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L.B.: The Watchmen

L.B.: The Watchmen

Last updated on: May 4, 2007 at 11:51 am by Fred Clark

L.B.: The Watchmen 2007-05-04T11:51:57-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Slight tangent for a look at an all-too-real example of why the World's Worst Books are worth exploring as more than just a celebration of wretched writing.

Here's CNN host Glenn Beck:

Are the cataclysmic events of 9/11, Katrina, tsunami, famine and the threat of global pandemic signs we`re living in the end times?

One world government, one world economy, one world vision. Are we creeping even closer to the Book of Revelations` countdown to doomsday? And does an age-old prophecy foretell a Russian-Iranian alliance against Israel as well as a nuclear showdown? Apocalypse now?

We`ll search for answers with Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the authors of the wildly successful "Left Behind" series and acclaimed author Joel Rosenberg.

This is on CNN, "the most trusted name in news."

Beck's introduction carefully frames the discussion that is to follow. He presents this list of calamities and suggests that he's summarizing something from the "Book of Revelations [sic]," a text he describes as a "countdown to doomsday." All of this has less to do with the actual final book of the New Testament than it does with a recent and parochial misreading of that book — a heresy popularized by his guests.

His guests, our friends L&J and the L&J-wannabe Joel Rosenberg, happily reinforce this idea — pretending that their garbled eisegesis does not, in fact, contradict what the vast majority of Christians have understood and taught throughout history.

Worse than that, they misrepresent their misreading — claiming that they differ from the orthodox reading only by interpreting Revelation more "literally." Let's be clear: there is nothing literal about this convoluted, herky-jerky, cut-and-paste collage. Their reading is neither literal nor linear — arbitrarily leaping about from Revelation to Ezekiel to Zechariah to John Birch, leaving no context intact.

Premillennial dispensationalism is as far from a "literal" reading as you can get. These folks are not orthodox Christians and they're not illiteralist "fundamentalists" either. So don't buy their pose.

Much of Beck's interview with LaHaye and Jenkins is like a second-rate imitation of Jack Van Impe's show. Jack & Rexella are much better at the whole today's-headlines-as-fulfillment-of-last-days-prophecy thing. But Jack has to buy his own airtime — he doesn't have his own prime-time show on CNN.

The full transcript of Beck's show is worth muddling through for accidental humor, like this choice quote:

The end of the world is anything but entertainment to the people I have at the table with me, Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, authors of the popular "Left Behind" books …

It's clear throughout the interview that CNN host Glenn Beck is more than a casual observer of LaHaye's books. He's a true believer. Consider this odd rant about EZ-Pass — it's not the work of a tourist or outsider, but of a PMD native-speaker:

BECK: Joel, the things like EZ Pass. Imagine what Hitler could have done with EZ Pass?

ROSENBERG: The Book of Revelation, the apostle John, envisions a world as God, I think prophecy is an intercept from the mind of God. And the apostle John envisions a one-world economic system and everybody having a mark on their right hand or on their forehead that allows them to buy and sell goods and services.

Well, we now have the technology, both with credit cards and EZ Pass systems. You don`t really have to stop at a toll booth. You just — your car is actually swiping through just like an ATM card swipes through. And there — scientists are actually testing now these types of chips, because if you lose all of your — you lose your wallet, you lose everything now.

BECK: Yes.

ROSENBERG: And why not just embed things?

BECK: I remember in the late 1990s, Madeleine Albright — I believe it was Madeleine Albright — went and saw an RFID chip that you could use for finance where you could go into a store, just grab what you want and walk out, and you`d be checked out automatically.

Follow the fever-stream, EZ-Pass, Hitler, mark of the beast, former U.N. Ambassador. Beck knows this stuff from the inside. He believes it. All of the weird conspiratorial logic we've seen at work in the books is at work here. The U.N. as federation of planets. The paranoid suspicion of "peacemakers." The vigilance against the Antichrist as a wolf-in-sheep's clothing. It's all right there. On CNN. From the CNN host.

Media Matters quotes Beck comparing Al Gore to Hitler:

"Now, I'm not saying that anybody's going to — you know Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world. That is the goal."

That's not just a Hitler reference, that's a Nicolae Carpathia reference. For those of you who were asking about Left Behind fanfic, there it is.

Glenn Beck said that on his radio show as part of his promotion of his CNN special on global warming, which he says presents "the other side of the debate" on the subject.

So there you have it. This is the "other side" of the debate: Global warming is part of Nicolae Carpathia's conspiracy to create a one-world government through the U.N. Once you realize that there's really no need to look any closer at what all his scientist/atheist pawns are saying. Your only duty, as a member of the Tribulation Force, is to warn others of the danger represented by Gore and Stonagal, the Trilateral Commission and the interJnationEal banWkerS as they set the stage for Carpathia's reign.

Beck explicitly calls for such vigilance by attempting to cite a passage from the prophet Ezekiel:

BECK: This is why — and I'm sorry, I think it's at the beginning of Ezekiel 34, or is it 35, where it says, "There will be watchmen, and I will appoint a watchman." Is it 34?

LAHAYE: Thirty-four.

BECK: Yes, right at the beginning. That's us, isn't it? I mean, that's the people who — anybody who's watching this and going, "I believe. You know what? I got to start reading up, and find out what's going on in the world, and find out all the events, and then tie it in." That's who you are.

If you are one of these people that are at all connecting with it, you've got to read Ezekiel 34, because it has quite a promise and quite a — it's a commandment. It's got a promise and a warning. And if you don't stand up and say something, you're in trouble.

Actually, the "watchman" bit is in Ezekiel 33. Beck's interpretation of this passage is rather novel. Ezekiel himself would not have taken kindly to the idea that his calling as a prophet was merely that of a soothsayer or augurer.*

But the delightful thing here is not just that LaHaye was so confidently wrong about the chapter in question (you'd never see Jack Van Impe making that kind of rookie mistake), the really delightful thing is what Ezekiel 34 has to say. Here the watchman Ezekiel has been told to prophesy to the "shepherds" of Israel — those who bear responsibility for the people, whether that responsibility be spiritual or temporal, ecclesiastical or political. Ezekiel 34, in other words, is addressed to people like the Rev. Tim LaHaye:

Woe to the shepherds of Israel who only take care of themselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd …

Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD … I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my flock. I will remove them from tending the flock … I will rescue my flock from their mouths, and it will no longer be food for them.

Ezekiel 34 is about a day of reckoning, a judgment day, an apocalypse. Like every apocalypse, it offers the hope of justice, the hope that the weak, the sick, the injured and the lost will finally get what's coming to them. And the fat and negligent powerful? They'll get what's coming to them. That's what Ezekiel's apocalypse means and that's what John's Apocalypse means.

To say it means something else, as LaHaye and Jenkins do, is to be a bad shepherd. And bad shepherds, the watchman says, will be held accountable.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* Based on Beck's fuzzy recalling of this text, and especially that hortatory summary about "a promise and a warning," I'd guess that he's repeating something he heard in a sermon. Some preacher, realizing that he had an influential journalist TV host sitting in the pews, turned to Ezekiel's "watchman" passage as a way of reminding this prominent parishioner of his responsibility to "the people" and the truth. It was a noble attempt, but the message got reinterpreted through the filter of L&J's End Times mania, so it didn't take.

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