Left Behind Friday on Sunday

I've written before about my guilty pleasure taken in reading the sites of that American good old time rapture ready left behind religion. But it's with an even greater pleasure and no guilt at all that I read the Slacktivist site and especially Fred Clark's Left Behind Fridays series, in which Clark has heroically taken on the task of reading and critiquing the execrable series of novels bringing Left Behind theology to a mass market. Time zone differences mean that most of the time it's a Left Behind Saturday in this corner of the world. But every once in a while it'll be a bit later. This weekend it's a Left Behind Sunday. But it's been worth the wait. There have been times when I think the sheer weight of extremely poor theology and abominable misreadings of biblical texts have crushed even Fred, sapped his spirit.

But this week he's back in full form with TF: Bruce's Sermon, part 4. Superb analysis and critique combined with a few of those LOL moments, often almost ROFL. Here's a sample to whet your appetite:

Yes, he's been preaching for more than an hour already, but who cares about lunch, I just want to hear about what it means that John's vision makes no mention of a bow-string.

Bruce is still preaching. "We'll talk next week and following about the next three horsemen of the Apocalypse," he says, forgetting that he's already said this. "The rider of the white horse is the Antichrist, who comes as a deceiver promising peace and uniting the world," he continues, forgetting that he's already said this more than twice:

"The Old Testament book of Daniel -- chapter 9, verses 24 through 27 -- says he will sign a treaty with Israel."

Really? Let's look, shall we? Here is Daniel 9:24-27:

Seventy 'sevens' are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy. "Know and understand this: From the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven 'sevens,' and 62 'sevens.' It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. After the 62 'sevens,' the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed. He will confirm a covenant with many for one 'seven.' In the middle of the 'seven' he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on a wing of the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.

Clear as mud, that, but that's Daniel for you.

The first six chapters of Daniel are fairly straightforward stories of Israel in exile. The final six chapters are a hallucinogenic stew of visions, numerology and wrath. That description of the second half of Daniel might also work as a description of much of Revelation, so it's not altogether unreasonable for Bruce to decide that there's some connection between the two apocalyptic nightmares, but why here? Why jump to this passage in Daniel from that passage in Revelation? What's the justification or logic or excuse?

This skipping back and forth between Revelation and Daniel is standard practice for "Bible prophecy scholars." They are, after all, reading from Scofield Reference Bibles, in which all of this cross-referencing is right there in the footnotes. Yet while this may be par for the course with prophecy preachers, it still seems to me that there are at least four reasons why Bruce's abrupt segues here from Revelation 6:2 to Daniel 9:24-27 and then back to Revelation 6, verse 3, strike me as deeply weird.

Weirder, even, than the bizarre content of the passages themselves.

First of all, there's nothing in that passage in Revelation about the horsemen that suggests any need or justification for inserting gaps into the chronology of John's strange vision.

And here's another:

You really, really don't ever want to learn enough about the esoterica of PMDism to appreciate the details of this disagreement, but it's fun to realize that Tim LaHaye isn't just using his fictional depiction of End Times events to "prove" that all non-PMDists are doomed to wrath, he also thinks this fictional depiction stands as proof that the wrong kind of PMDists are also fools and doomed to wrath. LaHaye has an ax to grind with prophecy scholars who disagree with him on the length of this allegedly prophesied peace treaty, or about when the Two Witnesses will first appear in Jerusalem, and so occasionally he turns away, briefly, from celebrating his fictional triumph over people like you and me to celebrating his fictional triumph over these dissenting PMDists.

And a last bit:

So everything we've heard so far is leading up to Bruce's big conclusion in which he explains that war is peace and peace is war. The text for his sermon warns of Conquest, War, Famine and Death***, but Bruce wants to warn his congregation that what they really have to fear is peace.

*** And also, of course, poor Hades, coming up behind on foot. Thanks to the comments from last week's LBFriday, I can no longer think of Hades in this context without getting a whole series of mental images that make me giggle. I'm fairly sure that's not the effect that John of Patmos was shooting for.

And I'll let you find the LOL moments for yourselves while I go and indulge my guilty pleasure.

Around my Blog Roll

Sunday. My flatmate and I are looking forward to a visit from an old friend from uni days later today. So instead of starting a post that might be broken/paused, I'll do one which conceivably could continue and continue. I'll move around some of the interesting items on my blog roll today. I've also added a new blog and I'll introduce that as well.

