At Patheos: TF: 788,400 moments so dear

Fred Clark has posted a new Left Behind post, TF: 788,400 moments so dear, at Patheos

This week Fred writes about pp. 398-399 of Tribulation Force.

Excerpt:

I also don’t want to read too much into a single preposition, but you may be wondering why someone would say “under our preaching,” rather than the more normal-sounding “through our preaching.” I suspect that if you attended Tim LaHaye’s church then the peculiar choice of that word would make more sense. In some circles it’s a common idiomatic reminder of who is expected to “submit” to whom. I have many friends and acquaintances who speak this way, sometimes telling me of what they’ve learned “under” their pastor’s teaching and never quite recognizing that the biggest thing they’re learning might be who is “under” whom.

[Fred Clark, TF: 788,400 moments so dear, June 27 2011, posted at Patheos.com]


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Comments

[Spalanzani]

The character of Elijah in this story apparently watches TV and knows how to use a telephone. There’s really no need for him to sound like the NKJV.

So basically he's the Biblical version of Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer?

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Again, “How did you get my number?” is a legitimate question, but perhaps not the first thing most of us would ask when a biblical figure from the Iron Age calls.

To steal from MST3K, "Of all the plot holes to fill, they chose the phone number plot hole!"

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Official Bruce Barnes Death Countdown: 49 pages

Unofficially Official Double Wedding Countdown: 26 pages

Officially Unofficial Meet the Bride Countdown: 10 pages

[RodeoBob]

Again, “How did you get my number?” is a legitimate question, but perhaps not the first thing most of us would ask when a biblical figure from the Iron Age calls.

Even more amazing is that said Iron Age biblical figure actually gives a detailed answer!

[JessicaR]

A good writer could pull the trick off of giving a very detailed account of one day then skipping ahead 18 months later. Only it would have to be clear that what passed in between wasn't so important that it couldn't be glossed over or covered in brief flashbacks.

This however is the literal end of the world. Those 18 months are the solidification of Nicky's power, the establishment of the OWR and the following banning of all other religions, the war drums are starting to pound, and now or heroes have to act their parts and spread the word and start sleeper cell churches of true believers all around the world. Back home they also have to keep an eye on their food supply, and turn New Hope into a makeshift infirmary/soup kitchen for those who have nothing or who are on the run from the Global Community inforcers.

Or they would if they were actual heroes. Who would actually do things like hand Loretta the keys to the place while they're off having globetrotting adventures. Or rescuing believers from re-education centers. Or anything besides jetting around in comfort while giving snotty looks to their bosses.

[Firedrake]

Traditional tenure agreements are not, of course, subject to termination by a mere End of the World.

I suspect that, like "under our teaching", "received [Christ]" (meaning "converted") is a fairly specifically evangelical usage; to a Catholic, it would mean "went to Holy Communion". How lucky that Elijah also speaks RTC-lish!

I am increasingly convinced that the RTC worldview absolutely requires - more than it requires Christ per se - an absolute hierarchy of command in all things. Everyone has a specific individual who tells him what to do, with no appeals - and with God right at the top. It's probably very reassuring, as long as every human being in a command position is perfect and utterly incorruptible.

Eighteen months later, Chloe is globose from all the "love cookies" she's been getting from Buck (interpret that any way you like, you filthy-minded people)...

[Philboyd]

Firedrake, it reminds me of the feudal power hierarchies, with everyone having both a master and a servant in the 'natural order' (except, of course, God and the lowest serf). Would it be uncharitable to suggest that the RTCs have failed to move on?

[Mary Kaye]

I don't know if the theory is still held, but when I was in high school (come to think of it, the year I spent in a Catholic girls' school) we heard about six stages of moral development, and one of the early ones is "I do good because an authority makes me do so."

If you get stuck there, you don't develop personal moral faculties, and if the authority falters you won't know what to do. Some people in this situation go on benders when released from external authority.

It's not fair to accuse a whole movement of moral immaturity, but I certainly feel I see it in individuals who say "Without God/the Law/the fear of Hell *of course* you would do something depraved." Because if you are still in that small-child position of only doing good because your parents insist, of course you're going to misbehave if your parents are removed from the picture. And the small child can't even conceive of another way to function.

It's a really bad idea to give someone in this moral stage authority over others.

[sharky]

Right, I know I've lost a flower or two from my daisy chain trying to follow the mythology behind Left Behind, but this is just bad. Back a few chapters ago, when the prophets were talking to Buck and Ben-Judah (apparently it wasn't important, since now they're just casually ringing up to chat) we had this:

"English?" Buck whispered.

"Hebrew," Ben-Judah responded.

"Silence!" Eli said.

