Purple Epilogue: A skeptic on the “Left Behind” books
John Marks, writing in “Reasons to Believe: One Man’s Journey Among the Evangelicals and the Faith He Left Behind:”
Dispensationalism, which has been around for about five hundred years, really came into fashion in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the era of the French Revolution and the industrial revolution. It wasn’t until the modern world erupted and began to threaten the bases for belief in Christ that the need for the world to end came into its own. The turn of the second millennium since Christ has seen a further deepening of the sense of doom, and that makes sense to me. The technological transformation that began in the late eighteenth century has continued at an alarming rate. One hundred years ago, the rapid growth in automation gave us trains, planes, cars, the cinema, the telephone, the telegraph. Right now we live in a period of comparable change, and the transformation is once again being driven by science, based in rational and materialistic beliefs about the nature of reality.
[In the "Left Behind" series] readers get to indulge in a revenge fantasy against the nonbelieving world that will preside over their extinction. They get to see the extemination of their enemies without any moral guilt, because God’s hand wields the sword.
We will be continuing our conversation with John Marks and Craig Detweiler of Purple State of Mind online by sharing excerpts from their books and video and transcript clips from our dinner conversation. A limited number of signed copies of John’s “Reasons to Believe: One Man’s Journey Among the Evangelicals and the Faith He Left Behind” and Craig Detweiler’s “Purple State of Mind: Finding Middle Ground in a Divided Culture” are available online HERE.
Add comment May 4th, 2009
