TF: Skip verse 10

Tribulation Force, pp. 53-55

Buck Williams spends a few more pages reviewing and admiring his miraculously complete Global Weekly cover story on the various theories circulating to explain the disappearance of every child on the planet, plus another few hundred million adults.

In that one sentence I've already described the Event in more detail than Buck seems to have done in his article. He's not alone in this -- in the world of Tribulation Force, no one stops to ask who is missing, or why them and not anyone else.

That no unbelievers would be curious about such questions is yet another impossibility. This is what we humans do when confronted with the inexplicable: We look for patterns. Buck and the other new believers don't have to look for patterns because they already know what the pattern is. They know that all of the missing adults were real, true, evangelical Christians who believed that Tim LaHaye was right about biblical prophecy. Yet Buck bewilderingly chooses not to mention this in his article on the disappearances. Like every other piece of evidence he has proving What Really Happened, he withholds this information from his readers.

As we've already discussed, Buck never had or committed time to write this article. Even if we go with the theory that Buck had the chance to type it up on the plane back from Germany, it seems unlikely that everyone he needed to interview for the piece was on that same flight. We're about to consider Buck's conversation with the Roman Catholic archbishop of Cincinnati, for example -- when was that conversation supposed to have taken place? Buck's painstakingly chronicled itinerary for the past 14 days did not include a visit to Cincinnati and we never read of him conducting any interviews by phone. (Our authors are not in the habit of skipping any detail of any phone conversation.)

But yet another reason Buck couldn't have written this article is that he just isn't up to speed on the subject. He has spent the past two weeks in a voluntary news vacuum. Bruce and Rayford have at least been watching CNN, but apart from their third-hand accounts of what they saw on TV, Buck has no idea what's going on in the world. He has picked up precisely one newspaper in the past two weeks, in which he read precisely one article -- his own obituary. He has no way of knowing what theories might be circulating in the current of current events because he hasn't so much as dipped a toe into the flow of news.

And there ought to be an unmanageably vast number of competing theories circulating, not just because we humans seek and require (and invent) patterns to explain the inexplicable, but also because circulating a vast number of competing theories is part of Nicolae Carpathia's job.

This is Disinformation 101: If you need to cover up a conspiracy, spread a thousand false conspiracy theories. Nicolae needs to keep people from learning the truth about What Really Happened. He may not know, specifically, about Bruce Barnes or New Hope Village Church or Pastor Billings' video, but he'd have to anticipate that there would be people like that out there and that steps would have to be taken to make sure that nobody would listen to them. This wouldn't require any recourse to his brainwashing mojo or his preternatural powers of persuasion -- all he'd need would be a sound studio to record hundreds of variations on Billings' "if you're watching this, it means I have disappeared" video. Most plausible explanations would fall under the broad categories of gods or aliens, but there are any almost infinite variety of such scenarios that might be retroactively "predicted" in these videos.

Another obvious step would be to commission dozens of "bible prophecy" experts to claim that the disappearances were the Rapture of the saints predicted in the Christian scriptures. These impostors would proclaim just enough detail from the premillennial dispensationalist truth, mixed in with just enough demonstrably false and easily disprovable nonsense, to discredit people like Bruce or Rayford once they started to speak out. "The Bible predicted all of this," Bruce would start to say, and everyone would think, "Ah yes, this bit. We've heard this and we know it's not true."

This would also of course be how Nicolae would deal with the "Two Witnesses" in Jerusalem. So Moses and Elijah are prophesying by the Western Wall? Very well  then, sprinkle a half-dozen more Moseses and Elijahs throughout the city. Have Abraham and Melchizedek prophesy by the Damascus Gate, warning people of the impending natural disasters that God is sending as a sign that they must obediently serve his chosen world leader. Send John the Baptist and John of Patmos to prophesy in the Kidron Valley and have Joseph and Daniel stake out a street corner on the Via Dolorosa. Dozens of pairs of "witnesses" would arise in every corner of the globe -- William Blake and Emanuel Swedenborg in London; Haile Selassie and Simon Kimbangu in Addis Ababa; Edgar Cayce and Madame Blavatsky in Machu Picchu; Nostradamus and Joan of Arc at the foot of the Eiffel Tower extolling the prophesied savior, the "golden-haired son of Cluj who shall appear to many as like unto Condor, only without the sideburns." Equip them all with enough plants and pyrotechnics to make the trip-and-die guys seem like small potatoes (I'm assuming that Nicolae is at least as capable at this sort of thing as Jannes and Jambres).

Mark Twain noted that "a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." Buck Williams has already given the lie a two-week head-start, so if Nicolae is anything like the Great Deceiver he's supposed to be -- or even if he were just a bush-league disinformationist along the lines of a Kim Jong Il -- the whole subject of "theories behind the disappearances" ought to be irreparably polluted by now by a flood of falsehoods and half-truths and the white noise of a thousand videos, prophets, witnesses and experts.

