Left Behind Archive

Left Behind Archive http://www.patheos.com Left Behind Archive NRA: Nudge, nudge, wink, wink http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/06/21/nra-nudge-nudge-wink-wink/ <div class="entry-content">Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 156-161Buck Williams is trying to reach former-rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah, but Ben-Judah is in hiding. So Buck turns for help to Moses and Elijah.Moses and Elijah are characters in this story. Moses Moses and Elijah Elijah. As in Mt.-Sinai, Ten-Commandments Moses and Mt.-Carmel, fiery-chariot Elijah. The very same. They’ve mysteriously come back to life and returned to Earth. And now they are both, like Tsion Ben-Judah, born-again Rapture-Christians.<div class="wp-caption alignright" id="attachment_15935" style="width: 249px"><a class="ext-link" href="http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/slacktivist/files/2013/06/Heston.jpg" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title=""><img alt="" class="size-medium wp-image-15935" height="300" src="http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/slacktivist/files/2013/06/Heston-239x300.jpg" width="239" /></a>There’s something vaguely familiar about that “Moishe” guy.</div>I know we’ve mentioned all of that before, but sometimes it’s helpful just to step back and let it sink in again how deeply weird it is that Moses and Elijah are characters in this story.*Tim LaHaye wants his readers to recognize that he, Tim LaHaye, is uniquely correct about the meaning of the Bible and of “Bible prophecy,” and so his story includes Moses and Elijah as characters who stand around preaching that Tim LaHaye is uniquely correct about the meaning of the Bible and of Bible prophecy. They stop just short of mentioning LaHaye by name, but still.Anyway, Buck takes a cab to the Temple Mount, where Moses and Elijah have been holding court, and before he arrives there we get one last flashback/summary/review reintroducing these two characters to any readers who may have forgotten them.<blockquote>They called themselves Moishe and Eli, and truly they seemed to have come from another time and another place. They wore ragged, burlap-like robes. They were barefoot with leathery, dark skin. Both had long, dark gray hair and unkempt beards. They were sinewy with bony joints and long muscled arms and legs. Anyone who dared get close to them smelled smoke.</blockquote>So either this is Moses and Elijah from the Bible, or it’s Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson.<blockquote>Those who dared attack them had been killed. It was as simple as that. Several had rushed them with automatic weapons, only to seem to hit an invisible wall and drop dead on the spot.</blockquote>The rules clearly state that there’s a penalty for using range weapons in melee.<blockquote>Others had been incinerated where they stood, by fire that had come from the witnesses’ mouths.</blockquote>Note the plural here. The authors suggest that this has happened more than once, publicly. And they’ve previously told us that one such incident was filmed by not-CNN and broadcast around the world.Set aside the laws of physics here. Yes, of course this bit of the story violates the laws of physics — that’s the authors’ point. But what the authors fail to see is that this bit of their story also violates every known law of human nature. The people in their story are not people — not anything recognizable as the humans that we know.They’ve just described a scene in which the entire population of the world witnesses a series of explicit, undeniable and unambiguously supernatural events. And then everyone simply ignores them. No awestruck wonder. No curiosity. No skeptical probing to try to figure out how the trick was done. Just a giant collective shrug. That’s impossible. Humans don’t work like that.But according to the authors, humans do work like that. Or, at least, Christ-denying, unsaved, non-RTC, damnation-deserving humans do. In their view, unbelievers are not simply unconvinced, but obstinate, willful deniers of evidence every bit as overwhelmingly clear as the miraculous fire-breathing killers in this story. (Just read Josh McDowell or any other “apologetics” book — it’s obvious, so anyone who doesn’t immediately convert is just stubbornly rejecting what they know to be true.)<blockquote>They preached nearly constantly in the language and cadence of the Bible, and what they said was blasphemous to the ears of devout Jews. They preached Christ and him crucified, proclaiming him the Messiah, the Son of God.</blockquote>If they’re sticking to “the language and cadence” of that part of the Bible, it wouldn’t sound blasphemous to the ears of devout Jews. It would sound like first-century koine Greek — an indecipherable babble even in a tri-lingual city like Jerusalem.<blockquote>The only time they had been seen apart from the Wailing Wall was at Teddy Kollek Stadium …</blockquote>Jerry Jenkins is so proud of the one piece of lazy research he bothered to do that he can’t resist repeating it every chance he gets. Yes, Teddy Stadium is a real place in Jerusalem. And Moses and Elijah, apparently, are football fans.<blockquote>The only time they had been seen apart from the Wailing Wall was at Teddy Kollek Stadium, when they appeared on the platform with Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah, a recent convert to Christ. News coverage broadcast around the world showed these two strange men, speaking in unison, not using microphones and yet being heard distinctly in the back rows. “Come nigh and listen,” they had shouted, “to the chosen servant of the most high God! He is among the first of the 144,000 who shall go forth from this and many nations to proclaim the gospel of Christ throughout the world!”</blockquote>That “come nigh” and “go forth” business is what the authors actually meant by “the language and cadence of the Bible.” For the authors, the language of the Bible is English — but only English as it was spoken before Friedrich Schleiermacher was born.But even if you read the Bible in King James English, it’s hard to explain how Ben-Judah could be counted among the “144,000″ mentioned in the book of Revelation. “These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins,” Revelation 14:4 says. And yet, verily and forsooth, the authors themselves hath written that Ben-Judah had taken unto him a wife, and gone in to her and knew her and uncovered her feet, and lo, in the fullness of time, she bore unto him many children.The authors review how Ben-Judah then spent the following year on a stadium tour around the world, “resulting in tens of thousands of converts,” before the recent slaughter of his family which drove the ex-rabbi into hiding. And that brings us back to the present in our story, with Buck approaching the Western Wall to seek help from “Moishe and Eli” in tracking down Ben-Judah.<blockquote>This evening the witnesses were doing as they had done every day since the signing of the treaty between Israel and Carpathia: They were proclaiming the terrible day of the Lord.</blockquote>And <a class="ext-link" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYvAYwpUDv8" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="">if that made you think of this</a>, then your brain works the same way mine does.<blockquote>And they were acknowledging Jesus Christ as “the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace.”</blockquote>So Moses and Elijah haven’t become orthodox Christians — they’ve become <a class="ext-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchianism" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="">Monarchian heretics</a>. (Hey, I’m not judging. I lean more than a bit Patripassian, myself.)<blockquote>Buck was always thrilled and moved by the preaching of the witnesses. He looked around the crowd and saw people from various races and cultures. He knew from experience that many of them understood no Hebrew. They were understanding the witnesses in their own tongues, just as he was.</blockquote>French-speaking people heard the witnesses speaking in King James French. Spanish-speakers heard King James Spanish, Mandarin-speakers heard King James Mandarin. …Buck creeps closer until he catches their attention:<blockquote>Both stared directly into his eyes, and he could not move. Without gesturing or moving, Eli began to preach. