How often have you heard or read the phrase “the End Times”? Last week, the evangelizing author Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), died at the age of 95. The world’s press took relatively little note of this, even though Planet Earth is sometimes said to have been the single best-selling non-fiction book of the 1970s. But even this surely understates the global cultural influence of Lindsey’s book. For many non-Christians, the variety of “dispensational premillennialism” he propagated just is their idea of Christianity, received at second hand from mass-media evangelists and religious pamphlets.
Throughout history, theologians have wrestled with the incomprehensibly cryptic Book of Revelation, whose very place in Holy Scripture was contested in early Christianity. There have always been those who regard the book’s parade of bizarre imagery as an allegorical map of the future — a prophetic description of horrible events leading to Christ’s return and the Last Judgment. (And then again, it may be a sort of satire of the author’s own era.)
The postwar foundation of a Jewish state in the Holy Land created natural curiosity in the minds of these Bible-decoders, whose scholarship, if that’s the word, is regarded as inadvisable or even heretical by mainstream Christians. The Jews’ return to Israel is one of the few clear-cut prophetic guarantees in the Bible, and here it was, happening before everyone’s eyes.
When Israel reacquired the whole of Jerusalem a couple of decades later, many felt that the End Times were imminent. As it happens, a lot of otherwise thoroughly secular people felt the same way at the same time, with concerns about overpopulation and pollution rocketing to the top of the political agenda.
The moment was right for Lindsey, a Dallas Theological Seminary graduate with a gift for soft-soap exegesis, to throw all these ideas and feelings into a blender. Anyone who writes for a living could benefit from studying the Reader’s Digest-influenced technique of The Late Great Planet Earth, which starts by pointing out that Christians all live according to, and give special respect to, the ancient wisdom of the Jewish people. Those people, God’s people, once took prophecy very seriously as an activity, and believed that men were occasionally singled out by God to know the future.
We should therefore, as Christians, look actively for biblical hints of what may be about to happen, lest it take us unawares. What could be more reasonable, apart from the inconvenient fact that Christ himself warned explicitly against trying to guess the timing of the world’s end?
The Late Great Planet Earth pays some attention to the Old Testament prophets, but the main thrust of the book is the decoding of Revelation, and the effect has been to create a variety of Protestantism in which Revelation has almost equal weight with that of the Gospels. I grew up in a region where premillennialism was culturally dominant: I had to grow up, read books and find out that most Christians don’t believe in a literal rapture of the faithful, much less an imminent one, or think that the Battle of Armageddon will be a four-way fight between the Russians, the Arabs, the Europeans and the Chinese.
Funnily enough, Lindsey absolutely could not find a trace of the United States anywhere in the Bible, leading him to conclude that the U.S. was unlikely to participate in the last war, and was therefore certain to enter a precipitous decline in economic and strategic power — probably because of some sneaky Soviet attack.
That’s held up as well as most of his prophecies. Lindsey was vague about timelines, but certainly did not think in 1970 that there would be a year 1990. He was sure that the return of the Jews to Israel would be followed immediately by the demolition of the Dome of the Rock, which is still there in 2024, and the building of the Third Jewish Temple, which still ain’t.
The Late Great Planet Earth had a long series of ludicrous and inevitable sequels as the original prophecies passed their expiration date and had to be subtly revised. But while the Cold War was still in progress, millenarian feelings were inescapable, and Lindsey did as much as anyone to make them so. Our secular teachers were propagandizing us endlessly about the imminent end of the world even as our evangelical friends were living with the same expectation and more than happy to tell you all about it. There is a part of the Generation X brain, religious or not, that wakes up in the morning in the year 2024 and subconsciously thinks, “Huh. It’s all still here.”
— Colby Cosh
