do and thus should never try. To do so is to place oneself in a metaphysical contradiction, interrupting thereby the loop of grace and ruining the sacrum convivium (sacred banquet). Indeed, if we turn ourselves into God, then the link that ought to connect us, through God, to the rest of creation is lost, and we find ourselves alone. This is, in the biblical reading, precisely what happens. Beguiled by the serpent’s suggestion that God is secretly jealous of his human creatures, Eve and Adam ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They seized at godliness that they might not be dominated by God, and they found themselves, as a consequence, expelled from the place of joy. Moreover, as the conversation between God and his sinful creatures makes plain, this “original.”
What is this saying? Does this amount to anything other than just a rehashing of the story with some new metaphors thrown it? I don’t see anything more than that.
This complex symbolic narrative is meant to explain the nature of sin as it plays itself out across the ages and even now. God wants us to eat and drink in communion with him and our fellow creatures, but our own fear and pride break up the party. God wants us gathered around him in gratitude and love, but our resistance results in scattering, isolation, violence, and recrimination. God wants the sacred meal; we want to eat alone and on our terms.
Again, this is just metaphor. It doesn’t mean anything because it refers only to some story in a book that is itself of dubious historical accuracy (read: nonsense). Even Barron would suggest that the story of the Garden of Eden is really more metaphor than anything else, so this is all metaphor about another metaphor.
[T]he salvation wrought through Israel and Jesus and made present in the Mass has to do with the healing of the world. We see this dimension especially in the gifts of bread and wine presented at the offertory. To speak of bread is to speak, implicitly, of soil, seed, grain, and sunshine that crossed ninety million miles of space; to speak of wine is to speak, indirectly, of vine, earth, nutrients, storm clouds, and rainwater. To mention earth and sun is to allude to the solar system of which they are a part, and to invoke the solar system is to assume the galaxy of which it is a portion, and to refer to the galaxy is to hint at the unfathomable realities that condition the structure of the measurable universe. Therefore, when these gifts are brought forward, it is as though the whole of creation is placed on the altar before the Lord. In the older Tridentine liturgy, the priest would make this presentation facing the east, the direction of the rising sun, signaling that the Church’s prayer was on behalf not simply of the people gathered in that place but of the cosmos itself.
We can’t be surprised at the degree to which Barron relies on metaphor to describe the rituals of the Catholic Mass since he can’t even describe his god in straight terms:
God is, in his ownmost reality, not a monolith but a communion of persons. From all eternity, the Father speaks himself, and this Word that he utters is the Son. A perfect image of his Father, the Son shares fully the actuality of the Father: unity, omniscience, omnipresence, spiritual power. This means that, as the Father gazes at the Son, the Son gazes back at the Father. Since each is utterly beautiful, the Father falls in love with the Son and the Son with the Father-and they sigh forth their mutual love. This holy breath (Spiritus Sanctus) is the Holy Spirit. These three “persons” are distinct, yet they do not constitute three Gods.
The father “speaks himself”? What could that possibly mean? He insists that “as the Father gazes at the Son, the Son gazes back at the Father.” How can spiritual beings gaze at each other? It makes no sense. And then they “sigh forth their mutual love.” What, do the Father and the Son breath? What are they sighing? They don’t even have bodies — how can this make any sense? That “holy breath” is the third part of this weird god? And yet it’s one god? In an attempt to use metaphor to explain the inherently self-contradictory notion that three is one and one is three, Barron just ends up uttering inane deepities.
An article by Karl Vaters entitled “13 Reasons Not to Worry About the Future of the Church” offers insight into how Christians are dealing with the nosedive in attendance and affiliation they are experiencing in America. Vaters acknowledges this immediately:
The church is in trouble.
It must be. My blog feed keeps telling me it is.
For several years now, barely a day goes by without someone writing about the imminent demise of the body of Christ.
Everyone seems to have a different reason why they think the church is dying:
- The “nones” are growing faster than the church
- The “dones” are leaving faster than we’re replacing them
- People aren’t singing together any more
- Offerings are way down
- Regulars attend less often than they used to
The post-pandemic turndown seems to be permanent in many places
But despite all the gloom and doom, I have not lost one moment of sleep over the demise of the church.