One of the things I find so enjoyable and stimulating about blogs, about the blogosphere, is that we can interact with each other and that we can be conduits for each other too, and for all our readers. And of course I must start with Slacktivist where Fred Clark has got his latest instalment reading the execrable Left Behind series. Fred has gained quite a following for this series and often the discussion on his pieces is as much worth reading as his own analysis. On The Immanent Frame, there's an intersting piece by James Wellman, Cheerleading for war?, reflecting on the 'frequent close correspondence between American Christianity and war making'. I'm interested in matters canonical so I have to mention that, over at The Naked Bible, Michael Heiser has a brief piece tossing around some questions on Constantine and the biblical canon. Spirit and Flesh writes on Lectio Divina and interpreting Scripture over at I'm Christian. I'm Gay Deal with It.

Meanwhile, April de Conick has a fascinating series of posts, on how Christianity, Christology, the worship of Jesus, kicks off amongst Jesus' followers (before and) after his execution. You'll find them all at her Forbidden Gospels blog. I haven't managed to read them all yet myself but certainly intend to. And don't forget Velveteen Rabbi; she's always got good stuff to read.

Blogs as conduits I have to point out Dr Platypus where Darrell Pursiful links us to a fascinating piece at Theological Scribbles on the use of the feminine form of the pronoun 'you' in Hebrew to refer to YHWH in Numbers 11: 10-15. My friend, Mad Hatter, leads us to a very beautiful and insightful post on healing, Zen meditation, therapy, suicide and mental health over at the Egregores blog.

Blogs as conduits must include Exploring our Matrix, where Jim McGrath is hosting this month's Biblical Studies carnival 41 complete with a supplement. I'm not mentioned in either this month which means I might have to dust off my pride and dare to nominate myself for next month's offering.

I think I'm leaving some of the best until last because I have to do a Molly Meldrum and say do yourselves a favor and spend a bit of time exploring J K Gayle's Aristotle's Feminist Subject. Just to whet your appetite check out her, umm his* Aristotle's Dreams or But Esau I Hated. and those are just this month. Not just a conduit but a platform Louis Proyect's Unrepentant Marxist has published in full one of the seminal essays of gay liberation Robert Duncan's The Homosexual In Society. This piece was originally published in 1944 in the left wing, apparently Trotskyite (aligned) journal, Politics, and is further noted: "Originally appeared in Politics, I, 7 (August 1944). The revisions were made in 1959. The expanded version was first published in Jimmy & Lucy’s House of “K,” 3 (January 1985)."

Finally, I discovered that J K Gayle has another blog, The WOMBman's Bible: An Outsider's Perspective on the Hebrew Males' Hellene Book. Her, umm his* focus is on the old Greek Bible, the Old Testament of ancient and Eastern Christianities. She, umm he* even engages in some mind blowing translations. Check out this sample here, a translation of the Greek version of Numbers 5.

Wonderful stuff!

UPDATE and it turns out our friend is not going to be able to make it this afternoon after all; I was looking forward to seeing her after all this time, too.

*A FURTHER UPDATE: J K Gayle is a boy not a girl. What a delightful misconception on my part.

From my blog roll

I just want to point folks to a couple of really intersting posts from my blog roll. Slacktivist is always worth a look not least for the weekly deconstructions of the execrable Left Behind series. I must admit to an almost pornographic fascination with things US evangelical and pentecostal. And the latest instalment on Slacktivist Left Behind really whets that fascination. Here we learn how Left Behind's characters refract the values of "evangelical courtship"

here we come to another reminder that the interpersonal events recounted here are every bit as strange, alien and inhuman as the international ones:

Chloe looked at [Buck] expectantly when she greeted him, yet she did not hug him, as Steele and Bruce Barnes had done. Her reticence was his fault, of course. They barely knew each other, but clearly there had been chemistry. They had given each other enough signals to begin a relationship, and in a note to Chloe, Buck had even admitted he was attracted to her.

Jerry Jenkins is well-served here by his habit of telling about things like this note without ever showing them to us, because such a note seems, if not quite impossible, at least unimaginable. "Dear Chloe. I admit I am attracted to you. Let us never speak of it again. Cordially, Cameron."

I appreciate that the target audience for these books includes readers in the hinterlands of the evangelical subculture where dating as it is practiced in most of the West remains a forbidden and largely unknown custom. LaHaye & Jenkins are writing for people who subscribe, instead, to the invented neo-Victorian practices of evangelical "courtship"

I suppose what really fascinates me is how people strive so hard to follow a supposedly 'biblically based' Christianity and end up with something that is so unrecognisable as Christian to so many Christians alive now and throughout history.