Because Ben-Judah is hearing it in Hebrew and Buck is hearing it in English. So the most miraculous thing about their miraculous conversations is already poofed out of existence. Eli's voice on the phone is putting a bullet in the foot of any miracle, because the cool thing was that he was speaking meanings without matching sounds to them. It doesn't work as a miracle across the phone, because now the phone is the miraculous speech-translating phone, and it works as a normal phone with wires and a number you call. If Eli had spoken to them out of the air, that would have been the sign of an active god guiding the course of events. If he'd called over a disconnected phone, or dripping-wet cell phone, or a banana, that would still have not retroactively sucked the one really mystical factor out of this and instead raised the question of if prophets need to have god tell them the number out loud digit by digit as they dial, or if god just tells them to call Information.

It still doesn't even work as a miracle with prophets, because he can't say anything new, he can't say anything EllenJay would think of as extra-Biblical, and he doesn't say anything useful. The fact that he's calling also knocks his earlier appearances on the head. What kind of prophet walks up to the person he wants to talk to, says nothing useful, and then calls him later to talk to him again without saying anything different or useful or putting what he said earlier in a new light? That's the one thing a prophet character should never do! They're prophets!

[Will Wildman]

Eli's voice on the phone is putting a bullet in the foot of any miracle, because the cool thing was that he was speaking meanings without matching sounds to them. It doesn't work as a miracle across the phone, because now the phone is the miraculous speech-translating phone, and it works as a normal phone with wires and a number you call.

I'm all in favour of the call-from-nowhere idea*, but I'm not clear on why the presence of the phone matters to the miracle in your view. Is there no way Eli could be transmitting his powers such that the phone receiver is now producing meanings-without-language? Isn't it just as plausible that if Tsion put him on speakerphone** he would still hear it in Hebrew while Buck would hear English?

Does it help if you imagine that while Tsion is listening via an ordinary phone, Eli is actually just hanging out in their Resting Alley, muttering into his sandwich?

And, of course, we must remember that a minor unspoken tenet of this particular version of PMD is that the telephone is a holy artifact. In a world where Nicky wanted to target LB readers instead of Jews, there would be no pig-riding scene, but there would be a heartrending sequence involving shears and fiberoptic cables.

*Actually, in my favourite version, Buck and Dr BJ are startled by a sudden flare from the windowbox, and Tsion yells "My geraniums!" before the voice of the prophet emanates from his burning perennial.
**Speakerphone! *balloons, confetti, buzzers, trumpet chorus*

[sharky]

Is there no way Eli could be transmitting his powers such that the phone receiver is now producing meanings-without-language?

Pretty much. It's still a phone, it's just now the EliPhone, and it's not his presence anymore; it's "OMG Eli is on the phone!" I mean, maybe his handprints leave little glowy marks on the receiver, but... well, Eli is talking, perhaps in a language neither of them would really recognize. He is picking his meanings and forming sounds, the sounds are travelling through the air, and two different people are hearing the same thing from different interpretations of their brains. It's a miracle because it's happening right then and can in no way be reconciled, and it doesn't have to be; and it raises the ideas of perception, of being able to connect with another person without any fear of the words going wrong, of being able to fully trust your senses and just have faith in the moment. The real thing that's happening here is thanks to the power of god, three people are able to have the purest conversation imaginable, almost mind-to-mind with all the ease of opening their mouths. (So naturally the first thing the prophet does is tell them to shut up.)

Add in a technological step, and now the sounds are leaving Eli's vocal cords and being shaped by his mouth, where they're picked up a receiver and sent along a wire, being broken back into audible sound again and sent along two different lines, and somewhere along the way the signal turns into just the meanings he wanted... it's like if instead of showing up in a burning bush, god had sent Moses to that rocky valley outside of town where by a trick of acoustics, you can hear a conversation taking place at the other end of the ravine as long as there's no wind, and had Moses wait around until the wind died down to start talking.

If you're gonna miracle, throw down and miracle, that's all I'm sayin'.

[Rodeobob]

It also could have worked as a "Morphius/Matrix" moment:

“This is Eli. I spoke to you last night.”

“Of course! How did you get my number?”

"...you think I'm using a telephone?"

Really, what drives me berserk about the "Eighteen Months later..." is that it's the wrong 18 months! We've talked about bad writing before, but this really, truly takes the cake. You have two sets of events. One of these can be quickly summarized after-the-fact with brief flashbacks and character dialogue, while the other can be described in detail over the bulk of the novel. Which do you choose to write about, and which do you summarize?

a.) The Antichrist consolidates power, buys media outlets, gets a new plane, announces a new religion and currency. The POV characters get jobs within the A/C's organization, and one falls in love and gets married. Two biblical prophets appear in the holy city, preach, and cause some people to burst into flames. A major Jewish scholar publicly converts to Christianity and urges other to do the same on the same day that Isreal signs a treaty with the Antichrist-controlled U.N.

b.) The newly-converted Isreali scholar preaches to massive crowds, protected from the AntiChrist's wrath by the ancient prophets empowered by God. The Antichrist constructs a city in the desert, armed with all the world's remaining weapons. The underground resistance begins training and planning and recruiting, building secret shelters, learning the skills they'll need to survive. The One World Government begins implimenting its various steps of consolidating power.