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear! Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for He is risen, as He said.”Believers in the crowd mumbled their amens and their agreement. Buck was riveted. Moishe stepped forward and seemed to speak directly to him. “Do not be afraid, for I know whom you seek. He is not here.”</blockquote>Back in the first book the authors established this pattern of having the Two Witnesses speak almost entirely in direct quotations from the Bible. That seemed like a timid choice — a way of side-stepping the precarious challenge of writing dialogue for characters who are supposed to be speaking on God’s behalf.Here that choice creates a problem, since Buck is coming to them with a specific, extra-biblical question — “Do you guys know where I might find our friend Tsion?” That question seems to require a specific answer involving something other than a hodge-podge of Bible passages plucked out of context.The authors solution is to have the Two Witnesses speak in a “clever” biblical code. “I know whom you seek,” Moishe says to Buck, winking broadly. “Eh, get it? Whom you seek? Like, it seems like I’m only quoting from Matthew 28, but really I’m also talking about Tsion … get it?”But Buck doesn’t get it.<blockquote>Moishe, still staring at Buck: “Indeed He is going before you into Galilee. There you will see Him. Behold I have told you.”</blockquote>I supposed this is slightly more subtle than having Moishe tell Buck that “ion-Tsay is in alilee-Gay.” But only slightly. Yet despite such broad hints, Buck still takes a while to pick up on all this winking and elbow-nudging:<blockquote>The witnesses stood and stared silently for so long, unmoving, it was as if they had turned to stone. The crowd grew nervous and began to dissipate. Some waited to see if the witnesses would speak again, but they did not. Soon only Buck stood where he had stood for the last several minutes. He couldn’t take his eyes off the eyes of Moishe. The two merely stood at the fence and stared at him. Buck began to advance on them., coming to within about 20 feet. They seemed not even to be breathing. Buck noticed no blink, no twitch.</blockquote>“Jeez, kid,” Moishe whispered. “Galilee. Tsion’s in @%#$ Galilee. How many times’ve I gotta say it? Now get lost before you draw any more attention to yourself.”That’s what I wish happened here, but what actually does happen is even sillier:<blockquote>In the fading twilight, he carefully watched their faces. Neither opened his mouth, and yet Buck heard, plain as day in his own language, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”</blockquote>And, finally, Buck gets it.So then, two questions:1. If you can communicate telephathically, why wouldn’t you do that first instead of speaking out loud in a heavy-handed Bible “code” that your dim friend still can’t quite grasp? And,2. If you’re communicating telepathically, why are you still speaking in Bible code?- – - – - – - – - – - -* Why Moses and Elijah? Well, in LaHaye’s idea of the End Times, they will be the “Two Witnesses” whose story is told in <a class="ext-link" href="http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=238849193" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="">Revelation 11</a>.We should note that Revelation itself never names those Two Witnesses, and that they seem to appear much later in that story than they do in LaHaye’s chronology. Revelation gives us the seven seals of divine wrath, then the first six of the seven trumpets, and then the Two Witnesses show up, but for LaHaye they appear before any of those divine judgments even begin. He can explain why that is, mind you, and if I had several hours to spare and access to the dozens of charts, graphs and decoder rings necessary to explain it, I could show you how he does that and how it almost makes a kind of internal sense given the whole vast, convoluted premillennial dispensationalist framework. But for now let’s just note this as another reminder that LaHaye’s insistence that he sticks to a “literal” reading of the Bible should not be mistaken for a claim that he sticks to anything like a linear reading of it.The idea of identifying John of Patmos’ two unidentified witnesses with Moses and Elijah is an old one. It’s an old guess more than a “tradition,” since apart from modern “prophecy scholars” like LaHaye, it was never suggested as more than speculation. That guess is inspired by the <a class="ext-link" href="http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=238847625" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="">strange story in the Synoptic Gospels of Jesus’ “transfiguration</a>,” which describes Jesus’ encounter with those two patriarchs. Moses and Elijah carry great symbolic weight there as the embodiments of “the law and the prophets,” respectively, although that symbolism has always bothered me a bit, since Jesus himself said otherwise, repeatedly. The embodiment of the law and the prophets, Jesus said, is love.<div class="nr_related_placeholder" data-permalink="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/06/21/nra-nudge-nudge-wink-wink/" data-title="NRA: Nudge, nudge, wink, wink"></div></div> Tue, 22 Jul 2014 07:00:30 -0000 NRA: Moses and ELIZA http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/07/05/nra-moses-and-eliza/ <div class="entry-content">Nicolae, The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 163-164I apologize for an error in the <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/06/21/nra-nudge-nudge-wink-wink/">most recent post in this series</a>. I overestimated Buck Williams.I assumed when the last scene ended that Buck had finally understood the clumsy, obvious Bible Code spoken by the Two Witnesses in this story. Moishe and Eli had told him, repeatedly, that he would find his friend Tsion Ben-Judah in Galilee — even repeating this message to Buck telepathically. (In Tim LaHaye’s Bible prophecy world, Moses and Elijah are telepaths, as any literal reading of the Bible clearly says.)I thought it was impossible for Buck not to pick up on that. But this is Buck Williams we’re talking about — not picking up on things is kind of his trademark. I suppose the telepathy only confused him further. They should have tried telephony instead.Thus we return to find Buck exactly where we left him, dimly trying to grasp what the Witnesses are saying:<blockquote>Buck stood riveted before the witnesses as the sun went down. He looked around to be sure it was still just him and them, “That’s all I get? He’s in Galilee?”Again, without moving their lips, the witnesses spoke: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”</blockquote>Using telepathy to tell someone to “use your ears” really doesn’t make much sense. It’s like a telepath saying, “Read my lips.”<a class="ext-link" href="http://getoutofmyheaddddd.tumblr.com/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title=""><img alt="" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-16188" height="300" src="http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/slacktivist/files/2013/07/GetOutOfMyHead-180x300.jpg" width="180" /></a>I sympathize with Buck a bit here. He’s just trying to get a straight answer, but the Witnesses can’t give him one because they’re unable to speak except by quoting unrelated snippets of Bible verses. I’m starting to think that Eli isn’t short for Elijah, but for <a class="ext-link" href="https://apps.facebook.com/eliza-chatbot/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="">ELIZA</a> — the early chatterbot computer program that recited lines from its scripts in a way that sometimes almost sort of mimicked human conversation. ELIZA was pretty crude, but it had a better shot at passing the <a class="ext-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="">Turing Test</a> than Moses and Elijah do here as they mechanically repeat the handful of Bible passages the authors allow them to say.In nimbler, more biblically literate hands, this device of speaking only in Bible quotations might have been effective.