Marks of the Beast

The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity

Glenn W. Shuck

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780814740057
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814788516
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins has become a popular culture phenomenon, selling an astonishing 40 million copies to date. These novels, written by two well-known evangelical Christians, depict the experiences of those "left behind" in the aftermath of the Rapture, when Christ removes true believers, leaving everyone else to suffer seven years of Tribulation under Satan's proxy, Antichrist.
In Marks of the Beast, Shuck uncovers the reasons behind the books' unprecedented appeal, assessing why the novels have achieved a status within the evangelical community even greater than Hal Lindsey's 1970 blockbuster The Late Great Planet Earth. It also explores what we can learn from them about evangelical Christianity in America.
Shuck finds that, ironically, the series not only reflects contemporary trends within conservative evangelicalism but also encourages readers—especially evangelicals—to embrace solutions that enact, rather than engage, their fears. Most strikingly, he shows how the ultimate vision put forth by the series' authors inadvertently undermines itself as the series unfolds.

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Signs of the Times

The Dispensational Background of Evangelical Prophecy Belief

In most cases the terms for the “last days” or “end times” refer to a period that may encompass no more than seven to ten or so years. We cannot pinpoint it more accurately because we are not certain how much time will elapse between the Rapture, which ends the church age, and the beginning of the Tribulation, begun by the signing of the covenant between the Antichrist and Israel (Daniel 9:27; see also chapter 13). Some prophecy scholars think it will just be a matter of days, but some estimates go as high as fifty years. . . . We are confident that if that writer were living today he would shorten his estimate to about one to three years.¹

—Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins,
Are We Living in the End Times?

It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times.²

—Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Nicolae

Prophecy writers such as Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins organize the meaning of history around the notion that God deals differently with His people in different epochs called “dispensations.” The first five dispensations concern prophecy writers the least, and few devote more than a passing mention to them. The action heats up during the sixth dispensation, known as the “Church Age.” It is then that God temporarily shifts his attention away from His chosen people, the Jews, and onto the Gentiles. Beginning with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., the Church Age strikes prophecy writers as a period during which God works most mysteriously, almost as if pressing the pause button on His cosmic stopwatch. Christ can return and start the apocalyptic clock ticking again at any time, yet no one knows—as prophecy writers are fond of repeating—“the day or the hour.” Believers must simply watch and wait. And watch they do, searching for signs of the times that potentially indicate the cosmic clock will soon start again. Prophecy writers claim that Biblical prophecies will soon be fulfilled, and plenty of signs will be given for the watchful, until Christ returns to rapture away His most loyal believers. Then, the world will endure seven years of torment and woe known as the Tribulation, when people will get one last, painful chance to choose the path of goodness and light. This chapter briefly outlines the basic ideas of dispensational prophecy belief and introduces the mythical seven-year period during which most of the events of the Left Behind series take place.

Darby and Dispensationalism

One cannot attribute the development of dispensational prophecy belief to a single figure or even a series of figures. The process is much more complicated. Nevertheless, for the sake of brevity and to reach the issues most essential to this project most expeditiously, I have organized my background discussion of prophecy belief around a few key figures of undeniable importance. The list begins with an Irishman named John Nelson Darby. Darby (1800–1882) was born into a prosperous merchant family—his father sold naval munitions during the Napoleonic Wars—and was thus able and expected to pursue a respectable career. Well-educated, Darby graduated from Trinity College with honors, read law at the Kings Inn in Dublin, and prepared himself for a career as a barrister. His theological avocation quickly turned him from law, however.³ After a flirtation with numerous Bible societies and conferences in Dublin, Darby sought and attained ordination at the new Anglican parish of Calary in 1825.⁴

Historian Timothy C. F. Stunt describes Darby’s experience with the “Irish Reformation” as a brief one, however, as his archbishop soon confused loyalty to the king with Protestant piety, calling for oaths of allegiance from prospective converts in 1827.⁵ Darby responded angrily but remained with the church. Nevertheless, his ongoing conversations with evangelical friends and their discussions of the work of the Scotch-Anglican turned dissenter Edward Irving and his colleague Henry Drummond, combined with Darby’s field experience, turned him against ecclesiastical hierarchies and their alleged soteriological significance and toward a doctrine of grace.⁶ According to such a belief, each individual related to God through Christ, rather than an ecclesiastical structure. Likely as a result of such experiences, Darby inserted an anti-institutional flavor into his dissenting movement, a suspicion of hierarchies and mediators that still influences contemporary prophecy belief.⁷ His experience in the Anglican Church also convinced him of humankind’s inherent propensity to evil and the need to place an emphasis on the infallibility of the Scriptures rather than institutions, which were, after all, populated by humans capable of error.

