American Baby Boomers grew up in a terrifying world. Born during the aftermath of the second world war, they lived with the idea that the new world order, that confirmed the United States as the most powerful nation in the world, was tenuous and questionably legitimate. It had been created through the horrible destruction by nuclear weapons that by God’s own grace were developed by the Americans before her enemies could.
Soon, however, the Soviets publicized their own atomic arsenal. Every aspect of American culture reinforced the idea that nuclear holocaust was a constant possibility and annihilation could always be just a few moments away. Some people were well off enough to dig their own bomb protection, but most of the population planned to depend on public fallout shelters, and the signs marking their locations made any trip around town a subliminal reminder of the constant threat.
Popular entertainment was not an escape from the idea that the world could end at any time. Blockbuster movies like the Planet of the Apes in 1968, the Omega Man in 1971, and Soylent Green in 1973, reinforced the fear that existential catastrophe was imminent. “Scientific” books like the Jupiter Effect, The Population Bomb, Famine 1975, and The Cooling taught nuclear war was not the only serious concern for the future of humanity. On the near horizon were mass deaths from famines related to overcrowding and climate change leading to a new ice age, pandemics, earthquakes and other natural disasters.
The hippies adopted accelerated hedonism as their means of escape, but what was the bulk of the populace supposed to do? Since the days of the French and Indian War, Americans turned to the church for encouragement, solace, and peace. One man, Hal Lindsey, made that impossible for many Christians. He put out a terrifying set of predictions about the coming destruction of the world, and all straight from the Bible, as he, a self-proclaimed lifetime student of prophecy, understood it, and he guaranteed it would all come true. He had written the most terrifying book of the 1970’s, The Late Great Planet Earth.
This book made its way into households across the country, and the New York Times said it was the best selling non-fiction book of the decade. By 1990, it had sold nearly 30 million copies. We are now more than 50 years since the book was published, a compendium of dire predictions that were sure to come true, most likely before 1980, and at the very latest, by 1988, when Lindsey predicted that the end would surely come. He claimed that the UN Secretary General said in 1970 that the world only had ten years or less to fix pollution, overpopulation, and the risk of nuclear war. It was not clear what he thought would happen if these problems weren’t “solved.”
Lindsey made a core prediction that nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the west was ordained by God and would happen before the year 2000. This, of course, didn’t happen, but that didn’t dampen Lindsey’s self perception as a lesser prophet of the One True God, and the man is still at it, predicting impending calamity. He has implied, on his website, that the current hostility between Russia and Ukraine is the lead up to a Biblically-predicted nuclear world war. Despite all the hype, so far Putin has only rolled his tanks into two autonomous regions near the Russian border.
But where did Lindsey originally get these ideas, and how has he managed to keep the attention of American Evangelicalism for over half a century? He simply has been an untiring proponent of “newspaper exegesis”, looking at current world events and analyzing them in a way to make them seem to conform with events described in the Bible. The problem is that nothing Lindsey has predicted has ever come true.
Lindsey’s interpretive framework is dispensationalism, a system of understanding God’s relationship with mankind that was developed in the first few decades of the 19th century. It became popular in the United States after the Second Great Awakening, and several seminaries were created for the main purpose of teaching these new ideas to American clergy. Dallas Theological Seminary was built in 1924 as one of this new brand of institution, and since then has been one of the most prominent hotbeds of dispensational thought. That is where Lindsey received his Masters of Theology degree; he had specifically sought teaching the dispensational theories of what would happen at the end of time, or the field of eschatology.
Lindsey’s ideas aren’t really original regarding the prophecies themselves, and he holds to the dogma pretty well. Still, he is always wrong. This must raise the question as to whether the whole system of dispensationalism is fundamentally flawed, and an inaccurate and inappropriate way of understanding God’s word. Unfortunately, dispensationalism is the way that about two thirds of American Evangelical Christians interpret the Bible.
In a way, then, Lindsey is doing these people a service by demonstrating that dispensationalism, taken to its logical evolution, proves to be simply not true. According to his calculations, the third Jerusalem Temple absolutely had to be built by 1988, 4o years or one Biblical generation after Israel was reconstituted as a nation in 1948. The Dome of the Rock Mosque still occupies the site where the Temple is to be built.
Also, Lindsey says that the end will be ushered in by a multinational group led by the Soviet Union in a nuclear war against Israel, for the purpose of “pillaging Israel’s riches.” Does that make any sense in an age of digital banking and cryptocurrency? Additionally, Lindsey predicts that a 200 million man army led by the Communist Chinese will ride actual horses across the mountain ranges of southern Asia to attack the Soviet confederation in the Middle East. Most dispensationalist believers may be unaware of the implications of their faith, but in the meantime, their beliefs keep them from enthusiastic participation in furthering Christ’s kingdom on earth today.
More technically, though, what are the fundamental problems with dispensationalism, and why should it be discarded?
It supports an extreme literal interpretation of the Bible that allows reading into the scripture erroneous interpretation.
It smacks of gnosticism in its dualistic interpretation of the spiritual world being “good” with the material world being “evil”, and its emphasis on secret, complex theories and interpretations.
It downplays the severity of the Jews’ rejection of Christ.
It diminishes God’s omniscience by implying that he had to change his mind and come up with the idea of the church as a “Plan B” in response to the Jews’ rejection of Christ.
The focus on miraculous divine interventions that obscures God’s day to day providence.
Complex machinations make history look arbitrary and God look illogical.
The looming presence of an impending “rapture” removes all responsibility of Christians for the future of Christ’s kingdom.
With these apparent problems, and with Lindsey’s poor predictive accuracy, why does he persist in claiming he has unique insight into God’s word? He answers this clearly in the first chapter of the book. He says, “‘The future’ is big business.” Early in his career, Lindsey hit upon the perfect money-making formula by ascribing mystical implications to the headlines of today. Like any other charlatan, he was free to make the most enticing predictions and knew that he would never be held accountable when they failed to come true.
ONE WORD: BOOMERS!