Nothing like any of that appears in Buck's article, which seems to restrict itself to Rayford's explanation of PMD mythology and a smattering of tabloid-style theories that Buck seems to have gleaned exclusively from the tabloids.

The good news is that by avoiding any real engagement with any actual competing theories, by refusing to debunk anything, by neglecting to even mention the official explanation, and by omitting all of the evidence he might have presented for the real explanation of WRH, Buck frees up a lot of room in his cover story. He uses this room to offer an extended rant against the Arminian heresies of the papist infidels.

That's right. Buck studiously avoids any discussion of Darby, Scofield or Hal Lindsay, but he goes out of his way to present a caricatured rehash of the Diet of Worms.

Most interesting to Buck was the interpretation of the event on the part of other churchmen. A lot of Catholics were confused, because while many remained, some had disappeared -- including the new pope, who had been installed just a few months before the vanishings. He had stirred up controversy in the church with a new doctrine that seemed to coincide more with the "heresy" of Martin Luther than with the historic orthodoxy they were used to. When the pope had disappeared, some Catholic scholars had concluded that this was indeed an act of God. "Those who opposed the orthodox teaching of the Mother Church were winnowed out from among us," Peter Cardinal Mathews of Cincinnati, a leading archbishop, had told Buck.

They probably first realized they were in trouble with their new pope when he chose the papal name of Calvin Zwingli I.

Buck decides to engage the archbishop in a theological debate. Because this Global Weekly article is obviously the appropriate place for that. And because Buck skimmed through the Gospels just the other night, so he's confident he knows the Bible better than this bishop possibly could.

Buck had been bold enough to ask the archbishop to comment on certain passages of Scripture, primarily Ephesians 2:8-9 ...

OK, stop. Two things.

First, there's no way that Buck knows anything about the book of Ephesians. He's never read it himself and, since it's not one of the "prophecy" books, Bruce never read it to him. It's absurd enough that Buck is going around citing chapter and verse, as though he'd grown up doing Sword Drills in Vacation Bible School, but it's even more ridiculous that he would be citing chapter and verse for a chapter and a verse that we know for a fact he's never read.

The explanation for this miraculous knowledge, of course, is that the authors know this passage, and they can quote it from memory, citing chapter and verse. And since Buck here is acting as the authors' mouthpiece, he magically knows everything they know.

This destroys any hope the reader has of a realistic story with realistic characters, but it can also be kind of fun. Just watch this:

READER: Hey, Rayford! Bev's birthday is in April, right?

RAYFORD STEELE: Yes, the 30th.

READER: What'd you get her this year?

RAYFORD: Oh, I found this lovely butterfly broach, an antique with ... wait, crap, I mean, um, ah ... who is this "Bev" that you speak of? I don't know anyone named Bev. Irene, that's my wife's name, Irene Steele, not this Beverly LaHaye or whatever it was you said. And anyway I'm not supposed to be talking to you like this.

He falls for that one every time. And you should see what Buck does when you tell him that Gil Thorpe was never funny.

But let me get to the second point, namely this: Anyone who makes a habit of reciting Ephesians 2:8-9 without going on to recite verse 10 as well is a jackass.

Seriously. A colossal jackass.

Here's the first two verses, which ventriloquist-dummy Buck recites:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.

And here's the next verse, the next sentence, the second half of that thought:

For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Now there's only one reason you'd ever quote those first two verses while omitting the third, and that's if you're doing what Buck is doing here -- tossing out what you believe to be the Lutheran trump-card in some pointless, abstract and distracting argument over "grace vs. works."

Buck at least has an excuse -- he's fictional, and thus on an even footing with the fictional strawman bishop he's debating here. But this same side of this same argument is presented  all the time in American evangelical churches, as though the fictional strawman Peter Cardinal Mathews were lurking in the lobby, just waiting to burst into the sanctuary to declare that we earn our way to heaven by doing good deeds, praying to Mary and buying indulgences.

Simply saying that evangelicals, like Buck, recite those first two verses without ever mentioning the third doesn't fully convey how emphatically they reject what Ephesians 2:10 has to say. They treat this verse like the 13th floor of a hotel. It's not part of their canon. I have sat through at least a half dozen sermons in evangelical churches during which the preacher read the first nine verses of this chapter and then launched into a condemnation of the evil works-righteousness of the evil good-works faction, concluding with, "So let's pick up reading at verse 11 ..."

What elevates this strange behavior to the status of jackassitude is that these folks have allowed their fiercely abstract debate over the mechanics of soteriology to tie them into knots to the extent that, for them, "good works" is an epithet, an obscenity. To do good, to be good, is treated as an affront to the sufficiency of grace.

Here in Tribulation Force, LaHaye and Jenkins are gleefully proud of the way their spokescharacter in this scene is able to cite scripture to prove the evils of good works. After Buck recites Ephesians 2:8-9, carefully stopping before verse 10 (jackass), the archbishop is reduced to stammering:

"Now you see," the archbishop said, "this is precisely my point. People have been taking verses like that out of context for centuries and trying to build doctrine on them."

