The Late Great Hal Lindsey

Hal Lindsey has died. Ripe old age of 666.  Or was it 144?

Ripe old age of 95, actually.

Hereafter known as the Late Great Hal Lindsey.

Hal wrote the book that launched a thousand end times maps, The Late Great Planet Earth, a staple of all dispensational, Rapture loving/Rapture fearing churches.

The dispensational Rapture/Tribulation theology in the Fundamentalist churches across the West became a veritable cottage industry of charts and maps, freakingly scary movies about being left behind (called Left Behind – that spun off a TV series), and Distant Thunder.

Oh – and a kick-butt Christian song by Larry Norman called I Wish We’d All Been Ready, which begins:

Amazing song!  But so, so wrong!  Being ready? Yep, for sure? Being ready for that? Not on your nelly.

The point of the plot in such movies was to see which non-Christians who had missed out the Rapture, but who had subsequently decided that Jesus might have been onto something, could survive the longest before having their heads cut off. Very few apparently.

And the point of the showing of these movies at church evenings to impressionable young people was to literally scare the hell out of them into making a decision for Jesus just so that they, you know, wouldn’t get left behind.

Not that that stopped us worrying. In premillennial dispensational churches there was never really any sense of assurance based on the finished work of Jesus for you. At least that is what it seemed like to me.

I lost a lot of sleep over those movies. That book. I came home from school a few times worried when mum wasn’t at home. There’s one thing to be said for the decline of Rapture theology across the church, it’s that kids aren’t worried that way any longer!

Nowadays we outsource that sorta movie to The Hunger Games, or Squid Games, or whatever. No more Rapture Games for us.

Back in the day Hal’s book was the undisputed king of tomes that you were to give to an unbeliever to convince them that the world is going to blow up or end in a cataclysmic event.  Nowadays you just get them to join Extinction Rebellion.

The book was written in 1970, just in time for me to grow up with it in my younger church experiences, and just in time to ensure that our church was given over to that form of end-times theology.

1970. A tumultuous period. Oil crisis. Things happening in the Middle East. The more things change hey? And I can’t help wondering how much US foreign policy was predicated on the fact that this book was taken as fact.

And I gotta say, even though that may be a thing of the past, the theology behind it all, that views the Old Testament prophesies as primarily about events in the here and now, and focussed on American policies across the world.

There was no sense that the biblical texts were primarily about what happened then, and that the fulfilment of all of God’s promises are Yes and Amen in Jesus.  And the book of Revelation? Sheesh!  That was the stuff of nightmares. And interpretative imagination.

Which is why rebuilding the actual temple mattered in the land of The Late Great Planet Earth. Which is why we sang songs which went like: “Somewhere in outer space/God has prepared a place/ for all those who love him and obey”.  

I mean this planet was going to burn up because God couldn’t really figure out how to renew the project he began. It had to be scrapped. So in the meantime we waited to be whisked off to another planet. I didn’t really like the sound of that. Another planet seemed cold and clangy. I wanted this one – only better.

And while we waited we made sure we never boarded airplanes with two Christian pilots. Just in case, you know, rapture!  Rumour was the airlines themselves were cagey about it too. Though, not as far as I can tell, Airlines such as Emirates and Saudi Air.

Wiki says this about Hal’s book:

Although Lindsey did not claim to know the dates of future events with any certainty, he suggested that Matthew 24:32-34 indicated that Jesus’ return might be within “one generation” of the rebirth of the state of Israel, and the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple, and Lindsey asserted that “in the Bible” one generation is forty years. Some readers accepted this as an indication that the Tribulation or the Rapture would occur no later than 1988. In his 1980 work The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, Lindsey predicted that “the decade of the 1980s could very well be the last decade of history as we know it”.

This betrays a USA/Western/modern-centric flavour to this theological framework. No sense of fulfilment of Scripture through the final Messiah who creates the new Israel, and is the final and true temple. No sense that we are not the centre of the universe here in the modern West.

I’m glad I left behind that Left Behind stuff.  Not that it means I have left behind the idea that Jesus is coming again. We are told that time and time again in Scripture.

And I am sad that the Parousia has fallen off the radar for Christians. For some it’s because of the poor teaching such as Hal’s. For others, sadly, it’s because they love this present age and what it offers. We are supposed to be longing for the appearing of Jesus, even if we don’t know the circumstances that will lead up to it, outside the most generalised events.

Though the older I get, I realise I may just die before Jesus returns. I wish that were not the case, in much the same way that I wished it were the case when I was much younger. That’s another feature of Hal’s theology: Jesus was gonna come back – most likely – before all us red-blooded Christian males who were saving ourselves for marriage (aka sex) had the chance.

St Paul beautifully combines both hopes – life after death with Jesus, and life in the new creation, in these verses from 2 Timothy 4:6-8:

For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.

In general the manner in which the Scriptures were read by those who espoused Hal Lindsey’s theological rubric was not helpful. Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen, seemed to be the issue.   There was no sense of the sense of looking forward to it all, in the Hebrews 10:24-25:

And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

The day of Jesus’ return is supposed to spur us on to good deeds and meeting as a body of believers in encouraging ways, not to scare the lining out of us.

So Hal is now late and great himself. He died before Jesus returned. Something he could never have imagined. And now he is safe with Jesus. And now he knows – more than he could ever imagine – just how fulfilling Jesus is and how he is the fulfilment of all of those prophesies that Hal and his ilk considered to be some time in the future.

Jesus is coming back, by the way. So be ready.