* The problem here is that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are dispensationalists — meaning they’ve “rightly divided the word of truth” in a way that allows them to focus only on the supposedly “prophecy” related parts that interest them. With such a limited segment of scripture to draw from, the authors wind up making their Two Witnesses sound like a 1960s computer program, or like tourists using an abridged, religious version of the <a class="ext-link" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akbflkF_1zY" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="">Hungarian phrasebook from Monty Python</a>.This clumsiness is a bit of an obstacle for poor Buck. He’s trying to find one man who’s gone into hiding, and “Galilee” — the name of a large region — doesn’t really help him very much. Plus, he’s Buck Williams, so this vague direction helps him even less than it might help someone less dim.<blockquote>Galilee? Did it even exist anymore? Where would Buck start, and when would he start? Surely he didn’t want to be poking around there in the night. He had to know where he was going, have some sort of bearing. He spun on his heel to see if any taxis were in the area. He saw a few.</blockquote>Galilee is still a commonly used name for the region in northern Israel and for the Sea of Galilee itself, a large freshwater lake also known as Lake Kinneret. It’s kind of hard to miss.“Did it even exist anymore?” is an odd thing for Buck Williams to be wondering. He’s supposed to be a sophisticated, jet-setting world traveler and someone who is intimately familiar with Israel, a country he’s visited numerous times. This is a bit like having Buck — who’s also supposed to be a savvy New Yorker — wondering to himself whether or not Connecticut even exists anymore. (Come to think of it, that’s actually a more reasonable question, what with the Antichrist having recently nuked much of North America off the map.)One gets the sense here that it’s not just the character, Buck Williams, who is wondering this, but also the authors themselves. And, again, that’s odd. I’m sure that both authors have visited Israel themselves, and the Sea of Galilee is an almost mandatory stop for us Christian Americans when we tour the Holy Land. (We swim in the lake, then have a worship service along the shore at which someone sings, “I Walked Today Where Jesus Walked.”) Tim LaHaye, like most American preachers in the End-Times racket, has led tour groups in Israel (note <a class="ext-link" href="http://www.timlahaye.com/shopcontent.asp?type=Israel%20Tour" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="">Days 6 & 7 of the itinerary</a> for one recent such <del>junket</del> pilgrimage).But then here — and even more so in the pages ahead — we’re given passages in this book that seem wholly unfamiliar with the geography of Israel and that portray it in implausible and impossible ways. (Wait until we get to how Buck eventually travels to Galilee and you’ll see what I mean.) It’s all just … odd.Buck seems tempted to hail a cab and tell the driver, “Galilee — and step on it!” But until he knows more about where that is, how would he be able to tell he wasn’t overcharged for the trip? He decides he still needs more information.<blockquote>He turned back to the witnesses. “If I came back here later tonight, might I learn more?”Moishe backed away from the fence and sat on the pavement, leaning against a wall. Eli gestured and spoke aloud, “Birds of the air have nests,” he said, “but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”“I don’t understand,” Buck said, “tell me more.”“He who has ears –”Buck was frustrated. “I’ll come back at midnight. I’m pleading for your help.”Eli was now backing away too. “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”</blockquote>And now I must apologize again — this time to Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT, the creator of ELIZA. His program sounded far more like a real human than the Two Witnesses in this book do. Buck would have been better off consulting a Magic Eight Ball.The scene ends with Buck no closer to finding Ben-Judah, but at least he has scheduled a second consultation with Moses and Eliza, and that promises to be just as fruitfully informative as this first session.<blockquote>Buck left, still planning to come back, but also strangely warmed by that last mysterious promise. Those were the words of Christ. Was Jesus speaking directly to him through the mouths of these witnesses? What an unspeakable privilege!</blockquote>Earlier, Buck was completely unimpressed that Deutero-Isaiah had spoken directly to him in the same indirect way of speaking directly. And, of course, “these witnesses” are themselves none other than Moses and Elijah — yet Buck doesn’t seem to think speaking directly to them is an “unspeakable privilege” either.Buck doesn’t seem to realize, though, that “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” is also the words of Christ. So when he cut off Eli just now, was Buck directly interrupting Jesus himself? And when Eli quoted those words of Christ as a way of telling Buck to shut up and go away, it was as though Jesus himself was telling Buck to get lost. What an unspeakable privilege!- – - – - – - – - – - -* Consider, for example, the way the Gospel of Matthew uses this device in the curious <a class="ext-link" href="http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=240049301" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="">story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness</a>. (Curious because Jesus isn’t the one telling this story, but he’s the only one who could, since no one else was there to see it.) That story features a character who speaks almost entirely in carefully chosen quotations from scripture, and it works there. In Matthew, of course, the Bible-quoting character is Satan, not Moses, but the device is much the same.Here in Nicolae the device seems so clumsy that I keep thinking of the old joke about the “spirit-led” preacher who asks for direction from God as he repeatedly opens his Bible at random. That joke would work in this scene:MOISHE: He is going before you into Galilee. There you will see him.BUCK: I don’t understand.ELI: I know whom you seek. He is not here. He is going before you into Galilee.BUCK: So is he here then?MOISHE: Behold, I have told you.ELI: He who has ears to hear, let him hear.BUCK: I’m just not following this. Just tell me, specifically, what I’m supposed to do.MOISHE: And Judas went out and hanged himself.BUCK: In Galilee?ELI: Go thou and do likewise.MOISHE: What thou doest, do quickly. <div class="nr_related_placeholder" data-permalink="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/07/05/nra-moses-and-eliza/" data-title="NRA: Moses and ELIZA"></div></div> Wed, 23 Jul 2014 07:00:33 -0000 NRA: The Restaurant at the End of the World http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/07/19/nra-the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-world/ <div class="entry-content">Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 165-166In this scene, Jerry Jenkins achieves a vivid, palpable realism. The effect is brief, but it is powerful, visceral.<blockquote>Rayford and Hattie were welcomed expansively by the maitre d’ of the Global Bistro.</blockquote>You, the reader, suddenly realize that you are about to be swept along, accompanying Rayford Steele and Hattie Durham for an entire meal. Your fight or flight instinct kicks in, your pulse quickens, your breathing becomes shallow and rapid. It becomes difficult to articulate your thoughts into anything clearer than a primal, howling Noooo! You wish you were anywhere, absolutely anywhere, other than here, in this restaurant, with these two people.And that is exactly what this experience would be like in real life. Jenkins has made you feel the very same emotions with the very same intensity that you would be feeling them if you were experiencing this scene in real life. Few writers ever achieve this effect quite so successfully.I can’t help but respond exactly the way I would if I were there in the flesh. I start examining my surroundings, looking around the restaurant for any blessed distraction from the horror of accompanying these two people on this intensely awkward dinner date.And here, alas, the spell is broken. The initial emotional realism — the head-to-toe dread and longing to escape — quickly dissipates in a flurry of incongruous and contradictory details. This restaurant, we were told, was the finest in all of New Babylon and a personal favorite of the Antichrist himself. Yet I can’t make any sense of the place. Nor can I reconcile what we’re shown of it with the principles of Nicolae Carpathia’s “Global Community” that it is said to embody.