"But there are other passages just like those," Buck said.

Oh, snap! Buck is thinking as the authors high-five one another for successfully out-debating their fictional bishop.

Of course Buck left his personal comments and opinions out of the article, but he was able to work in the Scripture and the archbishop's attempt to explain away the doctrine of grace.

And thus we come to the point. Martin Luther believed in the doctrine of grace. Buck, LaHaye and Jenkins believe in believing in the doctrine of grace. The archbishop of Cincinnati did not believe in that doctrine, and so he was left behind. Pope Calvin was raptured along with all the other RTCs because he had come to believe in the gospel of salvation by belief in the proper understanding of the mechanics of salvation. RTCs are not real, true Christians because of the grace of God -- they are real, true Christians because their sentiments are aligned with the correct side of the argument about the role of God's grace in salvation.

What L&J and Buck are arguing for here is self-refuting nonsense that swallows its own tail and it isn't easy to give a lucid description of such madness, but try thinking of it this way: They do not believe in Calvinism, but in Calvinism-ism. They believe that we achieve our own salvation by means of asserting that Luther, Calvin and Augustine were correct to say that we cannot achieve our own salvation. The logical implication of this would seem to be that Heaven will be populated with Calvin-ists and Luther-ans, but that Calvin and Luther themselves will be excluded. Those reformers mistakenly believed that God's grace would be sufficient to save them, not realizing -- as L&J do -- that God and grace are powerless apart from what really matters, which is our own assent to the proposition that grace is sufficient. To be saved, then, we need to say that God's grace alone is sufficient, but to mean by that that our belief in the power of our believing that we believe that is what is really sufficient to save us. Or something like that.

The point is that it is the authors and their mouthpiece who are here rejecting the doctrine of grace. The gist of that teaching is that God's grace is not dependent on our merit or worthiness -- that's what "grace" means, after all. But the authors believe God's grace is dependent -- that it is earned and not freely given. They believe grace is dependent on a correct understanding of grace, that it is contingent on whether or not its potential recipients can properly articulate how it works. They believe, in other words, in righteousness by works -- but mental, or sentimental, works, rather than tangible ones.

This whole lengthy aside is particularly troublesome in the context of this series, which elevates the apocalyptic passages of the Bible over the rest of it. Those passages are not very hospitable to Calvinism, let alone to the authors' Calvinism-ism. The authors' favorite book, Revelation, ends with a relentless and emphatic litany of judgment based solely on deeds: "The dead were judged according to what they had done ... Each person was judged according to what he had done." Or consider my favorite apocalyptic passage, Jesus' so-called "mini-apocalypse" at the end of Matthew's Gospel, the centerpiece of which is the parable of the sheep and the goats. That parable makes no mention of faith or grace or any other basis for judgment or salvation apart from how we treat "the least of these." Those who feed the hungry and befriend the criminals are saved. Those who don't, aren't. Period.*

Those passages can be reconciled with the idea of salvation by grace, but not in the way that Buck or the authors think of it. The idea -- which is embraced by Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Arminians alike -- is that grace is what enables the sheep to be sheep. God's grace is what affords us the possibility to be -- in the Pauline phrase that jackasses like Buck so studiously avoid -- created to do good works.

That idea leads to a workable doctrine of grace -- something more like the original Pauline and Augustinian notion that Luther and Calvin sought to recover. It says, "Grace. Therefore works." Buck and the braying crowd of Skip-Verse-10ers would argue the opposite of that, "Grace. Therefore not works." So I guess I shouldn't be calling them jackasses. "Goats" would be more accurate.

The poor archbishop was constructed and inserted here entirely for the purpose of this anti-works-righteousness rant in defense of thoughts-righteousness, so he's not meant to be anything more than a straw-man embodiment of the worst evangelical fantasies about what it is that deluded Catholics believe. The authors won't allow him to discern any pattern as to who was taken in the disappearances, and they insist that he must be -- like every character in Tribulation Force who isn't a member of the Tribulation Force -- wholly ignorant of any aspect of PMD rapture mythology, and those restrictions force him to seem a bit dim. But all of that together gives the bishop an incoherence which is just about the closest thing you'll find in this book to realistically conflicted human nature.

He comes across as someone who is struggling to make sense of the horrific tragedy of the Event, someone who is desperate to reconcile such horrors with the idea that a just and loving God is still in control. So he starts by trying to talk himself into the "winnowing" of evil theory:

"The Scripture says that in the last days it will be as in the days of Noah. And you'll recall that in the days of Noah, the good people remained and the evil ones were washed away."

He's got a point there, actually. The bishop is referring to Matthew 24, where Jesus says that the end of the age will be like "the days before the flood":

... until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left.

That last sentence is, of course, where the Left Behind series gets its name -- Matthew 24:40 via Larry Norman's "I Wish We'd All Been Ready." But neither L&J nor Larry seemed to notice that the flood reference clearly shows that getting "taken" is bad while being "left behind" is good.** That's part of why I think this passage makes far more sense if read as a memento mori.

