The last book in the New Testament, Revelation, is remarkably popular today. Few people read Revelation itself, but millions have read a book series called Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Books seven and eight in the series (The Indwelling and The Mark) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list. The Remnant began at number one on the Times best-seller list (2002). Roughly 65 million copies have been sold in over forty languages, though only in America has it become a publishing phenomenon.
Rapture
Left Behind assumes an evangelical doctrine called “rapture.” The term nowhere appears in the Bible, but is the relatively recent creation of John Nelson Darby, an evangelical Protestant who came up with the term in the 1830’s. Popularized by Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, and books that followed, The Late Great was the best-selling nonfiction book of the nineteen-seventies. While the Book of Revelation is not widely read, the attraction of end of the world thinking remains remarkably real even in a secular age. Dorian Lynskey’s recent Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, suggests some reasons why. I’ll return to one of these reasons at the end.
Rapture claims that at the end of days, all Christians will rise “in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.” First Thessalonians 4:17 is an often-cited Biblical source, but its meaning is obscure. /1/ The word “rapture” never appears in the Bible. Nor does the Book of Revelation say anything about the followers of Jesus being taken out of the world before it all goes up in flames.
Like all apocalypses, the rapture fantasy can be dangerous. Older readers may remember Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, who stated in testimony before Congress that while it’s essential to preserve our resources for future generations, he remarked that he wasn’t sure how many future generations there would be before the Apocalypse and Christ’s subsequent return. Casper Weinberger, then Secretary of Defense, agreed. /2/ When you think this way, everything from nuclear war to climate change becomes less significant.
The Left Behind series loves violence. In this respect, it is true to Revelation, the bloodiest book in the Bible. This, though, is not why there was so much debate over whether to include it in the canon we call the Bible, a book of books. One thing that troubled the early church leaders was that the book was too bound to what Christians call the Old Testament. Revelation’s God was a God of power and might, with no hint of God’s willingness to become weak and vulnerable in the person of the son (2 Corinthians 12:9). For many Christians, not Revelation, but the Gospels teach the true lesson of Christianity: non-violence and love of neighbor in the face of hatred (Matthew 22:36-40). Barely a hint of this remains in Revelation.
Continue reading The Book of Revelation Does Not Belong in the Bible