<blockquote>Rayford and Hattie were welcomed expansively by the maitre d’ of the Global Bistro. The man recognized her, of course, but not Rayford. “Your usual table, ma’am?”“No, thank you, Jeffrey, but neither would we like to be hidden.”They were led to a table set for four. But even though two busboys hurried out to clear away two sets of dinnerware, and the waiter pulled out a chair for Hattie while pointing Rayford to the one next to her, Rayford was still thinking of appearances. He sat directly across from Hattie, knowing they would nearly have to shout to hear each other in the noisy place.</blockquote>Earlier, Rayford fretted about dressing for dinner, making sure he wore something formal enough to be acceptable at this upscale restaurant. We were led to imagine a fine dining establishment — the kind of place with cloth napkins, real silver, crystal water glasses and maybe even live music played on a harp or a grand piano. The fussy maitre d’ and solicitous staff reinforce that impression. So did the idea that this is where the global potentate himself has a “usual table.”I don’t generally imagine global dictators eating out regularly. I picture them, instead, usually dining at one of those long tables in a palatial dining hall with chandeliers, high-backed chairs and a dizzying assortment of goblets, glasses and silverware at every setting. I picture them having personal chefs and probably even a food-taster screening for poison back in the pantry. (All of that is probably inaccurate, but I admit that my sense of the dining habits of global elites comes mostly from old movies and New Yorker cartoons.)So now I’m trying to square this idea of a fancy-schmancy high-class restaurant with being told the Global Bistro is a “noisy place.”And I’m even more confused by the next bit of detail we learn about our surroundings: Instead of tasteful artwork, Le Bistro apparently has TV sets all over the place.<blockquote>Televisions throughout the Bistro carried the continuing news of war around the world. Hattie signaled the maitre d’, who came running. “I doubt the potentate would appreciate this news depressing patrons who came in here for a little relaxation.”“I’m afraid it’s on every station, ma’am.”“There’s not even a music station of some kind?”“I’ll check.”Within moments, all the television sets in the Global Bistro showed music videos. Several applauded this, but Rayford sensed Hattie barely noticed.</blockquote>So now I’m trying to recalibrate my mental image of the restaurant. “Televisions throughout” makes me think of a TGI Fridays or a Buffalo Wild Wings, but places like that don’t have maitre d’s. And what kind of restaurant has TV sets tuned in to cable news? (Jenkins seems to be confusing restaurants with his preferred setting — airports.) I used to stop for breakfast after work at a diner in Marcus Hook where patrons watched the morning news on a TV behind the counter, but that doesn’t seem like the kind of vibe Jenkins is aiming for here.<div class="wp-caption alignright" id="attachment_16418" style="width: 310px"><a class="ext-link" href="http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/slacktivist/files/2013/07/Cluj2.jpg" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title=""><img alt="" class="size-medium wp-image-16418" height="240" src="http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/slacktivist/files/2013/07/Cluj2-300x240.jpg" width="300" /></a>This is the Restaurant Vila Tusa, which TripAdvisor tells us is the 14th-best restaurant in Cluj, Romania, Nicolae Carpathia’s hometown. Note the absence of TV sets.</div>Restaurants with TV sets usually keep them tuned to only one thing: sports. Unlike either the news or music videos, sports can be watched with the sound turned off.In one sense, it’s a positive change that we’re told the news of World War III is “on every station.” Rayford Steele is so preoccupied reminiscing about his past with Hattie — “when they were playing around the edges of an affair of the mind” — that he seems to have completely forgotten about the sort-of-nuclear destruction two days ago of London, Cairo, and a dozen major cities in North America. But in a world anything like the real world, that huge story would, indeed, be on every station — pre-empting all other programming for whatever channels still managed to be on the air, even the ones that only ever show Law & Order re-runs.*Up until now, though, the world of this story has defied any comparison to the real world. In the world of this story, the obliteration of New York and Los Angeles is a one-day story. The destruction of Chicago does nothing to disturb the daily routine of residents of Evanston. So even though it’s wholly unimaginable and unrealistic to think that sporting events would have resumed two days later, in the context of this story and this book so far, there’s no reason to think that a regularly scheduled game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Pittsburgh Pirates wouldn’t be played as though nothing had changed (or a game between the Charlotte Bobcats and the Memphis Grizzlies of the NBA, if it’s wintertime — we readers have no idea what time of year anything in this book takes place).Just thinking about sports, though, leads me to wonder what sort of sports there might be in the “Global Community” of the Antichrist’s one-world government. Nicolae Carpathia has insisted that the entire globe share a single government, a single currency, a single language and a single religion. It makes sense that he should also have imposed a single sport for the entire world.Soccer seems like the obvious candidate. (And yes, since American English appears to have become the official one-world language, it would be called “soccer.”) But how would that work now that all prior national and ethnic loyalties have been subsumed into a single Global Community? The One World Cup promises to be a sad, one-round affair consisting only of a “final” between GC and Israel. The Global Community squad would be heavily favored, I think, since they’d draw from the very best players of every other former nation on Earth. Plus the Israeli team would need a new place to practice, what with their home stadium having been taken over by Moses and Elijah’s revival meetings. In their favor, though, Israel wouldn’t have lost any players during the disappearances of the Event 18 months ago** — so at least they’d have all their starters still ready to play.And while we’re musing about this, shouldn’t the harmony-through-uniformity logic of the Global Community mean a single world cuisine as well? I can’t really imagine what that might mean — something as flavorless and uninspiring as Nicolae’s one-world religion, probably. But imagining such a one-world cuisine still seems easier than making sense of the description of the menu that Jenkins gives us here:<blockquote>Though the Global Bistro had a French-sounding name, Hattie herself had helped conceive it, and the menu carried international cuisine, mostly American. She ordered an unusually large meal. Rayford had just a sandwich.</blockquote>Sandwiches and unusually large portions, I suppose, is as clear a description of “American” cuisine as one could hope for.As this post illustrates, I wasn’t joking about the near-physical sensation of revulsion I feel toward sitting down to a long dinner conversation between Rayford and Hattie. Rayford is just too creepy for comfort in these situations.<blockquote>They were led to a table set for four. But even though two busboys hurried out to clear away two sets of dinnerware, and the waiter pulled out a chair for Hattie while pointing Rayford to the one next to her, Rayford was still thinking of appearances. He sat directly across from Hattie, knowing they would nearly have to shout to hear each other in the noisy place. The waiter hesitated, looking irritated, and finally moving Rayford’s tableware back to in front of him. That was something Hattie and Rayford might have chuckled over in their past, which included a half-dozen clandestine dinners where each seemed to be wondering what the other was thinking about their future. Hattie had been more flirtatious than Rayford, though he had never discouraged her.