When Buck pointed out to the bishop that the disappearances also involved children and babies:

The bishop had shifted uncomfortably. "That I leave to God," he said. "I have to believe that perhaps he was protecting the innocents."

"From what?"

"I'm not sure. I don't take the Apocrypha [sic] literally, but there are dire predictions of what might be yet to come."

"So you would not relegate the vanished young ones to the winnowing of the evil?"

"No. Many of the little ones who disappeared I baptized myself ..."

He's a straw man grasping at straws. He doesn't know how to make sense of what happened and he's willing to admit that, to confess, "I'm not sure." This makes me far more fond of him than I'm able to be of any of the cruelly certain characters the authors tell me I'm supposed to like.

Buck could have helped the archbishop. He could have opened his eyes to the pattern of the disappearances and explained the prophecies outlined on the back cover of the book, but he's no more interested in sharing that evidence with the bishop than he is in sharing it with his GW readers. So instead of telling the poor man what he believes happened -- what he knows happened -- he instead abruptly asks the guy "to comment on certain passages of Scripture."

"So you've lost many children from your parish, precious little ones you knew and loved yourself," Buck says. "Well then suck on this. Ephesians 2:8 and 9, bee-yatch! Aw yeahhh!" And then he spikes the Bible and starts doing his end-zone victory dance, leaving the poor man more bewildered than ever.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* This parable utterly contradicts Calvinism-ism's notion of salvation by assent to proper doctrine. The story suggests, instead, that salvation itself is unrelated to concern about salvation. The Son of Man tells the sheep that they are blessed and they reply, "I'm sorry, have we met? What's a 'Jesus' and what does that have to do with me?" They have no knowledge or understanding of the mechanics of salvation and it turns out they didn't need any. Soteriology is a red herring.

** The parallel passage in Luke's Gospel is more fun if you ever have to deal with a PMD in conversation. Be sure to use the King James Version when you bring up Luke 17:34 -- "In that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left" -- and then argue that a literal interpretation suggests that precisely 50 percent of homosexuals will be raptured.

Comments

[Nick Kiddle]

First?

[cjmr's husband]

Woohoo! TF Friday!

[Nick Kiddle]

//"Now you see," the archbishop said, "this is precisely my point. People have been taking verses like that out of context for centuries and trying to build doctrine on them."//

This strikes me as a pretty reasonable thing to say in an ordinary theological debate. There's still the part where, if he wasn't made of straw, he would have said, "What is wrong with you? The world's children have vanished, and you think it's time for a theological debate?"

[Katz]

Hooray! We can end the 1000+ post thread!

[Grumpy]

Perhaps the authors decided that Buck's writing process was boring (certainly the authors of these books can barely be bothered with the task). That explains why they elided it, just as they failed to mention his trips to the bathroom. Well, most of his trips to the bathroom.

...he'd have to anticipate that there would be people like that out there...

That raises a question which you may have addressed earlier: Did Nicolae anticipate the Rapture was coming? Did he know the day and the hour? Or was he caught unprepared? If he had been too unprepared, would that have frustrated the End Times scheme? Or did God wait for Nicolae to get in position before he snapped the ball?

To be saved, then, we need to say that God's grace alone is sufficient, but to mean by that that our belief in the power of our believing that we believe that is what is really sufficient to save us.

Obligatory Simpsons Quote:
Marge: Am I cool, kids?
Bart+Lisa: No.
Marge: Good. I'm glad. And that's what makes me cool, not caring, right?
Bart+Lisa: No.

[cjmr's husband]

I don't take the Apocrypha literally

Oh really. A Catholic bishop using the word Apocrypha????

[Rebecca]

Interesting point with the flood analogy....I've never heard it mentioned before, but it definitely seems to make more sense as a reference to the good being "left behind". And I absolutely love this paragraph! "** The parallel passage in Luke's Gospel is more fun if you ever have to deal with a PMD in conversation. Be sure to use the King James Version when you bring up Luke 17:34 -- "In that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left" -- and then argue that a literal interpretation suggests that precisely 50 percent of homosexuals will be raptured."

[cjmr's husband]

precisely 50 percent of homosexuals will be raptured

Pitchers or catchers?

[Randy Owens]

RAYFORD:... And anyway I'm not supposed to be talking to you like this.

And stop talking to the audience!
RAYFORD: It's a fair cop!

[Jessica]

then argue that a literal interpretation suggests that precisely 50 percent of homosexuals will be raptured.

Is it possible? Did Fred win his own thread before it even started? Can that happen?
*polishes up an internet, blushingly hands it over to Fred*

[cjmr's husband]

Fred always wins his threads, it's one of the rules. We merely compete for second place.

But I do believe that someone has, what's the phrase, "been told".