None of these developments in isolation inspired Darby to develop his prophetic worldview, but their effects were cumulative. The prophecy conferences sponsored and hosted by Henry Drummond from 1826 to 1830 at his Albury Park estate in England were definitely influential, as delegates there outlined many of the positions that Darby would later synthesize into dispensational belief. These included several critical points, most notably the belief that the Jews would soon be restored to Israel and that the present age was destined not to end in the progressive achievement of universal happiness—as some millennialists believed—but would instead continue to deteriorate until Christ returned—at any time.⁸

Somewhat more controversial was the possibility of a secret, pre-tribulational Rapture during which Christ would appear only to believers—hence, the aspect of secrecy—and whisk them to safety, returning again only after the seven years of the Tribulation, this time visible to everyone. Arthur Wainwright traces the idea of the Rapture back to the sixteenth-century English prophet Joseph Mede, while Paul S. Boyer places the idea on American soil, beginning with the seventeenth-century Puritan divine Increase Mather.⁹ While such figures, along with many of the delegates to Drummond’s prophecy conferences, probably toyed with the idea of the Rapture, it was left to Darby to popularize the new belief.¹⁰ Darby based the notion of the Rapture on 1 Thessalonians 4:17, “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”¹¹ Darby read this verse as indicating the literal ascent of believers to “meet Christ in the air.”¹² This fit well with Darby’s conviction that Scripture should be read literally whenever possible, rejecting “spiritualized” accounts.¹³

Darby’s increasingly radical views led him to disaffiliate with the Church of England in 1834. The break was not sudden, however, as he had been meeting since 1830 with a number of like-minded dissenters and even regular Anglicans in Plymouth, England. The result of this loose congregation and its spin-off groups became known as the Plymouth Brethren,¹⁴ and finally the Exclusive Brethren or simply the “Darbyites,” once Darby disaffiliated from the Brethren in 1849.¹⁵ Once shorn of any hint of denominational affiliation outside of his own small flock, Darby wove together his various influences, emphasizing God’s successive dealings with humankind in a salvation history divided into unique segments. The result, from which the term “dispensationalism” derives, divided history into seven different dispensations, each beginning with a Covenant between God and humans, and each ending with the violation of the Covenant and the subsequent outpouring of divine judgment.

Such philosophies of history were not new. As historian Sidney Ahlstrom notes, “The idea of successive divine dispensations is, of course, immemorial, being implicit in the very terms Old and New Testament.”¹⁶ Most historians, however, including Boyer, trace dispensationalism’s intellectual antecedents back to the twelfth-century Calabrian prophet-monk, Joachim of Fiore (~1135–1202).¹⁷ Joachim’s formula, simply put, divided history into three distinct ages, corresponding with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each of these personages acted in a particular “status,” beginning with the status of the Father or of Law. This status ended shortly before the appearance of Christ, corresponding to the end of the Old Testament. The New Testament, coming shortly after Christ’s death and resurrection, signaled the beginning of the status of Grace under the Son.¹⁸

Each of the first two statuses—note historians Marjorie Reeves and Warwick Gould, following the work of historian Herbert Grundmann—corresponded to a Biblical Testament. Another status remained, however, but Grundmann emphasizes that it was not to be another Testament. Rather, the status of the Holy Spirit ushered in a spiritual understanding of the previous two dispensations, one that spiritualized, but did not discard, previous truths.¹⁹ Such spiritual truths required “spiritual men,” monastic figures like Joachim who would come into full understanding of the previous texts, without writing another Testament. This new status nevertheless retained a historical character. It was not the end of history but represented a historical phase, corresponding inexactly to the ages associated with the first two statuses. Joachim divided these periods into generations, but noted that what constituted a generation in one phase altered within and outside of each status.²⁰ Although Joachim’s subsequent readers revolutionized this final status as eliminating the social hierarchies, inequalities, and injustices characteristic of the previous two statuses, Joachim himself apparently never drew this conclusion.²¹

