Book Review

Yesterday morning I had a chance to stop in at Barnes and Noble, wanting to use a $25.00 gift card from last Christmas. I picked out 3 books to browse through. The 1st was Kingdom Come, the latest and maybe the last of the Left Behind series by LaHaye and Jenkins. This one covers part of the 1000 years that Jesus will rule on the earth, from the end of the tribulation to the new heavens and the new earth. I thought they kinda ran out of steam midway through the series, churning out mediocre books because they could make mega bucks without sweating about quality. But I had just been going through the chapters in Ezekiel during my daily Bible reading describing the millenial temple, and not knowing very much about that time period, the book piqued my interest. I think the 2nd book was called Betrayal, dealing with the tremendous decrease in the number of Catholic nuns since the 1960's. In 1962, the same time I was in 7th grade at St. Francis de Sales, there were 185,000 nuns in America. Today there are only 6000 nuns under the age of 50. The sections of the book that I scanned gave some pretty interesting reasons for the decline, foremost seeming to be the inability of a male hieraricy to deal with the changing role of women in the Catholic church after the reformsw of Vatican II.

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And the last book was by Hank Hannegraft, the purpose of which seemed to be to rip on the theology of the Left Behind series. I don't know why I pulled this book out, except for maybe the bright book jacket, because my previous readings of Hank indicated that he believes that the gifts of the Holy Spirit ended with the death of the last apostle. This cessesionist theology interprets 1 Cor. 13: 10 as meaning that the gifts of the Holy Spirit ended when "the perfect comes", the "perfect" being the Bible, instead of a more reasonable explanation that when Jesus returns, or when we are in the presence of Jesus (the perfect), our use of the gifts of the Spirit are no longer necessary. His newest book is true to what my camp calls "replacement theology", which believes that God's promises and prophecies for the Jewish people and their nation as a separate people also ended at the time of the apostles, "the Church" replacing them. It actually does make a difference how one views this. Our current Mid-East policy is being formulated by a Christian, Condeliza Rice, who doesn't see a conflict with the Jewish nation giving back to the Arabs land, which in my understanding of scripture, God promised forever to the Jews. And I believe that we as a country will suffer for our pressure on Israel to surrender land for peace.

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Anyway, I put back books 2 and 3 and bought, for $27.00 (with my gift card), a book I could probably have purchased on Ebay for $5.00. But I wanted it now, and I finished the 356 pages (large print, lots of double spaced dialogue) by 11:30 last night, dispite viewing the Red Wings and Survivor while reading. Let me just say that, although I finally got into the book 2/3rds the way through, the series is seriously running on fumes, and they don't smell pretty. There were the oddities (the first book had the clothes of all the raptured ending up neatly folded; this had a restored Israel as a land flowing with milk and honey - e.g. Rayford bending down, cupping his hands to drink form a stream full of milk), and there were the confinements of the author's evangelical experiences (a fondness for everybody to express their worship in the forms best appreciated by white, conservative, traditional, non-Pentecostal Protestants). But most annoying was their steadfast refusal to fill in any of the gaps in the stories told in the Bible. In this book, Noah, David, Joshua and Caleb came at different times to tell a large group of children their personal stories. To tell these stories, the authors basically cut and pasted sections from the Bible. Did LaHaye or Jenkins do ANY research into what David's sling might have looked like, the way to use one, or on what basis he selected his stones and their feeling in his hands, or what was involved in a shepherd's sack or staff? Did they make any effort to convey what David may have felt, lying under a million starts at night, or for that matter, any emotion that might make us connect with the author of so many psalms? No! I don't fault them for making gobs of money, but come on guys, have a little pride. The Lord deserves more.