[ako]

This would also of course be how Nicolae would deal with the "Two Witnesses" in Jerusalem. So Moses and Elijah are prophesying by the Western Wall? Very well then, sprinkle a half-dozen more Moseses and Elijahs throughout the city. Have Abraham and Melchizedek prophesy by the Damascus Gate, warning people of the impending natural disasters that God is sending as a sign that they must obediently serve his chosen world leader. Send John the Baptist and John of Patmos to prophesy in the Kidron Valley and have Joseph and Daniel stake out a street corner on the Via Dolorosa

Don't take this the wrong way, Fred, but you'd be so much better at this Antichrist business than Carpathia.

Simply saying that evangelicals, like Buck, recite those first two verses without ever mentioning the third doesn't fully convey how emphatically they reject what Ephesians 2:10 has to say. They treat this verse like the 13th floor of a hotel. It's not part of their canon. I have sat through at least a half dozen sermons in evangelical churches during which the preacher read the first nine verses of this chapter and then launched into a condemnation of the evil works-righteousness of the evil good-works faction, concluding with, "So let's pick up reading at verse 11 ..."

Also, you do brilliant illustrations of the problem with prooftexting. The whole "The Bible says this!" without mentioning who's saying it, in what context, and what's being said before and afterward, never looks so ridiculous as when it's pointed out on this blog.

They believe grace is dependent on a correct understanding of grace, that it is contingent on whether or not its potential recipients can properly articulate how it works. They believe, in other words, in righteousness by works -- but mental, or sentimental, works, rather than tangible ones.

So basically, salvation involves believing something false (that it's grace alone), and the authors and their RTC subculture believes something directly contradictory (hence the incessant demand that you ask for salvation), but they have to simultaneously believe it in order to get saved? While believing the opposite in order to save other people?

Salvation by doublethink? Big Brother gathering up the faithful?

He's a straw man grasping at straws. He doesn't know how to make sense of what happened and he's willing to admit that, to confess, "I'm not sure." This makes me far more fond of him than I'm able to be of any of the cruelly certain characters the authors tell me I'm supposed to like.

L&J have a weird talent for accidental likability, don't they? I think it's because they're so obviously trying to cram one point of view down the reader's throat that any character who doesn't fit the mold seems bullied, and therefore naturally sympathetic.

[jmaccabeus]

First, where does the Archbishop of Cincinnati get off having such an Anglicized name like "Matthews"? It should be something nice and German, like "Moeller" or "Alter" (or "Pilarczyk", but that's more Slavic).

Second, the best part about that bit is that he managed to actually have the exact correct response to Buck there: "You're taking that out of context". If this had been a real person rather than Archbishop Strawman, he could have easily pulled out the next verse himself. It's always nice when the strawman actually manages to aquit himself well when even the authors themselves (who are something like the deities of their own writings) are lined up against him.

[Prankster]

Well of course Good Works have to be vilified. Otherwise you could get into heaven without the magic Jesus formula! Can't have that!

Question: is the fact that the pope got raptured sort of a vague attempt on the part of the authors not to piss off Catholics TOO much? Because the scenario they're presenting--pope made into a reformer so that he can be raptured along with the RTCs--comes off as bending over backwards to please SOMEONE.

[ako]

Second, the best part about that bit is that he managed to actually have the exact correct response to Buck there: "You're taking that out of context". If this had been a real person rather than Archbishop Strawman, he could have easily pulled out the next verse himself.

I'm thinking Lehaye must have heard this so many times that he's got it in his head as "What people who are the wrong kind of Christian say when I'm showing them up with my superior Biblical knowledge". Unfortunately, the next part sounds like the schoolteachers in Charlie Brown to him, so the bishop doesn't get a decent follow-up.

(The thing I've always wondered - in those arguments where people quote context-free verses at each other, it's pretty easy to end up with "My Bible verse contradicts your Bible verse". Which, if you ignore context, is the Bible saying the opposite of what the Bible says. How do they settle that? Is that the rare circumstance where they actually look at context, or do they keep throwing verses at each other?)

[Mnemosyne]

I actually managed to win a faith vs. deeds argument with some guy who was evangelizing me in the street by bringing out James 2, which has these kinds of things to say about faith and deeds:

14 What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? 15 Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

He didn't like the fact that I could quote the Bible back to him and left me alone after that.

[Prankster]

By the way, Fred: this might seem a little random, but I'd really like to hear your thoughts on the movie "Drag Me To Hell". It's a movie that's focused rather expertly on moral issues of the kind you cover, despite being a silly over-the-top (and hugely entertaining) horror movie. Of course, it comes down heavily on the "there is a hell and if you do anything wrong you burn for all eternity" side of things, but again, horror movie.

[Randy Owens]

They do not believe in Calvinism, but in Calvinism-ism. They believe that we achieve our own salvation by means of asserting that Luther, Calvin and Augustine were correct to say that we cannot achieve our own salvation. The logical implication of this would seem to be that Heaven will be populated with Calvin-ists and Luther-ans, but that Calvin and Luther themselves will be excluded.