</blockquote>Blame the waiter, blame Hattie, nothing is ever Rayford’s fault.<blockquote>In the past, when they were playing around the edges of an affair of the mind, Rayford had to remind Hattie to order and then encourage her to eat. Her attention had been riveted on him, and he had found that flattering and alluring. Now the opposite seemed the case.Hattie studied her menu as if she faced a final exam on it in the morning. She was as beautiful as ever, now 29 and pregnant for the first time. She was early enough along that no one would know unless she told them. She had told Rayford and Amanda the last time they were together. At the time she seemed thrilled, proud of her new diamond, and eager to talk about her pending marriage. She had told Amanda that Nicolae was “going to make an honest woman of me yet.”Hattie was wearing her ostentatious engagement ring; however, the diamond was turned inward toward her palm so only the band was visible. Hattie was clearly not a happy woman, and Rayford wondered if this all stemmed from her getting the cold shoulder from Nicolae at the airport. He wanted to ask her, but this meeting was her idea. She would say what she wanted to say soon enough.</blockquote>We’ll hear what Hattie has to say next week. Unfortunately though, we’ll only get to hear it filtered through the distorting, condescending lens of Rayford’s point of view.- – - – - – - – - – - -* Also, if Hattie is right that the potentate wouldn’t want 24/7 coverage of his World War depressing people, then this coverage would not be “on every station.” The Antichrist owns and controls every station. They broadcast whatever he wants them to broadcast.** Because, in Tim LaHaye’s theology, Jews are just a special sub-category of “the unsaved.” LaHaye, like most premillennial dispensationalist “Bible prophecy” enthusiasts, believes in hard <a class="ext-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersessionism" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="">supersessionism</a> — a theology in which real, true Christians replace the Jews as God’s chosen people and the beneficiaries of all the promises God ever made to the people of Israel.LaHaye’s complicated theology requires this supersessionism for a variety of complicated reasons that we don’t need to explore here. But I also think the illogic of this view is appealing to LaHaye. Just consider another piece of his life’s work — promoting his wife’s anti-feminist lobbying group, Concerned Women for America. Beverly LaHaye and her army of “concerned women” reject feminism because, in their mind, anyone who says women and men should be equal must hate men. Any effort to improve the lives of women is perceived as an attack on men. Take that same logic and apply it to the New Testament’s insistence that Gentile Christians do not need to become Jewish in order to be counted among the people of God. If that is good news for Gentiles, then by LaHaye-logic it must be bad news for Jews. Tim LaHaye makes the same odd leap here that his wife makes with regard to feminism: If Gentile Christians do not need to become Jewish in order to be counted among the people of God, he thinks, then Jews must have to become Gentile Christians.For the record, I think supersessionism is a really big mistake, but I tend to find the theological arguments about this confusing, so I’m not sure whether that makes me orthodox or a heretic. “Remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you.” <a class="ext-link" href="http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=241271573" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="">That seems clear enough</a>. I can’t make sense of any theology that sees value in being a wild branch grafted onto what it also says is a dead tree.<div class="nr_related_placeholder" data-permalink="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/07/19/nra-the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-world/" data-title="NRA: The Restaurant at the End of the World"></div><span class="st_facebook_vcount" displaytext="share" st_title="NRA: The Restaurant at the End of the World" st_url="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/07/19/nra-the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-world/"><span class="st_twitter_vcount" displaytext="share" st_title="NRA: The Restaurant at the End of the World" st_url="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/07/19/nra-the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-world/"><span class="st_email_vcount" displaytext="share" st_title="NRA: The Restaurant at the End of the World" st_url="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/07/19/nra-the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-world/"><span class="st_sharethis_vcount" displaytext="share" st_title="NRA: The Restaurant at the End of the World" st_url="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/07/19/nra-the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-world/"><span class="st_plusone_vcount" displaytext="share" st_title="NRA: The Restaurant at the End of the World" st_url="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/07/19/nra-the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-world/"></div> Thu, 24 Jul 2014 07:00:27 -0000 NRA: The imminent Rapture is not imminent http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/07/26/nra-the-imminent-rapture-is-not-imminent/ <div class="entry-content">Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 167-174During a long, rambling conversation over dessert with Rayford Steele, Hattie Durham reminds her former non-boyfriend that he was always too old for her anyway. “[Buck] and I are closer in age,” she says.She underscores the point on the following page, saying of Nicolae Carpathia: “He was only about as much older than Buck as Buck was older than I.” At that point I felt like I was reading a word problem from the PSATs (“Rayford is twice as old as Hattie. Nicolae is as much older than Buck as Buck is older than Hattie. If Hattie is 22 years old, what color is the Norwegian’s house?”).This discussion of the characters’ relative ages got me to thinking about my own age relative to theirs — and that’s a disastrous line of thinking when it comes to the central claim of these books. Buck Williams was 29 years old in the first book of this series, which was published in 1995. In 1995, I was 27 years old, so Buck is two years older than me.<div class="wp-caption alignright" id="attachment_16543" style="width: 310px"><a class="ext-link" data-wpel-target="_blank" href="http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/slacktivist/files/2013/07/BladeRunner.jpg" rel="external nofollow" title=""><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-16543" height="300" src="http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/slacktivist/files/2013/07/BladeRunner.jpg" width="300" /></a>Bladerunner (1982).</div>That would mean that today, in 2013, Buck is 47 years old. But Buck Williams doesn’t get to live to see 47 because seven years after these books begin, Turbo Jesus comes back and destroys life, the universe and everything. So the world was supposed to end in 2002.Spoiler alert: The world did not end in 2002.Heck, in 2002, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins hadn’t even finished writing this series of books.But wait, that’s not entirely fair. That first book wasn’t set in 1995. It was set in an undefined not-so-distant future. The problem is that the not-so-distance between 1995 and this future is asked to serve two contradictory functions.On the one hand, this distance must be very, very short because the story begins with the Rapture. LaHaye, like everyone who believes in the idea of the Rapture, believes that it is imminent. <a class="ext-link" data-wpel-target="_blank" href="http://lmgtfy.com/?q=imminent+rapture" rel="external nofollow" title="">Type “Imminent Rapture” into Google</a> and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of results, even though the phrase is redundant. To believe in the Rapture is to believe that it could occur at any second — maybe this very day, maybe this very hour, maybe before you finish reading this post or even this sentence! (Phew — looks like we’re all still here.)A Rapture-believer like Tim LaHaye cannot provide one of those sci-fi introductions when telling a Rapture story. It