i am sparticus: Survivors: Why?

Survivors: Why?

Time for more bad theology! If you’ve missed the start of this new gripping and exciting series, go read the first one here . Over the next few weeks we’ll be taking an important journey through the horror that is this Survivor book. And as with any good literary review we’ll start by asking the question “why have the authors written such abomination as this?” The author here is a man named David McKay writing under a pseudonym, part of a group of people naming themselves “The Jesus Christians”, the reason they have written this book is to try to correct the wrong they see portrayed in the Left Behind series. They don’t believe that the Left Behind writers have written their books because they want people to know the truth, they reckon that the reason the Left Behind series has been written is because the authors wanted to make a lot of cash. The authors of the Left Behind series don’t really believe what they write, they’ve just picked the most sell-able theology. In the introduction to the Survivors book they state that the Left Behind series is set “at a time when the mass media is monopolised by materialistic forces that seek to distort the truth. We believe that this is already the situation in the world of religious entertainment. In order for a book to sell in a really big way, certain important truths (truths which are uncomfortable, ad hard for the masses to accept) must be left out.” And again, “I could (as others have done) make millions of dollars by altering the facts in order to give the public what they want to hear”.¹

Part of the reason the Jesus Christians can’t believe the Left Behind writers actually believe what they’re writing is that they can’t understand how anyone could read the Bible and come to any conclusions other than their conclusions. After all, how can anyone honestly read the Bible and come to believe anything other than the one true correct theology of the Jesus Christians? The problem here is one of how to read the Bible. The dispensationalist school of interpretation, to which both the Jesus Christians and the Left Behind writers belong, teaches that you have to take the bible as literal except when a literal reading is not possible (the expression commonly used is ‘understood plainly unless it would do violence to the text’, which is a fantastic expression and one that needs to be used more often). And that leads to the question; how do you work out what is literal and what is not possible to be literal? If I read “For He has founded it [the world] upon the seas, And established it upon the rivers” (Psalm 24:2) and then do not believe that the world rests upon water have I done violence to the text and disobeyed God’s word? If you go around teaching that the bible must be understood as literal whenever possible then at some point you have to arbitrarily decide what is not possible to count as literal and at that point your own personal ideologies and viewpoints start to dictate how you interpret the bible because you have no other guideline. An example?

Revelation 7:4 reads “And I heard how many were marked with the seal of God-144,000 were sealed from all the tribes of Israel.” The Survivors authors see this text as obviously literal in the number of people who are marked by God towards the end of the world, however the part about the tribes of Israel can’t be taken literally because the different tribes of Israel don’t exist any more. In their book, as we’ll eventually see, they give the name of a tribe to each of the 12 geographic groups they divide the world up into. The Left Behind writers take a different approach saying that the 144,000 should be read as the literal number of people marked and sealed from all the tribes of Israel that God will reform from the Jews on the earth towards the end of the world, however they’ll be more non-Jews outside of those twelve tribes who get marked. The difference between the two views doesn’t arise because out of a different understanding of God’s word, it arises because the Left Behind writers (following their right-wing American politically-conservative Christian tendencies) like the present Jewish nation of Israel whereas the Survivors writers (following their left-wing Commonwealth politically-liberal Christian tendencies) don’t like the present Jewish nation. And so both their literal readings end up miles apart, because they failed to realise that reading a text as understood plainly varies greatly depending on what’s plain for you. If it’s plain to you that modern day Israel is great then you’ll read that into it and if it’s plain to you that modern day Israel is bad then you’ll read that into it. And if that’s not doing violence to the text then I don’t know what is.

¹ As an aside, how bitter does McKay sound here? “I could have made millions of pounds, but I took the moral high ground and therefore really I’m wealthier where it counts even if I do have to sleep on my mates floor while they drink Shiraz a non-alchoholic fruit based drink from crystal glasses.”

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