This is one thing that's always bothered me about the schisms that are saying, essentially, that only those who hew to their particular belief system get the OK to get into Heaven. Without saying it, they're suggesting that this Heaven place just sat there empty and unoccupied for, typically, fifteen to twenty centuries, and God's work there was just wasted in the meantime, until the right schism came along. Seems more than a bit arrogant to me.

ako: Don't take this the wrong way, Fred, but you'd be so much better at this Antichrist business than Carpathia.

What do you mean, would be?

@Prankster: I would say, absolutely, yes that is the reason for the Pope's (not) being there.

Oh, and yes, second footnote is absolutely made of win.

[Lori]

Perhaps the authors decided that Buck's writing process was boring (certainly the authors of these books can barely be bothered with the task).

I wonder if they don't write about Buck's writing process, not because they find it boring, but because they have absolutely no idea what one is and therefore can't describe it.

These books don't offer an evidence that they have any coherent writing process to speak of.

[MadGastronomer]

So, doing good works, rather than prosperity, is a sign of grace? I mean, of course the whole prosperity-as-sign-of-grace thing is silly, given the problem of the camel and the eye of the needle, but does this mean that doing good works is (or may be) a sign of grace in the same way the prosperity-gospel types claim wealth is? Because that's what I'm hearing.

I rather like it.

I mean, that wanting to go out and do good works would be one possible reaction to grace has always made a reasonable amount of sense to me. I am, myself, a beneficiary of undeserved good fortune, and my impulse is often to share that (translation: my dad made a lot of money, so now I have money, so I am moved to help my friends out when they need it, because it behooves me to pass on my good fortune). But the idea that if you see someone doing good things, that you can simply assume that they have received grace, that's really quite fascinating to me.

Have I understood it correctly?

[cjmr's husband]

Good works is a sign of grace; this does not mean that grace is the only cause of good works.

[ako]

I haven't seen Drag Me To Hell, but now I'm kind of curious. I think it's interesting how "Eternal torture awaits you for the slightest mistake/failing to follow the arbitrary rules" works so well as a horror trope. A lot of horror works on the "There are powerful supernatural forces that can hurt you, and they have little or no interest in justice as you or I would understand it" premise.

[MadGastronomer]

So, cjmr's husband, when are good works not a sign of grace?

[Michael]

You pretty much said this, Fred, but it's worth saying twice:

"He had stirred up controversy in the church with a new doctrine that seemed to coincide more with the "heresy" of Martin Luther than with the historic orthodoxy they were used to."

Like fun he did. As someone who was raised Lutheran, I can say with 100% certainty that none of the PMD nonsense (which Pope Corky IX must have subscribed to, to be among the Raptured) I have ever read, seen or heard has coincided with a single thing Martin Luther ever said or wrote.

On a lighter note, a friend recently showed me (via interwebs) an old comic book adaptation of Hal Lindsey's There's A New World Coming that refers to the Rapture as, I am not making this up, "The Great Snatch." Insert your own jokes here, folks.

[Dahne]

precisely 50 percent of homosexuals will be raptured

Pitchers or catchers?

Blessed are the uke, for they shall...yeah, I'm not finishing that.

[LMM]

ako: A lot of horror works on the "There are powerful supernatural forces that can hurt you, and they have little or no interest in justice as you or I would understand it" premise.

Like people have pointed out before, L&J worship Cthulu.

And let me pile on and say that the comment about Luke 17:34 is *brilliant*.

[Doctor Science]

Fred didn't note it, but:

Many of the little ones who disappeared I baptized myself

is supposed to make us rear back, going "ooooo, bad Catholic, but at least your evil infant baptism didn't really *hurt* them".

[Anton Mates]

Be sure to use the King James Version when you bring up Luke 17:34 -- "In that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left" -- and then argue that a literal interpretation suggests that precisely 50 percent of homosexuals will be raptured.

On the contrary, this is clear Biblical proof that all homosexuals are pedophiles; therefore their partners are invariably under the age of accountability.

Those deluded by Satan may object that the word "men" here probably doesn't mean little kids, but RTCs know that Biblical nouns like that are always age-ambiguous. That's how we know that those "boys" massacred by Elijah's she-bears were actually scary gangbanger teens from the ghetto!

[Dan]

I didn't read the Pope being snatched as an attempt to appease any Catholics. I took it as one big swipe against the Catholics. Sort of a "unless you become like us, you're going to be Left Behind! So take that, you silly Catholics!"

[hapax]

when are good works not a sign of grace?

Good works are ALWAYS a sign of grace. For it is only by grace that we have the capacity to "do good."

They are not necessarily a sign of "saving" grace. Most good works in fact come from "natural" grace, the grace of our natures being created "good" like all works of Creation. That same grace that so many believers in different faiths and in no faiths saying, "Hey, I don't need the Bible or Jesus to tell me that it's a good idea to feed the hungry, I managed to figure that out on my own."

@Dahne -- well, you know, I always root for the underdog.

