Rod Dreher: The UFOs are full of demonic entities, you see

Hal Lindsey and Larry Norman hardly exhausted the market for bad popular theology lol.

Rod Dreher is going to need a better book, a degree in Greek from Dallas Theological Seminary, and three more wives if he hopes ever to compete with Hal Lindsey

 

 

 Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth was translated into 50 languages and sold 35 million copies by the year 2000.

In 2020 Dreher reported his The Benedict Option had sold over 70,000 copies. His Live Not By Lies has sold over 200,000 copies, "by far my bestselling book".

 

Meanwhile the British and Foreign Bible Society estimated in 2021 that printed copies of the Bible number somewhere between 5 and 7 billion, as reported here.  Just between the invention of the printing press in 1454 and 1815, it is estimated that 1.3 billion copies alone were produced.

 

Signs and wonders, miracles and prophecies, sell.

 

Is it an accident then that Dreher's latest book is a book about all this woo-woo? "No one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Methinks of Lindsey Dreher doth protest too much.

 

"unconventional beliefs regarded as having little or no scientific basis, especially those relating to spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine: some kind of metaphysical woo-woo". 

 

Hal Lindsey's dispensational premillennialism really changed his life lol

 

 He got rich off the book, The Late, Great Planet Earth, 1970, and had four wives.

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.  

-- Romans 12:2

Lindsey accrued a fortune with his book sales, media appearances, and multimedia products. In 1977, Publisher’s Weekly described him as “an Adventist-and-Apocalypse evangelist who sports a Porsche racing jacket and tools around Los Angeles in a Mercedes 450 SI.” In 1981, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lindsey was making “thousands of dollars a week” from combined sales of books, films, and cassette tapes. He also kept up a busy schedule of public speaking and consulting, meeting with low- and mid-level government officials around the globe to advise them on the future. ...

Lindsey’s second divorce—and subsequent third and fourth marriages—raised questions about his character for many evangelicals. But the biggest blow to his reputation was his failed predictions.

More.

Mark Tooley correctly views Hal Lindsey, a disciple of Robert Thieme, among the vanguard of those who led the way to post-denominational evangelicalism, not mentioning the role of others in this such as street preacher and itinerant evangelist David Wilkerson, whose 1962 book The Cross and the Switchblade was immortalized by a film version starring Pat Boone, also in 1970.

 

 

 

Advent: The Season of Eschatological Denial

For the First Sunday of Advent, Nov. 29, the text for the sermon in the Presbyterian Church came from 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, the last verse of which speaks of "the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all his saints."

Nary a mention was made of the meaning of this text, even though the preacher carved it up into three's and expounded upon it at great length. He simply assumed that it was appropriate to the season of advent, of "coming," when we celebrate the coming of Jesus into the world. But the text, of course, does not refer to the birth of Jesus at all. It refers, instead, to the fervent expectation of the return of Jesus, that he would "be beside" us again soon, an expectation shared by Paul with most, if not all, Christians of the first century.

The underlying Greek word, parousia, in the Latin vulgate is adventu, which of course means "coming," but not the one we celebrate at Christmas. It is, rather, the final coming of the Lord to end history as we know it and commence the final judgment. It would be no babe, meek and mild, spreading peace on earth to men of good will, but a victorious king separating the wheat from the chaff, purifying the former and consuming the latter with the fire of divine justice.

The failure of Jesus to return "soon" caused a crisis for Christianity, the effects of which are detectable as much in the development of its practices and theology as they are in the development of the gospel texts themselves. It should not surprise us, however, that Christianity's devotees would fall back on more familiar conceptions and, for example, eventually co-opt the term advent for other purposes. In doing so they acquiesced to a very old idea of a seasonal round, in which the celebrating of the coming of Jesus into the world and his going out again was loosely made to coincide with the times of harvest and planting in the autumn and the spring. It was a concession to the rhythm of life going back millennia, and to the impulse of human beings to attach religious significance to these facts of existence. A paganus, a pagan, after all, was just a country boy, nothing more than a farmer who, like all his fellows, marked the times and the seasons with rites and rituals meant to enlist the blessing and deflect the displeasure of the gods on his efforts in the fields.

And so it is today. The typical Christian is a pagan with no more sense of urgency about the imminent return of Jesus than an audiophile has of the return of vinyl. Whether he celebrates a liturgical calendar or not, his life revolves around seasons just the same, more often than not "the kids are back in school," "spring break," and "summer vacation." He goes to church seeking God's blessings on his life all the same, so that he may excel at his career, place his children in good schools, take a nice trip somewhere in June, save for their college and his own retirement, and generally enjoy life, within limits if he is wise. There is no such thing today as a disciple, who leaves all and follows Jesus.

Some of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies and listened to Christian balladeers like Larry Norman or read The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey acquired a veneer of the expectation only to lose it again because we finally realized that almost every century since the first has seen such expectation frustrated, or we came to grips with the fact that just because the expectation was preserved on papyri doesn't necessarily make it true, or translatable to now.

If Christianity is to remain relevant to such-minded people, it must do better than yet one more celebration of the Savior's birth. Saved from what? And for what? More of the same, day after day, year upon year, only to "fly forgotten as a dream, dies at the opening day?"