That Vaters feels no stress reveals the basic disconnect between believers and non-believers on this matter, and that gap is, I’m afraid, permanent and unbridgeable.
It’s evident from the first of thirteen points he makes:
The explanation for this point is one sentence: “And Jesus knows what he’s doing.” God is in control, believers insist, and so even if it looks bleak, his steadfastness is cause for calm. But this, of course, assumes that Jesus/God exists and operates the way Christians believe he does. They are not open to the possibility that the reason people are leaving religion is because they’ve realized the truth: gods don’t exist. Instead, these people are somehow deceived or never were Christians to begin with. This seems a little obvious, perhaps even axiomatic, but the shortsightedness inherent in such a position (“We could be wrong!”) means they will be in constant denial about the reality of the problem, and as it worsens, some of Vaters’s more moderate positions might radicalize.
His second point is an attempt to make things global:
While the European and North American church is dealing with significant issues, the church in many parts of the world is experiencing strong, steady growth. As reported at Lifeway.com, “There are fewer atheists around the world today (147 million) than in 1970 (165 million), and the Gordon-Conwell report expects the number to continue to decline into 2050.” Plus, “Not only is religion growing overall, but Christianity specifically is growing,” especially in the global south.
We could summarize this point as follows: Sure, in the West, where scientific literacy is steadily rising, religion is on the decline. But in the developing world, where scientific literacy lags, it’s growing.
If the growth of your religion is most pronounced where scientific literacy is most lacking, it doesn’t say much about the foundations of your religion.
Christians have a persecution complex: they see it as inevitable because it’s throughout the New Testament. True Christians suffer for their faith. This is so engrained in the Christian psyche that I’m not surprised it appears this early and only surprised that it wasn’t the second point.
If persecution is coming to the American church (which is where almost all of this hand-wringing is coming from) it may reduce church attendance numbers and perceived cultural influence, but it won’t kill the church.
Prosperity is far more dangerous to the church than persecution has ever been. As the Puritan writer Cotton Mather put it in the early 1700s, “Religion brought forth prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother.”
This point seems more like pop psychology than measured reasoning. It also ignores the reality driving this decline. People aren’t leaving the church because they have cushy lives — not exclusively, anyway. They’re realizing they don’t need this in their lives anymore, and they have tools at their disposal (read: the internet) that put dissenting views and reasoning well within their grasp. They can begin by feeling church is just not for them anymore and fill that in later (as they so choose) with good critical analysis of Christian theology that makes them add, “Well, not only do I not need it but it also just doesn’t really make a lot of sense when I think about it.”
This point is actually refreshing.
The removal of the Ten Commandments monument from a courthouse is not persecution.
I’m not saying it’s good, but it’s not persecution.
There are Christians in places like Syria and Iran who know what real persecution feels like. When we claim persecution for what is a loss of privilege, we minimize the real persecution our brothers and sisters face all over the world today.
It does feel a little like Vaters can’t make up his mind, though: are Christians facing persecution or not? As church attendance continues to dwindle, he might shift his opinion on this a bit.
I get the feeling that this is an attempt to be a little edgy, but it is in fact quite ridiculous:
The church doesn’t hold the reins of power well. We’re better in a burr-in-the-saddle role than being the conquering hero on the stallion. Let’s leave that role to Jesus himself.
Christianity has dominated the Western world for most of the last 1,700 years. It’s had a near-total monopoly on the culture. Its myths fill our collective consciousness. For hundreds of years it had the power to compel compliance through various means (including torture). To suggest that at any time in modern history it’s only been a “burr-in-the-saddle” of society is absolutely ridiculous.
This is why Christians are panicking. They are losing that monopoly. They are losing their political and cultural power. And they are going crazy about it.
Churches are being turned into residential units, bars, and even skateparks. What are we to make of that?
We are likely to lose many church buildings in the coming decades. This will be especially challenging for churches with full-time pastors and a mortgage. I also foresee massive stress points coming for most, if not all, denominations.