[cjmr's husband]

when are good works not a sign of grace?

Presumably when performed by a heathen?

Consider the point of view that everyone receives grace, whether they want it or not. Only then can you say that all good works are a sign of grace.

That's not my point of view. But it's a damn sight better than the "That guy's not saved, so his works aren't good" point of view I've heard more often...

[Judith]

Pitchers or catchers? --cjmr's husband

You know, that's what my friend and I were just wondering. I don't think I know enough about early Christians to make that call. Coming from Mexican culture, I'd be certain that it was the pitchers, but in Muslim culture it would probably be the catchers, but this is one issue where there is a good chance that Muslims and Christians would differ, since I'm basing that opinion off of what I know of Muhammad, not Jesus.

[cjmr's husband]

Woohoo! GRACE FIGHT!

[Anton Mates]

massacred by Elijah's she-bears

...Elisha, dammit. See, Biblical names are referent-ambiguous too. Literal interpretation takes a lot of work! I need my Scofield.

[ako]

Fred didn't note it, but:

Many of the little ones who disappeared I baptized myself

is supposed to make us rear back, going "ooooo, bad Catholic, but at least your evil infant baptism didn't really *hurt* them".

That may be the worst way to express that, ever. Because it immediately makes me think of the priest holding the babies, and talking to their parents, and generally taking an interest in the families and the child's well-being.

Of course, I've actually been to baptisms.

Pitchers or catchers?

Pitchers, obviously. Catchers, being men who take the 'woman's' role, are irrevocably damned.

[Sarah B]

Sort of related to what cjmr's husband was saying: when I was a senior in high school, my Sunday school teacher told our class that people other than Real True Christians could not do any good thing. "What about Gandhi?" I asked. Not even Gandhi, apparently. Because "good" is defined as "in accordance with God's will," and non-Christians aren't on the divine wavelength, ergo (if this twisted logic deserves a "therefore"), everything a non-Christian does is evil. So there is this messed-up viewpoint that one can do good works through grace alone, and a certain narrow definition of grace at that. And I would join cjmr's husband in rejecting that.

[Alex Scott]

On a lighter note, a friend recently showed me (via interwebs) an old comic book adaptation of Hal Lindsey's There's A New World Coming that refers to the Rapture as, I am not making this up, "The Great Snatch.

Man, I believe in a Divine Feminine, but that's a bit much.

Speaking of our dear friend Lindsey, there's a coffee shop in town with his book The 1980's: Countdown to Armageddon on the shelf, and which always seems proudly on display when I'm there.

[ako]

Judith, I'm curious now. What, in Islam, makes the pitchers more likely to be damned than the catchers?

[Lila]

:-( Typepad ate my comment.

[Fraser]

Dan, I agree with you: I can't imagine LH&J making nice with the Catholic Church.
I think it's intended to Nyaahh, Nyaah them: The Pope seeing the truth and disappearing is meant to be a much more dramatic challenge to the Papists than if a few average everyday Catholics around the world saw the light.

[PurpleYarnLover]

Like Dan, I read the comment on the Pope being raptured as a slap at the Papists, too. Regardless of how many Catholics may join causes with the RTCs, they know in their heart of hearts that the Catholics aren't really Christian.

[Lila]

Okay, since that one went through, I'll try again: good works are not a sign of grace if you do them in order to win a reward or praise, according to the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican.

[Alex Scott]

Sarah B.: Ugh, that is exactly what pisses me off about Chick Tracts. It's not enough, apparently, for Good Works to be insufficient. No, for Chick, there's apparently no such thing as a "good person."

hapax: Isn't that Augustine's understanding? I remember running into it in City of God and finding it awfully interesting, especially compared to the Chick version.

Of course, I went through all of Paul's letters (well, the genuine ones, anyway) a while back, and noticed something: Paul doesn't actually refer to "good works" except to praise them when he encounters them. What he does criticize is "works of the law." If Romans is a good indicator, what he's attacking is the tendency to use outward religious observances or strict adherence to arbitrary rules as a substitute for an authentic inner morality and spirituality. Which, if I read the Gospels correctly, is exactly what Jesus was against, too.

[Tony]

Prankster
Question: is the fact that the pope got raptured sort of a vague attempt on the part of the authors not to piss off Catholics TOO much? Because the scenario they're presenting--pope made into a reformer so that he can be raptured along with the RTCs--comes off as bending over backwards to please SOMEONE.

Maybe the Pope being a reformer was the catalyst that made it time for the rapture, you know if the Pope converted then ALL the Catholics would cause they are sheep not Individual Biblical scholars like all RTCs. And If all the Catholics would convert who would Jesus have to slaughter when he comes back? He needs to murder alot of people to fit in with prophecy, right?

[Lori]

Not even Gandhi, apparently.

So your teacher thought Gandhi was evil? Did s/he think non-violent protest to overthrow colonial rule was also evil or was that a good thing accidentally done by an evil person?