Meanwhile over at Two Powers in Heaven Mike Heiser has made available

Fifty-two pages of chunky pneumatological goodness, by Michel Rene Barnes. The paper is the first chapter in a monograph on the theology of the Holy Spirit until the time of Tertullian and Origen. Its thesis is that early Christian pneumatology continues and develops Jewish pneumatology.

I've read the paper and highly recommend it. I also discovered that the 2nd century Church Father, Theophilus of Antioch, in his work, To Autolychus, quotes from a Sibylline oracle in expounding a theology the Holy Spirit. He does so because, according to Barnes, "he considers (it) to be inspired by the Holy Spirit just like the Jewish prophets" (39).

Maybe the problems of 'biblically based' Christianity a la Left Behind relate to what Bible they use. For evangelicals and pentecostals it's pretty much a 19th century construct.

Finally, Mad Hatter has drawn attention to a post on Julie Redman's blog, "a brief but thoughtful note on the ways that the parables can be read." He sees there "a special value for studies of Pali Buddhism as the scriptures are replete with a variety of story-telling genres that require thoughtful and creative reading and interpretation." It's also set me a-thinking about parables and Jewish scriptures which I hope to put up as soon as exigencies of marking etc permit.

April Showers

It's April and the rain has been falling and flooding many parts of S.E. Queensland and much more rain is forecast for the coming week. It's a nice change from the many years of drought but there have been some personal costs for many.

For me life has been busy. I had hoped to put up a post yesterday but just didn't have time. I'm also conscious that last month there was little biblioblogging as opposed to other topics and that the state election dominated things somewhat. This month I plan to focus on biblioblogging and, as we are now in Holy Week, it seems an appropriate focus for the month. But for now I want to point you in the direction of some recent postings on a couple of other blogs.

First off Rollan McCleary, looks at the latest manifestation of that peculiarly American religious phenomenon of prophetic preachers announcing gloom and doom and, in the latest pronouncement from David Wilkerson, the penchant for visions of burning cities. As Rollan observes:

American films and culture thrive on disaster scenarios. It may have something to do with the role of the apocalyptic in American religion or the feeling engendered by the competitive atmosphere of American capitalism that life itself is one big crisis.

Wilkerson, of The Cross and the Switchblade fame, has a long track record of foreseeing US cities in flames. Perhaps the US inner city riots in the late '60s left an indelible impression on Wilkerson. Anyway, last month Wilkerson issued yet another urgent prophecy on his blog. In the American and David Wilkerson Disaster Syndrome, Rollan examines Wilkerson's latest prophecy against his previous record. Rollan then draws on some insights from astrology to further explore Wilkerson's visions of cities on fire.

Meanwhile don't forget to check out the Left Behind Fridays series on Slacktivist. When I first found this site he was reading and deconstructing the first of the Left Behind books, a reading that extended for many years. His readings were not only incisive but side splittingly funny as well. This year he has started on the second book of the series, Tribulation Force. His readings are still sharp and incisive but now there is little to laugh about. Perhaps it's because in the first book the main characters were still working out what was happening and were in the process of 'getting saved'. However in Tribulation Force they are now officially 'saved':

here the malice and contempt is premeditated and intentional. Buck Williams' despicable behavior toward Verna Zee -- and toward Alice, actually -- is not merely weak and obtuse and fearful, but careful and deliberate.And the authors celebrate this painstaking viciousness. It is our first glimpse of the newly saved and sanctified Buck Williams and the authors thus suggest that this is how godly, real, true Christian men ought to behave toward women or anyone else they regard as their inferiors.

The fruit of the Spirit, St. Paul writes, "is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control."If you sat down and tried to write a scene in which a character displayed the opposite of all of those characteristics, you'd come up with something like Buck's actions in the first 20 pages of Tribulation Force.

In urging the Galatian Christians to live up to these fruits of the Spirit, Paul warns them of the alternative. "Let us not become conceited," he writes, "provoking and envying each other." And again, if you sat down to write a scene in which a conceited character was driven to provoke others out of envy, you'd come up with something like Buck's actions in the first 20 pages of Tribulation Force.

In John's epistles, he gives a name to this behavior, this antithesis of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. He calls it "the spirit of antichrist."That is, again, the only place in the Bible where the word "antichrist" appears.

The really horrifying aspect of this subplot is the way it's driven by a gleeful misogyny.

Read it all on T.F.: Not Funny

UPDATE: Rollan has more on Wilkerson and his holy homophobia (as well as a swipe at Oz news media for it's handling of Rudd's reported spat over being served wrong type of meal in flight) over at his blog with Kevin Rudd's Dinner Dispute and David Wilkerson's Fireworks.

