The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation, by Barbara R. Rossing

Retrieved from: the library
(0813391563), 2004
Suggested by: library journals; this is one of my areas for collection development. Surprise?

I'm on page 78 and quitting (see Rule 3). She's a good writer, and I appreciate that somewhere out there are other Christians who actively loathe the Left Behind series, and the theology behind it.

My problem is that I have issues with dispensationalism and the Book of Revelation itself that go back to Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, which I read when I was about 14. It scared me to the point of terrible stomachaches every night (at like 2 a.m.) for about 6 months...to the point of holding my breath during the entire year of 1988 (40 years after Israel became a nation was when the End Times were due to begin)... Of course he's changed his tune repeatedly since then, because the End Times didn't happen on his schedule. duh

Having done a study of Revelation I now get some of the point of it. I still think it's a terrifying book, and tend to agree with Martin Luther that it doesn't really belong in the Bible. It has been so misused by crazy people that I have great difficulty separating the book itself from the actions of the lunatics leaning on it. Mind you, the lunatics also use the Old Testament book of Daniel, but Rossing reminds us that Daniel is a minor prophet in Jewish eyes, and certainly not writing eschatologically, but about Babylon. V e r y specific in time and place, really.

Having mea culpa'd, I have to say that because I'm not moving through this book at all, I'm quitting. In the back of my head is a little voice saying, "This is like all the books that have come out deriding Harry Potter, and The Da Vinci Code, when they are just stories. Fiction, y'know. Not to be taken as propounding a worldview. Entertainment."

Then another voice says, "Yes, but LaHaye himself says this is his version of what he really thinks the End Times will be like. So it's really not meant to be fiction. J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown both accept and agree that they have written stories, not fact."

Both voices are right. I'm tired of listening to voices argue in my head over this issue. My view: dispensationalist theology is crazy, in the scary WACO-ish sense, and I want nothing to do with it. The people who believe in it don't have the same view of God that I do. Niether benevolence nor love enter the story. Rossing backs me up on this, and that's enough for me; I don't really need to defend myself, knowing that there are sensible Christians out there. If I do feel the need to debate, I'll get this again and read it with intent.