The complexity of Joachim’s thought permits only a short introduction, but one can draw several similarities to Darby’s dispensationalism. First, Joachim’s periodization of salvation history corresponded to Darby’s in the belief that God deals with humans in different ways in different periods. Moreover, although antinomian heresies persisted in the wake of both movements, neither dispensed totally with the Old Testament law but merely insisted upon its reinterpretation in light of new understandings. Second, both men placed great emphasis upon the value of generations, which has given subsequent prophecy dabblers plenty upon which to speculate. Finally and directly related to the second issue, neither man insisted upon setting dates for “The End.” The End was indeed coming, but no one could know the day or the hour. Grundmann discusses Joachim’s perspective:

Joachim was not a prophet of the End in the sense of announcing an end to history—such speculation lay well outside of the boundary he believed he could reach with his methods of thought. He nevertheless did not doubt that the mundane world would indeed come to an end, but when this would be, “only God knows.”²²

Contrary to popular wisdom, Darby’s dispensationalism also opposed rigid date-setting. That is, although one cannot speak of Darby’s final dispensation as a replication of Joachim’s status of the Holy Spirit, both viewed their end-stages as penultimate to a final act known only in its exact timing and content by God. For Joachim, this reluctance to “set a date” may have been a gesture to the ecclesiastical and temporal leadership of his time—after all, apocalypticism, then as now, always carries the potential for disruptive political influence. Darby, by contrast, probably sought to avoid the opprobrium collected by such popular date-setters as the American William Miller, who twice predicted the Second Coming of Christ, first in 1843, and again on October 22, 1844.²³ Embarrassing failures such as those of Miller may have further dissuaded Darby from setting dates, but they did not convince his successors to avoid the foolishness of date-setting. Although most prophecy believers have proven reluctant to “name the hour,” this has not prevented a few intrepid souls from trying.²⁴

Dispensationalism, like Joachim’s three ages of history, unfolds in considerable detail—detail which, if allowed to unfold in all of its complexity, would take me well beyond my present focus. Nevertheless, I can note the relevant highlights. According to Darby’s American interpreter Cyrus I. Scofield—the definitive authority on dispensationalism after Darby who also sharpened Darby’s scheme considerably—history could be divided into seven divisions, each called a dispensation.²⁵ Each division corresponds to different ways God works in the world, with each dispensation containing its own covenant and subsequent judgment when humans inevitably violate the terms of the covenant.

The first dispensation was Innocency, referring to the prelapsarian, Edenic paradise of Adam and Eve. Second, humankind moved into the dispensation of Conscience, which spanned the gap from Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden until the Great Flood. Following the Flood, God promulgated a covenant with Noah, opening the period of Human Government. God’s promise to Abraham marked the start of the Promise dispensation, while the Mosaic covenant followed, signaling the dispensation of Law, which Moses received on Mount Sinai. This covenant stood in force until the appearance of Christ, and ended with his crucifixion, inaugurating the dispensation of Grace, or as it is more often called, the Church Age. The seventh and final dispensation, which will follow the dispensation of Grace, but not immediately, encompasses the millennial reign of Christ on earth or the Kingdom Age.²⁶

Humankind presently finds itself in the Church Age. And, unlike previous dispensations, its precise timing appears mysterious to prophecy writers. Part of this difficulty involves reading the apocalyptic portions of the Scriptures as prophetic of future events, which requires careful explanation when attempting to reconcile why the first-century apostles and believers apparently thought Christ would return in their generation. As it turns out, however, at least according to Scofield, those who read Matthew 24:34, as indicating that Christ had to return in the first generation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: About American Evangelicals
• Introduction: First Words on Last Things
• 1 Signs of the Times: The Dispensational Background of Evangelical Prophecy Belief
• 2 Reluctant Rebels: The Left Behind Novels and the Politics of Evangelical Identity
• 3 The Emergence of the Network Culture/Beast System
• 4 Technologies of Transcendence: “Beast Religion” and the Deification/Demonization of the Network Culture
• 5 Marks of the Beast: The Struggle for Evangelical Identity
• 6 Beast, Inc.: Evangelical Resistance and the Internalization of Evil
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author