A number of parishioners have asked recently about the best selling “Left Behind” series of novels that makes an industry of the apocalypse and highlights belief in “the Rapture” – a view of the Bible and mysterious predictions pretty much unknown to the average Catholic. In today’s fold out I tried to give a quick summary and evaluation. The beliefs about the end of the world that you’ll find in these novels is foreign to both the Catholic and traditional Christian approach to either the Bible or the future. Actually it’s almost impossible to find a good Bible scholar to even comment on this fanciful approach but books, movies and some evangelical Protestants keep these theories in the news so its good to know a little more about them.

A Protestant friend advised me that growing up in her church could be scary with nightmares about “the Rapture”. In her evangelical church, sermons on “the Rapture” regularly predict that someday, without warning, Christ would snatch away to heaven all the true Christians, leaving behind the unfortunates who would suffer seven years of “tribulation” under the anti-Christ. One night, at age eight, she woke up to find her parents gone. She was convinced and terrified that they had been “raptured” and she had been left behind. What a relief to later find out they had just gone out for pizza!

Left Behind novels now number eight and counting; they regularly make the best seller list and have produced a children’s book series, Christian music CD’s, radio dramas and “Left Behind: The Movie”. Using chiefly the Book of Daniel, I Thessalonians 4:16-17 and Revelation 20: 1-15 they are based on a relatively recent interpretation of the Bible that predicts a detailed description for the end of the world divided into several key eras or “dispensations”: the Rapture, the seven Year Tribulation, Christ’s return and the defeat of the Anti Christ with his one world religion, the familiar “mark of the beast”, plagues, disaster, millions of Jews converting to Christianity, and the beginning of Christ’s 1000 year reign (the millennium)! All of this thinking has a jawbreaker of a title: “dispensational premillennialism”!! This system of biblical interpretation was developed around 1830 in England by John Nelson Darby; it gained a foothold in the U.S. through Bible study notes written by Cyrus Scofield in 1909 and was popularized in the 1970’s by Hal Lindsey’s bestseller “The Late Great Planet Earth.” After about 2000 years of Christianity, it is a very recent and a highly questionable way of reading the Bible.

If you read any of the “Left Behind” series (which I do not recommend) you’ll find besides a very unreliable reading of the Bible (1) a mean spirited vision of faith (it’s your own fault if you don’t make the Rapture); (2) a clubbiness with other believers (we’re the one’s with the truth, you’re not); (3) a subtle anti Catholicism (which is strong and explicit in the authors others writing); (4) a profound distrust of ecumenism (any one world religion is the work of the anti Christ); (5) a complete disinterest in social justice (any preaching of peace before Jesus returns is the work of the anti Christ!).

While Catholic and mainline Christian teaching speaks of “the last things”, with heaven, hell and Last Judgment, it does not claim to have a blueprint or timetable of the final events. The fiery and dramatic symbols of the Book of Revelation have their place in our art, stain glass windows and hymns; but they are taken as metaphors for the victory of Christ over evil rather than as a secret code to be cracked open after 1900 plus years. Rather than being fanciful, Catholic Biblical scholarship tries to be faithful to what the Scriptures meant to the people who wrote it and to what it might mean to us now.. The Left Behind novels which include “Tribulation Force”, “The Indwelling” and “The Mark: the Beast Rules the World” deserve to be left behind!