I sympathize with those who love their church’s historic building and their denomination, only to lose one or both. But I’m grateful that buildings and denominations are not needed for the church to survive and thrive.
In fact, we may need to lean on our buildings and denominations less in order to lean on Jesus more.
This point is just to serve as a balm to those handwringing traditionalists who are upset about the material decline in the church, nothing else.
If churches aren’t buildings, what are they?
This is one of the main reasons the church thrives under persecution. It forces us to turn to what really matters and can never be taken away – loving Jesus, following the Bible, and caring for each other.
Churches (particularly Protestant churches, especially those that align with the Evangelical movement) maintain their hold on people through the social cohesion they provide. Non-theistic churches are forming that attempt to fill this void, so this point is a non-starter from the beginning.
Besides, Vaters says, it’s not all that bad:
Whatever your real or perceived church crisis may be, it is not “the greatest calamity the church has ever faced.”
We tend to magnify the severity of small pains that are close to us, while diminishing the reality of much larger pains that are further removed from us.
The church has faced far bigger problems than what most of us are currently experiencing, but those problems are so far away from us that they feel insignificant. The church survived them all.
But it is that bad. Christians fail, intentionally or unconsciously, to realize exactly what the problem is.
The internet is killing the church. It is exposing young people to more and more arguments against theism in general and Christianity in particular. These ideas weren’t widely diseminated in times past. A thousand years ago, uttering such criticism would risk death. Now, it’s everywhere. And content creators are getting better and better at presenting the dark and illlogical sides of Christanity, and Christianity just keeps throwing the same apologetics mud at them. And here, the internet applies something new: reactions to those apologetics. Discections of those apologetics. Critical analysis of those apologetics. So not only does the internet provide the initial explanation of why Christianity makes no sense, it provides answers to Christians’ attempts to explain away those faultlines and fractures, and it shows apologetics to be hollow, shallow, and repetative.
I’m not sure why Vaters put this one in here:
My segment of the body of Christ may be tied to a particular worship style, theological stance, historical background, denominational identity, or any of a wide variety of other distinctives. But the way I worship is not the church. It’s just my little corner of it. If the way I like to worship becomes less popular, that has nothing to do with the strength of the church as a whole.
In fact – brace yourselves – even if the church in America collapses, as tragic as that would be, it would not mean the end of the church.
Jesus has sheep that are not of this fold.
It’s really a tweak of point 6.
This point seems like it’s going in a direction of critical self-examination.
I know that sounds harsh, and it may even be triggering for many small-church pastors who have heard something similar because of their lack of numerical gowth. But the small church is not the issue.
This is not a point about size, but of type.
Anything Jesus does will not just survive, but thrive. Eternally. So I have to wonder, if my favorite form of church is dying, maybe it’s because Jesus isn’t building it?
Everything but the church itself (as defined in point #7, above) has an expiration date. No denomination, worship style, or tradition is forever. Sometimes a congregation, tradition, or denomination dies because it has finished serving its purpose.
This point is not meant to trivialize the very real pain of a local church going through serious hardships. I stand with you. Like John said to the suffering saints in Philadelphia (Rev 3:7-13), “I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.” You have my heart, my prayers, and any help I can offer.
Instead, though, Vaters is simply using an old apologetics technique applied to those those who leave the faith to explain why some churches are failing: they weren’t really Christian.
This, too, is a short point — two sentences.
For almost 2,000 years of great triumphs and horrifying persecution, the church keeps going.
When Jesus builds something it tends to stand. And stand strong.
The fact that it’s been dominate in the political and cultural machinary of Europe and America for centuries has nothing to do with its longevity. It’s all Jesus’s work.
Remember when we used to worshop Zeus? Neither do I. Worshiping Jesus will eventually seem as antiquated.
Another one-sentence explanation: “In fact, worry makes it worse.” This smacks of desparation, but I could be reading more into it than is really there.
The bottom line:
You can toss the previous 12 points. This is all I need to know.
To wildly (but hopefully not inappropriately) paraphrase Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew 5:25-33:
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your church building, where you will worship or fellowship; or about your denomination, what decisions it will make. Is not the church more important than buildings, and the faith more important than denominational creeds? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his church’s life or a dollar to its offering basket? But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Whatever is of worry is not of faith.