cannot be specific, like the first lines of John Carpenter’s 1981 film Escape from New York: “In 1988, the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent. …” No one knows the day or the hour of when the Rapture will come. But it is undoubtedly imminent. No one knows the day or the hour, but it must always be possible that it is this day and this hour.The imminence of the Rapture means that this book, published in 1995, also had to, at least in a sense, be set in the world of 1995. The story couldn’t include any elements that would have seemed “futuristic” in 1995 — flying cars, rocket packs, domed cities, cell phones, wi-fi, a black president, etc. All of those would have signaled that the Rapture is not imminent, but some future event still years or even generations away. They would serve to increase the not-so-distance of the book’s future setting, contradicting the imminent-Rapture requirement that this not-so-distance be as short as possible.The imminent Rapture requires that this story be set in a present that’s just about to happen. That presented Jerry Jenkins with a bit of a dilemma as it took the authors 12 years to finish publishing their narrative of how they believe the final seven years of history will unfold. Jenkins needed to preserve the Rapture’s imminence by avoiding futuristic technological details and only including the technology of the present day, but the present-day technology of 2007 was quite different from the present-day technology of 1995. Jenkins’ cleverly pragmatic response to this problem was simply to incorporate new technologies as they arose while pretending this doesn’t create any anachronistic conflicts between his earlier books and his later ones. So in the first book we have airport pay-phones (ask your parents) and by the third book we have cell phones. That can sometimes be jarring, but I give Jenkins a pass on this because telling a story set in the imminent future is a difficult business.The one bit of futuristic technology the authors do include in their story is Dr. Chaim Rosenzweig’s Miracle Formula. The chemistry and biology of this seems so unlike anything possible today that the presence of such a formula in our story seems to push its setting decades further into the future, destroying the whole sense that the Rapture it describes might be “imminent.”I suppose the authors might counter that Rosenzweig’s formula wasn’t so much a scientific breakthrough as it was an actual miracle. Like the Rapture itself, it was an act of divine intervention in the natural world and thus, like the Rapture itself, something that might be regarded as imminent. That’s a bit unsatisfying, though. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, any act of miraculous intervention is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology.The larger problem for the authors and for their insistence on the imminence of this story is that their focus on avoiding futuristic technology didn’t extend to an avoidance of futuristic politics. The political world in which Left Behind (1995) is set has as much relation to present-day politics as the technological world of Star Trek has to present-day technology. Peace in the Middle East, for example, is presented as a fait accompli. Israel is said to be at peace with all of its immediate neighbors — a state of affairs the authors describe as somehow involving Israel absorbing all of its immediate neighbors, annexing much of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt without disrupting or disturbing the residents of those countries while also not altering in any way the distinctive identity of Israel as a Jewish nation.Such a development doesn’t seem particularly imminent. It seems utterly unlikely, if not impossible. For the authors, though, this is something that will and must happen — a fulfillment of what they believe is divine prophecy. They also believe this to be a necessary precondition for the “imminent” Rapture. Let’s play along with that idea as best we can. Forget about 1995, start with today, July 26, 2013. How long do you imagine it would take to get us from where we are today to this prophesied future world of a Greater Israel beloved and unthreatened by those neighbors it hasn’t yet absorbed? Can you imagine this happening in a single decade? A single generation? A single century?I can’t. And if this development is a prerequisite for the Rapture — if this must be accomplished before the Rapture can occur — then it seems to me that this Rapture cannot be in any way described as imminent. If this is a necessary precursor to the Rapture, then — based on Tim LaHaye’s own rules of “Bible prophecy” — the odds are that we’ll see a colony on Mars long before this “imminent” Rapture could ever occur.And keep in mind that these books are about prophecy, not playful prediction. If the future they foretell does not come to pass as they foretell it, then these books utterly fail. That is their central claim.That makes for a very different sort of problem than the fun-but-mistaken discussion of the supposedly failed predictions of science fiction stories. George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1949. I quoted from Escape From New York above, which described a future world of 1988 in which Manhattan had been transformed into a penal colony. The image above is from the 1982 movie Blade Runner, which portrayed the Los Angeles of 2019 (getting close!) as a cramped city wracked by climate disruption and police drones (getting close!). But Blade Runner also predicted “off-world colonies” and androids indistinguishable from their human creators — developments that seem more than six years distant from our present. Or consider one of my favorite books, Infinite Jest, which depicted the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment as a 2009 that wasn’t even called “2009.” David Foster Wallace nearly predicted Netflix, but northern New England hasn’t been transformed into a concavity overrun with mutant feral hamsters, so he loses points for “accuracy” there.But this game of spot-the-failed predictions misrepresents what those stories are about. They’re not about the future, but about the present. The point wasn’t an attempt to make an accurate prediction about where we are inevitably headed, but a way of using such predictions as a mirror to reflect and examine where we are now. The words on the screen in that still from Blade Runner really mean just the same thing as the words at the beginning of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil: “Somewhere in the 20th Century.” Those stories aren’t predictions about the future, but rather commentaries on the present (and on the perennial).That’s also true for the alleged source material for the Left Behind series — the apocalyptic literature of the Bible. Apocalyptic literature is not making predictions about the future, but rather it attempts to unveil (“Revelation”) the true reality of the present or perennial human condition. It is prophetic in the sense that, like the prophets, it passes judgment on the world and renders a verdict. But it is not meant to be “prophetic” in the carnival-huckster sense of foretelling future events.Unfortunately for LaHaye and Jenkins, their books are meant to be predictive “prophecies” in that latter sense. These books are fictional, but they’re meant to provide a fictionalized description of future events that will occur just as described — a kind of historical fiction about the future. That means the standard for accuracy that it would be unfair to apply to 1984 or to Blade Runner must be applied to these books. By fudging on the precise year in which their story is set they don’t allow us to state conclusively that their predictions have failed and that their prophecies have gone unfulfilled. But we can state conclusively that the imminent “Rapture” they continue to prophesy was not and is not and cannot be “imminent.”This may seem like an overlong response to just a couple of sentences from Hattie in this section of Nicolae, but her whole conversation with Rayford is infused with her nostalgic musing about her past. That past, even as sketchily and carelessly described by Jenkins, is situated in time. Combined, then, with Hattie’s discussion of all the characters’ ages one gets a clearer sense of when the imminent present of this scene is set — and that actually seems to be earlier than 1995.