[Hashmir]

Question: is the fact that the pope got raptured sort of a vague attempt on the part of the authors not to piss off Catholics TOO much? Because the scenario they're presenting--pope made into a reformer so that he can be raptured along with the RTCs--comes off as bending over backwards to please SOMEONE.

Doubtful. I assure you, they are not worried about pissing off the Catholics, every single one of whom they are quite certain is destined for the absolute worst places in Hell, along with the homosexuals and vegetarians. More likely, it is something of a threat combined with pure authorial wankery -- by writing an RTC Pope, they get to tell actual Catholics to suck it, while basking in the triumph that is converting the Pope, of all people! Who would have thought? It's like something out of a -- What? This is a story? Oh. Then I guess that L&J are just stuck up their own respective asses.

And to tie this in with Randy's comment above, I think this Chick tract sums it up nicely. In short, it outlines a lot of the Catholic practices that are inherited from other, older religions, in much the same way that Christmas and Easter took over solstice and equinox festivals, etc. But the strange thing is that the Catholic church was basically all of Christianity until the Protestant Reformation (ignoring the Orthodox church, which it's safe to assume the RTCs would hold in the same regard).

In other words, they haven't identified "problems" with Catholicism so much as they've identified "problems" with Christianity itself. This in turn would suggest that there was no such thing as a Christian until around 40 years ago -- and even then, the early Evangelicals were nothing like these jackasses. It is no coincidence that anything resembling knowledge or curiosity is anathema to these guys: the slightest bit of information about the world sends their house of cards crumbling down.

[Tony]

To go with my above post does the series every state why the rapture did happen when it did? Because what I'm getting is that it happened because the antichrist is ready. That would mean if Nicky Poccanos was killed before the rapture there would have to be a second antichrist born, and if he was killed after the rapture would everybody be returned?

Since I'm asking questions one last one what exactly is Bruce spending so much time studying shouldn't it only take about 20 tops to learn everything you need to know about PMD/

[MadGastronomer]

Good works are ALWAYS a sign of grace. For it is only by grace that we have the capacity to "do good."

OK, I'm with you so far.

They are not necessarily a sign of "saving" grace. Most good works in fact come from "natural" grace, the grace of our natures being created "good" like all works of Creation. That same grace that so many believers in different faiths and in no faiths saying, "Hey, I don't need the Bible or Jesus to tell me that it's a good idea to feed the hungry, I managed to figure that out on my own."

Then why, in the parable of the sheep and the goats, is the only criteria mentioned simply the good works thing? Or have I misunderstood that? I haven't read the actual verse (maybe I should go do that), but I certainly though that's what Fred said. And what IS a sign of "saving grace," since knowing Jesus seems to be explicity not it, according to Fred about the sheep and the goats?

Presumably when performed by a heathen?

Well, Fred said:
The Son of Man tells the sheep that they are blessed and they reply, "I'm sorry, have we met? What's a 'Jesus' and what does that have to do with me?"

So what's the definition of heathen here?

Okay, since that one went through, I'll try again: good works are not a sign of grace if you do them in order to win a reward or praise, according to the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican.

Well, ok, I could see that. I'm not sure why, as long as the good deed gets done, but ok.
But we don't have any way of knowing that, unless the selfish do-gooders happens to mention it, and anyway, how common is it that someone will keep doing good things, in order to get a reward? Can they be a large enough proportion of do-gooders to actually make it an unreasonable assumption to look at a person doing good works and think, "That person is probably the recipient of grace*?" I mean, some portion of people who wear shirts that say Live Long and Prosper probably have some other reason for doing it than that they like Star Trek, but it's a fairly small number, so if you see a shirt that says that, it's a reasonable assumption to think, "That person is a Trekker."

*leaving aside the Grace vs. Saving Grace distinction, which I don't currently buy.

[sharky]

In a go-along with what Alex and Sarah are saying--I don't know if anyone's read the Angelwalk series, which was basically a weeding out of who was going to heaven or hell (also, Nazis are bad; did YOU know Nazis were bad?) It's been years since I've read them, but they were part of my childhood.

I can remember one bit in which... I think Satan shows up at a... ballet with a good angel. I'm fuzzy on the setup, but I clearly remember the part in which the angel tells Satan that the reason humans can be atheist and create beauty is not as a result of their atheism, but "in spite of it."

So human effort gets you somewhere, but it still isn't any good, because it's sort of the flipside version of, say, cockroaches surviving in your house despite your best efforts.

Other things I remember: the author really intensely disliked gays--INTENSELY homophobic--but thought animals went to heaven and was very hard on megachurches. I have no idea what he thought/thinks of LB.

[Murfyn]

"It had been six generations agone at a Highland banquet, in the days when the unrestrained temper of the time gave way to wild orgies, during which theological discussions raged with unrestrained fury. Shamus McShamus, an embittered Calvinist, half crazed perhaps with liquor, had maintained that damnation could be achieved only by faith. Whimper McWhinus had held that damnation could be achieved also by good works."
-Stephen Leacock