Left Behind Fridays on Slacktivist

If you haven't checked it out yet I strongly recommend the Left Behind Friday series of posts over at Slacktivist. The latest instalment, TF: The Militant Verna, continues his reading of Tribulation Force, the second instalment of the probably world's worst series of of novels of all time, which Fred Clark began last month. Here Fred exposes the misogynist and homophobic assumptions that underpin LaHaye's and Jenkins' worldview and indeed the worldview of that conservative, US-centric, born-again, rapture expecting Protestant Christianity. As Clark points out, as well as misogyny, there is an incredible double standard based on male privilege that underpins L&J's representations of their male heroes as is shown in this incident concerning the journalist character, Cameron "Buck" Williams and his dressing down by his new boss, the "militant" Verna Zee. I quote directly from Fred Clark:

Every sentence in these pages portrays Buck as a swaggering idiot whose only response to his demotion is an expanded sense of entitlement and self-importance, yet we're not meant to perceive Buck this way at all.... It's hard enough to keep liking a character despite such a passage, but L&J want readers to like Buck even more because of it. It's not Buck they want us laughing at and despising here, but the militant Verna.

Yet the word militant is used here without further explanation because LaHaye & Jenkins assume that their intended audience will understand it in the context of a larger, ongoing story. That story is what they like to call the "culture war" here in the United States, and Verna Zee is, in the familiar phrase of the culture warriors, either a militant feminist or a militant homosexual. They needn't explain which, specifically, since in their view the two categories overlap.

The phrase "militant homosexual" is so common in religious-right jargon that L&J seem not to realize how peculiar it sounds to anyone who doesn't share their phobias. It provides us a glimpse of how they perceive the Pink Menace of homosexuality -- a faceless horde in refugee camps south of the border, lobbing deadly, indiscriminate rockets of gayness toward their peaceful homes.

But the key point here, as it applies to the militant Verna, is that for L&J and their intended audience, "militant feminist" is always regarded as a subset of "militant homosexual." For them, in other words, all feminists are presumed to be lesbians, and all lesbians are presumed to hate men.

This leap from sexual orientation to a presumption of militant hatred is illuminating. L&J's visceral opposition to the presumed militant feminists/lesbians is proclaimed as a defense of sexual morality, but that claim is ironic, since lurking just below the surface here is a staggering sexual incontinence. Their cartoonish depiction of the militant Verna Zee is simply L&J's expression of frat-boy douchebag sexual entitlement. Their purported complaint that she fails to display a requisite femininity or wifely submission seems really just the insistence that women -- all women -- provide universal sexual access. They are saying, in effect, "If you don't agree to have sex with me when I want, whenever I want, then you must be a lesbian. A militant lesbian."..

...If we can manage, however, to screen out the appalling contempt piled on poor Verna here, it's also worth taking a closer look at Buck Williams' behavior in this scene so we can try to figure out what on earth he's thinking.

We're told that upon arrival, "Buck winked at Alice, Verna's spike-haired young secretary." After Verna informs him that he will need an appointment to get a meeting with her, he sits down next to Alice's desk and proceeds to flirt with her for the next two pages.

"You can call me Buck," he whispered.

"Thanks," she said shyly, pointing to a chair beside her desk.

They whisper together for several more paragraphs, Alice giggling even though Buck never says anything actually funny.

The authors intend us to view Alice sympathetically. She's accommodating, subservient, fawningly grateful for Buck's very presence. She is, in other words, available...

There are at least two obvious problems with Buck's idly passing the time here with his idea of light-hearted flirtatious banter. First, he's supposedly still in the throes of sappy, first-blush-of-love smittenness over Chloe. Do you think the authors would have approved if instead of Buck and Alice, it had been Chloe and Allen whispering, giggling and winking at one another? Me neither.

But apart from the question of whether light-hearted, flirtatious banter is appropriate with Alice, there's the matter of whether such frivolous chit-chat is at all appropriate or human-seeming just two weeks after the Event... In the wake of the sudden disintegration of every child on the planet and the deaths and disappearances of millions more adults, greeting people with a flirty wink just seems terribly, terribly wrong.

Indeed, as several people observe in the comments to this post, L&J's portrayal of "Buck"'s swaggering ineraction with women borders on pornography. Women must always be available for male desire. And indeed the Left behind series can be considered a species of Protestant porn, both in its sexual and gender dynamics as well as its schadenfreude. I can't praise Left Behind Fridays enough and I encourage you to make it a part of your regular reading, especially if you've at any time had to live in the shadow of the Rapture heresy.