<blockquote>“Think about it, Rayford. All I ever wanted to be was a flight attendant. The entire cheerleading squad at Maine East High School wanted to be flight attendants. We all applied, but I was the only one who made it. I was so proud. …”</blockquote>Hattie is supposed to be a member of Generation X, but Jenkins describes her childhood dreams and teenage fantasies using his own Baby Boomer imagination. This seems like something out of the world of Bye Bye Birdie or Mad Men. If Hattie grew up reading <a class="ext-link" data-wpel-target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicki_Barr_Flight_Stewardess_Series" rel="external nofollow" title="">Vicki Barr Flight Stewardess</a> books as a child and she’s in her early 20s, then this story can’t be set much later than the Reagan years — 1985 rather than 1995.Back in 1985, of course, Tim LaHaye was preaching about the same “Bible prophecies” he later fictionalized in 1995 and that he’s still preaching today in 2013. He was preaching that the central focus of every Christians’ life ought to be the Rapture. And the Rapture, he said in 1985, is imminent.<div class="nr_related_placeholder" data-permalink="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/07/26/nra-the-imminent-rapture-is-not-imminent/" data-title="NRA: The imminent Rapture is not imminent"></div></div> Fri, 25 Jul 2014 07:00:28 -0000 NRA: What Would Rayford Do? (Do the opposite) http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/08/09/nra-what-would-rayford-do-do-the-opposite/ <div class="entry-content">Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 165-174This chapter offers scenes featuring Rayford Steele at his Rayfordiest.He and Hattie Durham are at a restaurant. That gives Rayford another chance to interact with people who are at work, and whether that’s at a restaurant, an airport, a store or a traffic stop, it’s an opportunity for more cringe-inducing Rayfordishness:<blockquote>They were led to a table set for four. But even though two busboys hurried out to clear away two sets of dinnerware, and the waiter pulled out a chair for Hattie while pointing Rayford to the one next to her, Rayford was still thinking of appearances. He sat directly across from Hattie, knowing they would nearly have to shout to hear each other in the noisy place. The waiter hesitated, looking irritated, and finally moved Rayford’s tableware back to in front of him. That was something Hattie and Rayford might have chuckled over in their past. …</blockquote>To fully appreciate the Rayfordosity on display here, keep in mind that this isn’t just any restaurant. This is Hattie’s restaurant. “Hattie herself had helped conceive it,” we are told. Rayford knows this, but — despite several pages of small talk in this chapter — he never says anything to her about it. No comments or compliments on the decor or the place’s success. No questions conveying an interest in her project. No acknowledging her work at all.Most of us, on visiting a restaurant with an acquaintance who helped design the place, would find something encouraging to say about it, even if the place was a total trainwreck. “You must have had fun bringing all this together,” or some other such vaguely positive comment would seem like the least one should say. Hattie’s Global Bistro, we’re told, is doing very well. It’s a magnet drawing discerning patrons who have come from all over the world to work in the new global capital city.Yet it never occurs to Rayford to say one word about it. Instead, within five minutes of arriving he’s giving the waiters a hard time for no reason (“I’d prefer to sit here, please,” would have avoided the irritation he seems to have provoked deliberately), rolling his eyes as though visiting such a restaurant is an ordeal. And he imagines that Hattie would be “chuckling” over this behavior if she weren’t otherwise in a bad mood.The irony is that Rayford’s appalling behavior stems from his “thinking about appearances.” His aim, on arriving at the restaurant, was to appear virtuous — and he seems to believe he succeeded at doing so. He and the authors both seem wholly unaware that the main appearance he is creating is that of being a callous, condescending jerk.That gets at the core of what it means to be Rayford Steele: the vast chasm between how he imagines he appears to others and how he actually is. That difference is a product, in part, of the fact that he seems to spend a great deal of time preoccupied with imagining how he appears to others and of the related fact that he is terrible at doing so accurately.Consider this part of his conversation with Hattie, where he seems to think that imposing a lawyerly control on the terms of their former flirtation is a better way of asserting his goodness than, say, the long-delayed apology Hattie deserves from him:<blockquote>“Well, to tell you the truth, when you dumped me –”“Hattie, I never dumped you. There was nothing to dump. We were not an item.”“Yet.”“OK, yet,” he said. “That’s fair. But you have to admit there had been no commitment or even an expression of a commitment.”“There had been plenty of signals, Rayford.”“I have to acknowledge that. Still, it’s unfair to say I dumped you.”</blockquote>One of the things that I find fascinating about Rayford Steele is the way he subverts the readers’ expectations about the significance of a character’s motive. Broadly speaking, we expect good characters to have good motives and evil characters to have evil motives. That’s a conventional way of distinguishing between the heroes and the villains of a story. Rayford doesn’t fit into such tidy categories. He has horrible motives, but he seems to believe — sincerely — that his motives are good. He’s a bad guy who thinks he’s one of the good guys, a cad who thinks he’s a gentleman, a jerk who thinks he’s a mensch, a negligent bystander who thinks he’s a hero.This also separates Rayford from antihero protagonists. Antiheros may spend time “thinking about appearances,” but they tend to be aware of the difference between the appearances they strive to project and the characters they actually are. Antiheroes tend to be aware of their own conflicted motives.With an antihero, redemption is always a possibility. Think of Tony Soprano. One could argue that the theme of The Sopranos was that Tony knew he needed to change to become a better person, and he even seemed to want to change to become a better person, and yet at every opportunity he chose not to. The show would have been a stagnant, repetitive mess except that Tony was perpetually aware of his need for redemption, of the possibility of choosing it, and of the cost of that choice.<div class="wp-caption alignright" id="attachment_16959" style="width: 239px"><a class="ext-link" data-wpel-target="_blank" href="http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/slacktivist/files/2013/08/RumPunch.jpg" rel="external nofollow" title=""><img alt="" class=" wp-image-16959 " height="256" src="http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/slacktivist/files/2013/08/RumPunch.jpg" width="229" /></a>The difference between a literary masterpiece and something else can sometimes boil down to whether the artifice of the unreliable narrator is conscious or unconscious.