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NRA: The only thing worse than the Antichrist

NRA: The only thing worse than the Antichrist

Last updated on: September 2, 2014 at 9:29 am by Fred Clark

NRA: The only thing worse than the Antichrist 2014-09-02T09:29:23-04:00 Fred Clark

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Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 242-244

In Tim LaHaye’s End-Times theology, the Antichrist is the ultimate Bad Guy — in every sense of the word “ultimate.” The Antichrist will be the final evil ruler in human history, and his evil will surpass that of all who came before.

Mainstream Christian teaching views biblical figures such as Moses, Joshua and David as precursors to a future Messiah who would fulfill and transcend their promise. LaHaye believes this is also true of every biblical villain and evil ruler. For him, Pharaoh, Ahab, Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus,* Herod and Nero* are all “types” and portents of the future Anti-Messiah who will fulfill and transcend every wicked scheme any of them imagined during the only time that matters — the early– mid– late– 20th 21st century, when the most important parts of the Bible will at last come true for the most important Christians who ever lived (us, obviously).

“Daniel’s dream of four beasts,” a 1528 woodcut by Jan Swart. (Because you have to go back several centuries to find an illustration of this thing that doesn’t look like a heavy metal album cover or an airbrushed painting from the side of a van.)

The ultimate, superlative evil of the Antichrist is a foundational, central principle of LaHaye’s biblical scheme. The Antichrist — a title that never actually appears in the Bible — is coming soon, LaHaye insists, and he will be the evilest evildoer who ever did evil.

We’ve already seen this idea demonstrated here in Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist. In the past few chapters, the Antichrist has slaughtered millions of his subjects — mostly for kicks and giggles. Nicolae used the pretext of a rumored uprising led by the former president of the former United States to launch nuclear strikes against major population centers, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London and Cairo. He didn’t have to kill all those people, but he wanted to because he’s evil, evil, eeeeeee-vil, mwaaaaa-hahahahaaaaa.

The Antichrist’s bombing campaign against millions of hapless, unarmed civilians was, in fact, continuing even while Buck Williams met with Tsion Ben-Judah to figure out some way to smuggle the former rabbi out of Israel. In a hideout just outside of Israel’s eastern border, they decided that the best way to get Ben-Judah out of Israel would be to re-enter that country via the Jordan River, then cross the entire country at its widest part and sneak him across the southwestern border into what used to be Egypt.

It’s not Egypt anymore, remember. It’s just the Egyptian District of the new “Global Community” empire of the Antichrist’s tyrannical one-world government — the worst and wickedest regime in the history of the world. And a couple days ago, millions of people were killed in that Egyptian District in nuclear strikes ordered by that same evil tyrant.

Egypt, in other words, seems like a particularly bad place to seek refuge. But then, since the Antichrist’s one-world government covers the entire world, almost everywhere seems just as bad. There is, in fact, only one place left on the entire planet that’s beyond the reach of this ultimate evil ruler. There is only one sovereign nation remaining outside of his reign of unsurpassed wickedness.

That one place is Israel — the very nation that Buck and Tsion are desperate to escape from.

The implication is clear. LaHaye’s ultimate, superlative evil isn’t the very worst thing after all. In his theology, there’s one thing that’s even worse than the Antichrist: Jews.

That’s an ugly idea. Just writing about the bald anti-Semitism that LaHaye expresses here feels dirty. I feel compelled to reiterate that I vehemently disagree with this — to clarify and re-clarify that these are LaHaye’s views I’m describing here, not my own. But is there any other way of interpreting the premise of this entire escape-from-Israel subplot?

Buck and Tsion are so desperate to get out of Israel that they don’t care that this means getting back into the Antichrist’s one-world tyranny. They’re treating the Antichrist as the lesser of two evils. That other “evil” — Israel — has just been portrayed as a murderous, dishonest regime bent on slaughtering anyone who speaks favorably of Jesus. After Ben-Judah converts to End-Times Christianity, the Jews of Israel slaughter his wife and children, beheading them in the street. And they’ve launched a nationwide manhunt intent on capturing the former rabbi and doing the same to him.

So, once again, Buck Williams is racing for safety in the arms of the Antichrist. He’s done this before, remember, back in the first book, when he cut a deal with Nicolae Carpathia, offering to bury his story about the Rockefellers (“Stonagal” — get it?) and the Illuminati in exchange for Nicolae’s promise of protection from their conspiracy of international bankers. (I suppose LaHaye could protest that episode wasn’t anti-Semitic because he carefully never says that they’re “international Jewish bankers,” but that’s like claiming you’re not spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories because you only ever refer to “The Protocol of the Elders” and leave off the last bit.)

Tim LaHaye always seems perplexed and angrily indignant when he’s accused of promoting anti-Semitism. He points to his unqualified support for the IDF and Likud, and his significant personal financial contributions, direct and indirect, for the defense of the State of Israel. That, he argues, should forever shield him from accusations of anti-Semitism — even if that support is all based on his presumption that Israel must be defended in order to play its role in his “Bible prophecies,” wherein every Jew who fails to convert to his version of Real, True Christianity will be mercilessly slaughtered by God.**

Whatever you make of LaHaye’s long track record as an outspoken “Friend of Israel,” the fact remains that in these books, Israel is far more anti-Christ than even the Antichrist himself. The escape sub-plot of this chapter was sparked by the slaughter of Ben-Judah’s newly Christian children — a not-so-subtle variation of the ancient blood libel that has served as a “Christian” pretext for the persecution of Jews for centuries.

