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NRA: The creationist satellite dish

NRA: The creationist satellite dish

Last updated on: January 6, 2015 at 1:54 pm by Fred Clark

NRA: The creationist satellite dish 2015-01-06T13:54:18-05:00 Fred Clark

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Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 289-292

Buck Williams has faced all-out nuclear assaults (twice). He’s been chased by the conspiracy of international financiers, by anti-Christian Jewish death squads, soldiers of the Global Community, the Chicago PD, and the Egyptian army. And he witnessed the Rapture — the instantaneous disappearance of more than two billion people all over the world. But nothing he’s seen before had him nearly as excited as he is here, tracing the phone lines that Bruce Barnes hooked up in the secret lair beneath New Hope Village Church.

Buck crawled along the carpet and looked behind a sleeper sofa. There was a bank of telephone jacks. He traced the wiring up the wall and tried to spot where it would come out in the hallway. He turned off the lights, closed the circuit-breaker door, closed the metal door, jogged up the steps, and slid the brick door shut. In a dark corner of the hallway he shined the flashlight and saw the section of conduit that led from the floor up through the ceiling. He moved back into the fellowship hall and looked out the window. From the lights in the parking lot, he could make out that the conduit went outside at the ceiling level and snaked its way up toward the steeple.

This is some of the liveliest, most propulsive writing Jerry Jenkins has yet produced in these books. There are telephones involved. Where do the wires go? Buck Williams needs to know.

This continues for two more pages with a palpable sense of urgency. Jenkins’ accelerating pacing and Buck’s desperate fumbling in the dark give this passage an almost sexual energy as Buck climbs a ladder, tracing the wires up, up, up, deeper and deeper into the church’s old bell tower until, at last, he reaches its climax:

Buck briefly shined the flashlight at the top of where the conduit ran up the steeple. There was what appeared to be a miniature satellite dish, about two-and-a-half inches in diameter. Buck couldn’t read the tiny sticker applied to the front of it, so he stood on tiptoe and peeled it off. He stuck it in his pocket and waited until he was safely back inside the steeple, down the ladder and through the trapdoor to the stepladder before pulling it out. It read, “Donny Moore Technologies: Your Computer Doctor.”

So that’s the key to what will soon become Tsion Ben-Judah’s untraceable Internet ministry — a satellite dish hooked up by young Donny from the church.

There’s no suggestion here that Donny’s dish is tapping into his own network of satellites, of course. The satellites are, like the electricity and plumbing supplying Bruce’s shelter, just sort of assumed to be there for the taking. Sure, global dictator Nicolae Carpathia owns and controls all of those satellites now, but we’ve already seen that he’s a busy man with scarcely a dozen trusted employees on his staff, so maybe he’ll never notice this signal piggybacking on his network. Or maybe Bruce has already set up a satellite Internet subscription service under a fake name like “International Harvesters” — the Antichrist’s secret police force would never see through that.

And, on the plus side, it seems Tsion will also have cable. Maybe even HBO.

Buck put the stepladder away and began shutting off the lights. He grabbed a concordance off the shelf in Bruce’s office and looked up the word housetop. Bruce’s installing that crazy mini-satellite dish made him think of a verse he once heard or read about shouting the good news from the housetop. Matthew 10:27-28 said, “Whatever I tell you in the dark, speak in the light, and what you hear in the ear, preach on the housetops. And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Wasn’t it just like Bruce to take the Bible literally?

It’s a good thing Buck is doing that no-context concordance thing, because that lets him skip Matthew 10:26 — “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known.” And that would’ve been a rather disconcerting verse to pluck off the shelf just after inspecting Bruce’s super-secret hidden underground shelter.

Satellite’s gone up to the skies. Things like that drive me out of my mind. (Public domain photo by Petr Kratochvil)

But let’s consider the claim that Buck and the authors are making here about Bruce “taking the Bible literally.” They insist that a satellite mini-dish on the roof of a church is some kind of “literal” fulfillment of this passage from Matthew’s Gospel in which Jesus says to “preach on the housetops.” This strains the meaning of that word “literally” beyond the breaking point.

