Left Behind?

Tim LaHaye has passed, and many of those who served as the vanguard of a resurgent premillennialism are aging toward the grave. His views and popularity have been fascinating to me and also one of the biggest roadblocks to healthy Christianity.

Dispensationalism is a way of seeing the message of scripture with a heavy dose of literalism and a huge belief that God wants us to figure out the season of His second coming.

I grew up with this, yet my own theological family always saw it as novel and somewhat dangerous. Throughout my ministry I would find people so steeped in the latest end time ideas that they assumed all around them were seeing things as clearly as they.

The history of date setting in my lifetime is a history of complete obvious failure. Hal Lindsey always couched his predictions with the vague phrase "this decade, month, season could very well be the last we see".

Is is polite to say bullsh*t? For LaHaye and his crew made themselves very wealthy on the steady diet of "This is It Believers, pack up, pray up and look up.

Fifteen years ago after 9/11 I spent months and months arriving as a view that has many variations but is generally about the fact that the prophetic scriptures in the Gospels are by in large past in fulfillment, that most of them pointed to a very close and temporal judgment coming upon that last Jewish Generation culminating in the loss of national status and the destruction of the ceremonial abilities of Israel.

Yes there are some possibilities that temporal history has perhaps a culmination, but the intricate end times antichrist scenario of The Left Behind Series bordered on the ridiculous and irresponsible. Yes, the rapture tribe loved them, and bought them, and discussed them. But my earnest hope is that Christianity will leave all this silliness behind. Please don't raise up another generation of date setters, please Lord, come before we have to endure another group of theological demigods who are oh so certain about things they do not really understand. Rant Ended, blood pressure slowly returning to normal. Rest in Peace Tim LaHaye.