Returning to this chapter after a brief hiatus, I was particularly struck by the form of Christianity to which Tsion Ben-Judah converted. His conversion is presented as the result of his supposed scholarly inquiry into the identity of the Messiah, which led him to conclude that only Jesus fits the bill. (This is unsurprising once you realize that Tsion’s research, as described by LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, seems to have consisted mainly of modern, Christian texts — the sort of Christian texts, in fact, that tend only to be read by people who already agree with them.)

But Tsion didn’t merely conclude that Jesus was/is the Messiah — he also came to embrace all of Tim LaHaye’s theology, including his supersessionism. That’s the pernicious belief that Jesus introduced a new covenant which supersedes God’s prior covenant with Abraham and his children. It means the church — the Gentile church — supplants and replaces Israel.

I haven’t previously paid much attention to that idea because it just seems kind of dumb. God’s promises to Abraham are from everlasting to everlasting, and that doesn’t really allow for an expiration date. (Also too, Romans.) But I’ve been thinking about this more lately due to this thoughtful sermon by Jason Micheli, and to the discussion at Syndicate of Willie James Jennings’ The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, both of which have made me think more about the pervasive repercussions of this Very Bad Idea and the myriad ways it has distorted western Christianity. I’ve begun to realize that this is something that needs to be cut away, root and branch.

The bottom line here is that Tim LaHaye’s End Times scheme is entirely dependent on his replacement theology.*** In LaHaye’s scheme, Jews are damned and deserve only damnation unless they say the magic prayer and convert to real, true Christianity. The character of Tsion Ben-Judah is the personification of this theology, but it’s not just Tsion, and it’s not just the awkward plotting and incoherent world-building of Jenkins’ border-crossing set piece. It’s everywhere in these books.

So, yes, this subplot, specifically, which is based on the idea that Buck and Tsion are better off under the rule of the Antichrist than they are among the Christ-hating Jews, is nastily anti-Semitic. But that’s just one particularly explicit example of the anti-Semitic theology that stains every page of these books.

And but so, that was all a bit abstract — focused more on Tim LaHaye’s atrocious theology than on Jerry Jenkins’ atrocious writing. The latter tends to be a lot funnier. I promise we’ll hear more from Jerry next week, but let’s just close here with at least a little taste.

Buck Williams is still driving through the desert, musing on the passenger he’s trying to smuggle across the approaching border and into the radioactive wasteland of the Global Community District of Egypt:

Buck considered that God was providing Rabbi Ben-Judah to be the new scriptural and spiritual mentor for the Tribulation Force, but he didn’t dare suggest that. No way an international fugitive could become the new pastor of New Hope Village Church, especially if Nicolae Carpathia had his sights trained on him. Anyway, Tsion might consider Buck’s idea a crazy one. Was there not some easier way God could have put Tsion in a position to help the Tribulation Force without costing him his wife and children?

That question goes unanswered, which itself is an answer of sorts. Apparently, no, there was no easier way. The death of Tsion’s wife and children (and of his driver, and Michael, and Michael’s wife and children …) was evidently a necessary part of God’s plan for bringing New Hope Village Church a new pastor who can pick up where Bruce Barnes left off — neglecting the entire congregation to spend all his time as the “scriptural and spiritual mentor” for the four members of his extra-special inner-inner circle.

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

* LaHaye actually treats the biblical passages about Antiochus and Nero as being exclusively about the future Antichrist. He disagrees with the majority of scholars who see Daniel and Revelation — his two favorite books of the Bible — as responses to their respective regimes, although I think he treats one of Daniel’s visions as a predictive prophecy foretelling their future reigns as foretastes of the ultimate evil reign of the Antichrist. (I’m not sure — I’d have to look that up in one of LaHaye’s other “prophecy” studies to see what caption he puts next to the picture of the four-headed winged leopard.)

** I suppose the strongest defense for LaHaye against the charge of anti-Semitism would be a variant of the “He’s not racist, he hates everybody” argument. There’s some truth to that. When LaHaye implies that Jews secretly know, but stubbornly reject, the real truth of real, true Christianity, he’s not saying anything about Jews that he doesn’t also seem to believe about everyone else who isn’t his kind of Christian. And if he believes that Israel is murderously opposed to RTCity, that doesn’t mean he’s accusing them of anything unique — he seems to think that all non-RTCs are similarly, lethally intent on persecuting the elect. But he also believes that the Jews are a special case, and he seems particularly preoccupied with arguing that and illustrating that in his story, so I don’t think this defense really works.

*** Nicolae Carpathia’s one-world religion — the Enigma Babylon One World Faith — might’ve been much more interesting if he had followed LaHaye’s example and constructed his new faith on supersessionist claims. The EBOWF would supplant the old covenant of Christianity in just the same way that LaHaye teaches Christianity replaces God’s covenant with Abraham. His message to Christians like Buck and Rayford would thus be the same as Tsion’s message to Israel — repent and be converted to the newer covenant, or your eternal soul will be damned to an eternity of suffering.

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