(This is also bad dispensationalism. Tim LaHaye is supposed to be a premillennial dispensationalist — meaning he interprets the Bible by dividing it up into different “dispensations,” or different eras, such that particular passages are only applicable to their particular dispensation. Matthew 10 is not an apocalyptic passage and even “Bible prophecy scholars” like LaHaye don’t usually try to twist it into some kind of End Times prediction applicable only to the distant future.)

First off, a church-top isn’t a literal house-top, nor will Tsion be literally preaching “on” the church/housetop. So, then, OK, “housetop” is probably a figure of speech there — Jesus wasn’t literally telling his disciples to literally climb up to the tops of houses to preach. But if we concede that point, then what sense does it make to say Bruce’s church-top satellite dish “takes the Bible literally”?

As always, the supposedly “literal interpretation” of those who claim to “take the Bible literally” isn’t anything of the sort. There’s nothing at all “literal” about the strained, symbolic analogy between Bruce’s satellite dish and Jesus’ commission to the 12 disciples in Matthew 10.

But the annoying thing about this is the way this false claim of a “literal interpretation” goes unchallenged and thereby creates an unjustified benefit of the doubt for the supposedly “literalist” side of any argument about the meaning of the Bible. On the one side of the argument you have people like Tim LaHaye who say, “I read this passage from the Bible literally.” On the other side are those who say the passage in question should not and cannot be read that way, and who point out that LaHaye’s purported “literalism” is not at all literal.

Yet most of that other side of the argument gets ignored simply because of the way LaHaye and the other literally not-literal “literalists” have framed the matter. It comes to be perceived as a conflict between “literalists” who take the Bible seriously and “non-literalists” who apparently don’t.

This is as dishonest and misleading as it is frustrating. Consider, for example, what is probably the most contentious specific case of this dynamic at work: the supposed “literalism” of young-Earth creationists.

Creationists claim that they read the book of Genesis literally. This, they say, sets them apart from the millions of Christians — like me and Pope Francis, for example — who believe in geology, biology, astronomy and the other sciences. And thus the battle lines are drawn. On the one side are Christians who take the Bible at its word and on the other side are Christians who ignore the literal words of the Bible in order to accept the anti-biblical claims of science.

That’s how Ken Ham frames the dispute. That’s how Bill Maher frames the dispute. And that’s utter nonsense. Because creationists do not take the book of Genesis literally.

Don’t take my word for it. See for yourself. Here is the creation story told in Genesis 1:1-2:4. It takes place over six days, in a particular order, culminating in the creation of an unspecified number of unnamed male and female humans. And here is the creation story told in Genesis 2:4-25. It takes place in a single day, in a different sequence and order, starting with a single male individual, named Adam, and then, after everything else, culminating in the creation of a single female individual, named Eve.

These are not the same story. If we regard these stories as historical accounts, then they are not compatible. They would be contradictory accounts. If one of these stories is “literally” historical, then the other would be literally false.

Thus the very first thing that every young-Earth creationist sets out to do is to harmonize these two separate stories. This project always fails — the stories themselves refuse to be harmonized. But the key thing here is not the failure of this attempt, but the fact that such an attempt is being made at all. That attempt involves re-configuring and re-writing the very passages that the creationists claim to be taking “literally.” Such a reconfiguration and reworking of the text is the very opposite of a literal reading.

This is wholly separate from the question of creationism as it relates to evolution, geology and astronomy. Set all that aside. The one thing that absolutely cannot be said for creationism is that it “takes the Bible literally.”

And yet, time and again, this is how creationists describe themselves and thus how they are described by others.

It’s also how “Bible prophecy scholars” describe themselves and thus how they, too, are described by others, even as they skip over big chunks of Revelation, reordering its chapters while arbitrarily jumping back and forth to Daniel and Ezekiel and random bits of the Gospels and Epistles. Perhaps LaHaye et. al. really have discovered the arcane secret to decoding the Bible’s secret messages. Or perhaps their delirious cutting-and-pasting of unrelated texts is nothing more than the narcissistic delusion of people who need to believe that the Bible exists particularly for them and not for the generations who preceded them.

Either way, the one thing that cannot be said about such “Bible prophecy” is that it “takes the Bible literally.” And yet that is the one thing that is said about it, over and over again.

That literally makes about as much sense as reading Matthew 10:27 and deciding it means that God is telling you to install a secret satellite dish on the roof of your church.

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