</div>Rayford is not aware of any of that. He thinks of redemption only in the past tense. Where The Sopranos gave us an antihero struggling, and failing, with the ever-present possibility of redemption, Left Behind gives us a Rayford, a man so wholly entombed in his delusion that he can’t even imagine changing or choosing or growing.Whenever I think about this, trying to plumb the bottomless depths of Rayford’s shallowness, I’m tempted to think of him as a remarkable literary creation. He epitomizes the kind of delusional narcissism that enables one to enable evil. There are layers of complexity to his simple-minded self-absorption. Had any of that been a deliberate effect intended by his creators, these books might be read in literature classes. Jerry Jenkins — despite his shortcomings as a stylist, his tin ear for dialogue, and his delirious disregard for continuity and research — might be spoken of in the same sentences as Nabokov or Dostoevsky or, at least, David Chase.But we don’t commend the authors for this achievement because they seem as wholly ensconced within Rayford’s delusion as Rayford is himself.It almost seems unfair that such an accidental, unintentional achievement isn’t recognized. I suppose that’s partly because such accidents are all too common. Consider, for example, the polar opposite appreciation and literary reputation of Lolita and <a class="ext-link" data-wpel-target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Known-Unknown-Memoir-Donald-Rumsfeld/dp/159523084X" rel="external nofollow" title="">Known and Unknown</a>. Both books feature an unreliable narrator desperate to charm the reader into forgiving the unforgivable by weaving a tapestry of self-serving rationalizations. Both narrative voices are a painstaking construct — the product of labor and artifice. Yet the former book is hailed as a masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of all time while the latter collects dust on remainder tables as an unwelcome relic from a time most of us prefer not to remember.But imagine if “Donald Rumsfeld” was a wholly imaginary character and that the events recounted in his memoir were audacious fiction, a wicked satire describing an implausible campaign of deceit that ultimately ensnared even the deceivers themselves, leading to a catastrophically lethal blunder in which trillions were squandered and hundreds of thousands slain. Yet despite that all-too-predictable outcome, this fictional narrator with the oddly Dickensian name is unrepentant, effusively praising himself as a hero and a champion of virtue. If it were fiction — the product of conscious artifice rather than of unconscious artifice – Known and Unknown would be on the syllabus of English literature classes everywhere.Now imagine the other side. What if Lolita was actually a memoir, written by a real-life Humbert Humbert? All that gorgeous prose would be reviled and rejected. Copies of the book would sit, unwanted and unread alongside copies of O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It.Rayford Steele is, in his own way, a literary achievement that ranks up there with Humbert Humbert and the Underground Man, and with “Donald Rumsfeld” and “O.J. Simpson.” But because, like those last two, Rayford was not a deliberate artistic creation, he isn’t celebrated as such.I don’t want to celebrate Rayford, but I do want to learn from him. He has a great deal to teach us. And so do his creators.That, more than anything else, is why I’m still reading these books after nearly 10 years (!) of slogging through them page-by-ludicrous-page.I’ve seen this referred to as “hate-reading” — analogous to the diversion of “hate-watching” so-bad-it’s-good TV shows or movies just for the fun of mocking their shortcomings and reveling in their failures. I appreciate the pleasures afforded by this pastime. It can be a lot of fun in small doses — especially in the company of quick-witted friends.But hate-watching for its own sake can’t be sustained very long before it turns into something else. The whole point of the exercise isn’t just to absorb the awfulness of some so-bad-it’s-good movie or show, but to respond to it. And that response leads to something richer than just quips and mockery.Just responding, “This is bad,” is unsatisfying. It lacks specificity. To get more specific — to identify and articulate that specificity — means switching from statements to questions. Why is this bad. How is this bad?And that, in turn, leads to bigger questions: What is the nature of badness in general? What is the precise nature of the precise badness we’re witnessing here? What, if anything, would make this good? What is the nature of goodness?These questions are not asked explicitly or didactically — that would ruin all the fun of getting together with your friends to watch Plan Nine From Outer Space or The Real Housewives of New Jersey. But such questions are also unavoidable if you want to say anything funny, clever or incisive. Without considering those questions on some level, you’d be left with nothing but puns and funny noises. (Not that I’m opposed to puns and funny noises — I still giggle at <a class="ext-link" data-wpel-target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1hqfC0l5Pg" rel="external nofollow" title="">this YouTube classic starring Robert Tilton</a>. But we surely there are also more substantial critiques that need to be made of Tilton’s brand of deceitful, predatory sanctimony.)Even if you only start asking such questions in order to sharpen the edge of your mockery, thinking about such questions leads you beyond mere hate-watching and into something more like what we could call apophatic criticism.*“Apophatic” is a fancy word from the world of theology. It usually refers to a kind of negative theology in which we strive to clarify the nature and character of God by saying what God is not like. The idea was put forward by folks like Maimonides and Dr. Seuss (“the way to find a certain something is to find out where it’s not”).The idea of “negative theology” sometimes gets a negative response because the word “negative,” of course, has negative connotations. So some people hear that word “negative” and assume that negative theology must involve destruction — a tearing down or a tearing apart. But it’s actually a helpful approach that yields positive results. Negative theology allows us to be more constructive — to speak with greater clarity and confidence about the nature of God than we are able to do when attempting to make “positive” statements, which tend to be inadequate, anthropomorphic, or limiting and, therefore, misleading.**That apophatic principle from The Cat in the Hat is what allows us to learn so much from the World’s Worst Books. These books are an almanac of awful — an exhaustive catalogue of “where it’s not” that enables us to better locate many certain somethings. These books fail on every level — storytelling, characterization, continuity, theology, politics, ethics, logic. They’re also clearly “so-bad-they’re-good,” and thus suitable for the amusement of hate-watching, but more than that, they are instructively bad. Every page provides an opportunity to ask all those questions above — an exercise in negative theology, or negative literary criticism, or negative ethics.We can learn, in other words, how not to do theology, how not to tell stories, how not to treat others.This is the value of contemplating Rayford Steele in all of his insufferable, overwhelming Rayforditude. Rayford serves — albeit unintentionally — as a flashing red danger sign warning us of the perils of delusional narcissism. He is worth studying and contemplating in the same way that Charles Sheldon taught us to contemplate Christ. “What would Jesus do?” Sheldon famously asked. And we can ask — just as fruitfully — “What would Rayford do?”The difference there, of course, is that we should then make sure we’re not doing it.If you’re a storyteller and you’re trying to write a story with an actual hero, ask WWRD? Then write the opposite.If you want to be the hero of your own story and of your own life, ask WWRD? Then do the opposite.Try it out next time you’re at a restaurant and the waiter comes to your table. WWRD? Do the opposite. You’ll make one person’s day and help to make the world a better place.- – - – - – - – - – - -* We shouldn’t make too much of this distinction between “hate-watching” and what I’m describing here as an “apophatic” approach. Don’t conclude that the former is frivolous or that the latter is ponderous. The whole point of hate-watching, after all, is to say something funny — and that means to say something true. So the real difference here may be something more like the difference between poetry and prose.** This is part of why so many of my favorite bloggers are atheists — and why I often find myself agreeing with what they think and write about God. We can agree on the statement “God is not X,” even if we still disagree on the shorter, more sweeping statement, “God is not.” The <a class="ext-link" data-wpel-target="_blank" href="http://www.patheos.com/Atheist.html" rel="external nofollow" title="">atheist channel here at Patheos</a> features several really excellent apophatic theologians.<div class="nr_related_placeholder" data-permalink="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/08/09/nra-what-would-rayford-do-do-the-opposite/" data-title="NRA: What Would Rayford Do? (Do the opposite)"></div> </div> Sat, 26 Jul 2014 07:00:31 -0000