Saturday, October 4, 2014

Being Pre-Trib is frankly the least of Left Behind's problems

With the new Left Behind movie about to come out a lot of bloggers and websites are complaining.  Within the Church the negative comments about it mostly come from people who are irritated with Pre-Tribulationisim.  But as someone who's also not Pre-Trib, I don't even find that it's most annoying trait.  Same with other Pre-Trib based End Times fiction.  I haven't read all of it of course, but still I get the gist of what it's world is like.

None of these works of fiction about the Pre-Trib Rapture actually acknowledge the whole dispensational point of the uniqueness of The Church that lies behind it, and any view but Post-Trib or Preterisim/Amillennialisim.  There is no exploration of the fact that these post-Rapture believers lack certain promises that we of The Church have.  The problem is that these writers are probably all Cessationists, so to them The Church lost most of it's unique promises in the 1st Century.  I believe during the era just before The Rapture the 144,000 will be surpassing what the earliest Christians did just after Pentecost.

The simple fact that it's always obvious who The Antichrist is right from the start of The 70th Week is a problem to me.  Paul makes a point that the Abomination of Desolation incident is what identifies him.  And I believe there is good reason to expect there to be Decoy Antichrists during the first half of the 70th Week, among them The Terrible of The Nations.  So even from a writing perspective, why not have a few possible Antichrist and let readers argue over who it'll be.

They also tend to reflect how American Evangelicals have married their Faith to their Patriotism and political Conservatism way to much.  Of course The Antichrist is always the ultimate European Liberal (the End Times movie fad ended before the Mahdi thing really took off).

I'll be posting in the future on why I think End Times fiction that makes the President of the United States a hero who opposes The Antichrist and then gets killed by him is in fact potentially dangerous.

Along with that having an Antichrist who's Russian(ish), having video conferences with East Asian leaders as he destroys the U.S.  It's like they don't know the Cold War ended, and was only a fraud propped up by the Military Industrial Complex to begin with.

Also like a lot of Christian fiction it seems to come off unintentionally Calvinist.  Simply because the people who will or won't be saved are predestined by the writer.

There is a limit to how sinful they allow the characters who will latter become saved and members of the "Tribulation Force" to get.  The Airplane pilot stops short of actually committing adultery with the sexy stewardess.  I'd like to see a character analogous to Paul, who was a full blown enemy of The Gospel before being saved.

And then there is how they treat Homosexuality.  That they depict it as a Sin is sadly of course expected, but no Gay character ever becomes saved either, they're just there to be a problem for our protagonists until they suffer a horrible "deserved" death.  As if the writers agree with the insane position of some Baptists that being engaged in Homosexual activity is evidence of being no longer eligible for Salvation.

Both Christian writers and Secular Hollywood writers have trouble understanding the people who disagree with them.  But in all honesty it seems to me like the Left tends to make a better effort to at least try.

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