I mean, if you had to pick one to summarize and the other to describe in vivid detail with POV scenes, would treaty-signings and new job opportunities really beat out preaching to a football stadium and building a fortified city in the desert?

[Phoenix, who has Jonah on hold]

This however is the literal end of the world. Those 18 months are the solidification of Nicky's power, the establishment of the OWR and the following banning of all other religions, the war drums are starting to pound, and now or heroes have to act their parts and spread the word and start sleeper cell churches of true believers all around the world.

@JessicaR: Booooo-ring! And that's probably the most frustrating thing of all. The paragraph you just wrote should make for fascinating fiction. But their description of all of this is little more detailed than yours, and you're summarizing. Fiction Fail.

It's a really bad idea to give someone in this moral stage authority over others.

@MaryKaye, OMGQFT!!!

I mean, maybe his handprints leave little glowy marks on the receiver, but...

@sharky, you guys brought your funny today.

[Will Wildman]

Unfortunately, Rodeobob, your summary gives Option A far more credibility than it deserves. The process of the two TurboJesus-empowered heroes infiltrating the Antichrist's hierarchy and somehow convincing people to give them the jobs of his personal pilot and demagogue should be fascinating, suspenseful, stressful stuff. They need to simultaneously make themselves seem not merely exceptional, but unprecedentedly extraordinary, in order to secure positions that by rights don't even need to exist. (The Antichrist is only going to have one pilot, really? And he needs a personal media minion other than his False Prophet? That's a hard sell.) They would have to convince Nicky that he needs those jobs to exist and that he needs them to fill them. And they have to do this while hiding any hint of their religious beliefs or their personal vulnerabilities, the latter of which is especially difficult if Buck is trying to appear like an independent and worldly adventurer while fumbling through the first stages of his first romance. Compared to "Let's give a powerpoint presentation in a stadium and do some urban planning in a desert", this sounds thrilling.

It's only when we know that Nicky picks them out, forces them to take the jobs, makes no apparent plans to control/threaten them or take them out if they become a liability, knowing the whole time that they're newly-minted RTCs, that it becomes flabbergastfully boring.

[Cliff]

L&J's stripping of all mysticism and wonder out of the return of Moses and Elijah could have been great grist for a humorous story:

"So the prophet Elijah calls me up out of the blue one day, and I sez to him, 'cause you know, Elijah hasn't been seen for a couple thousand years, I sez to him, I sez, 'Elijah, how'd you get this number?'
"And he sez back, 'I called directory assistance. Listen, what are you doing Sunday?'"

And so on.
But no, because L&J have no imagination at all, they cannot imagine asking Elijah anything besides "How did you get my number?"

Although I suppose that the silver lining to the worst books in the world is that they've inspired people to do far better work with the rich source material at hand.

[Leum]

OT. My NT prof wants me to dissect a self-contained passage from Revelation. Any suggestions? Ideally something reasonably short.

[Firedrake]

Philboyd, that's certainly part of it, but the mediaeval system had some - albeit extremely limited - ways for someone at rank 5 to appeal to the person at rank 3 if his superior at rank 4 were messing him about. The RTC absolutist system doesn't seem to allow for that at all.

Mary Kaye, I agree on the lack of moral faculties - some RTCs may believe that they are better than that, but most of them seem to think that at least everyone else is restrained from going on murder sprees only by God. (But it's not just RTCs who have problems with this. I'm told by people who work in hotels that the worst sorts of conventions to host are for policemen and preachers. People who have to be the living standard of morality in their home communities...)

[walden]

Leum -- How about the curse on anyone adding or subtracting anything from the book? That seems self-contained.

Or the letters to the "churches" -- "frankly, I'd rather be in Philadelphia."

[Vermic]

The phone conversation is so surreal that I kept expecting "Eli" and "Moishe" to turn out to be the Jerky Boys. They tried to make the call as outrageous as possible until Tsion realized he was being pranked and hung up, but no matter how high they raised the stakes, he never caught on. And eventually Johnny B. was forced to wrap it up with, "All right, so we'll see you tomorrow at the stadium, then. That we rented. So long there, sizzle-chest." *click*

[kisekileia]

Leum, the passage that immediately comes to mind for me is Revelation 21:1-8. It's, to me, one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible, and there's lots to unpack about just HOW there can be no mourning or crying or pain--we've had tons of discussions here and on Patheos on the logistics of heaven with respect to free will and divine judgment, and you could draw on those for inspiration.

MaryKaye, you're referring to Kohlberg's stages of moral development. They're a fascinating theory that is definitely still talked about in the study of moral development. I can elaborate on them later today when I get my computer back (it's just been repaired and is waiting for me to pick it up) if people would like me to.