And we need all the faith we can get.
Vaters is doing his best to cope with the coming reality, but he’s still in denial, so he will never accept it when it comes.
There’s a local mega-church that rebranded a few years ago to “Relentless Church.” I thought that was an odd name. I always assumed it was suggesting that the Christian god is relentless in trying to reach the so-called unchurched, but there was something needlessly aggressive about that name. To be relentless seems antithetical to one of Christianity’s claimed attributes (claimed only, I would argue): that it’s built on mercy. To relent is, to some degree, to show mercy. Still, I thought they could have chosen a sillier name.
The pastor, a large man named John Gray, caused some controversy a few years ago when he bought his wife a $200,000 Lamborghini SUV. It made the Today Show:
His defense was that he used money from the couple’s reality show and his book sales to purchase the vehicle. It still seems pretty tone deaf to be a supposed servant of God and spend that kind of money on a vehicle.
But apparently tone deafness is one of Gray’s predominant qualities, for he’s decided to rebrand his church once again. This time: Love Story Church.
Considering the stream of sexual abuse scandals in countless denominations over the last few years, I couldn’t possibly imagine a worse name for the church
I could hear him long before I could see him. K and I were walking up Main Street last night, returning to our car after a night out, and I could hear an amplified male voice in the distance.
“Most likely a street preacher,” I thought, although sometimes the Black Hebrew Israelites make an appearance on the downtown sidewalks. As we approached, though, it was clear it was an evangelical street preacher.
“You need Jesus! If you don’t know the name of Jesus, you need to invite him into your life…”
It always astounds me how these guys say nonsense like that: we live in America, in the damn Bible Belt. There is no one in this area who has never heard of Jesus. It is utterly impossible, regardless of your religious views, not to have heard of Jesus while living in South Carolina.
“There is no one walking on Main Street,” I said to K, “who might be thinking, ‘Now this Jesus fellow — never heard of him. Who is he?'”
As we neared, we had to stop at the corner to wait for the light. Our street preacher started going on about the perils of living a self-centered life, completely oblivious to the irony.
“Here these people are, taking advantage of the lovely weather to enjoy their favorite restaurant’s outdoor seating option, and they have to listen to this jackass as he gets his saving-the-world fix,” I said to no one in particular and everyone in earshot. One guy laughed a little, most everyone else ignored my stupid comment.
I wanted to say that to the preacher himself, and came close to doing just that, but in the end, I decided not to add to the guy’s persecution complex.
Who is the villain in the story of Adam and Eve? Christianity and Judaism will have you believe it’s the serpent, but I think a close reading without the blinders of preconception proves God is the villain.
To begin with, notice when in the narrative God forbids the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Genesis 2.15-18
That second paragraph is crucial because it shows that God gave the command to Adam before Eve even existed. He told Adam, “Don’t eat of the tree.” He said nothing to Eve. In fact, if you read the text closely, he never talks to Eve at all.
The temptation occurs in the next chapter:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Genesis 3.1-5
A few questions arise here:
The narrative continues:
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Genesis 3.6, 7
First of all, we see that Adam was right there with her. What the hell was he doing? Why didn’t he stop her?
More significantly, we see that the serpent was telling the truth: “the eyes of both of them were opened.” But the didn’t die, despite God’s telling Adam that “in that day you shall surely die.” They didn’t die: God lied.
So let’s build the case for the serpent being the villain:
That’s it. One point, a point that’s really not significant at all. What’s the case for the serpent being the hero?
There’s not much, but at least he has the truth on his side.
How about the case for God being the villain:
And the case for him being the hero? Well, I guess according to the text, we have him to thank for our existence since he made everything. But since that “everything” includes hell and a guaranteed ticket there for the vast majority of humanity, that one point in his favor is hardly significant and is in fact a point against him.
This all of course depends on the narrative being factually accurate, which of course it isn’t. But imagine trying to square all of this with a literal interpretation of this passage: anyone who worships this being is worshiping a monster.