NRA: Antichrist & Sons

NRA: Antichrist & Sons January 20, 2015

Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 292-294

Here we arrive at one of the oddest variations in Tim LaHaye’s “Bible prophecy” prophesying. He strays from the main End Times script here, introducing a new element to the story that you won’t find in the footnotes to your Scofield Reference Bible.

The main outline of this “Bible prophecy” story was firmly established more than a century ago by Darby and Scofield. You got your Rapture, then your Antichrist and Tribulation with your seals and trumpets and vials of destruction. Then you got your Armageddon and your Second (Third?) Coming, your Great White Throne sorting and The End. So far in the Left Behind series, Tim LaHaye has offered only minor variations in that main story, mostly only tweaking arcane details — when do the Two Witnesses begin preaching? — that will be of interest only to those well-versed in the minutiae of End Times fandom.

But here, halfway through the third book in his series, LaHaye introduces something quite original.

Jerry Jenkins sets the scene for us, and since no one is on the telephone or in an airport, that must mean …

Despite his years of flying, Rayford had never found a cure for jet lag, especially going east to west. His body told him it was the middle of the evening, and after a day of flying, he was ready for bed. But as the DC-10 taxied toward the gate in Milwaukee, it was noon Central Standard Time. Across the aisle from him, the beautiful and stylish Hattie Durham slept. Her long blonde hair was in a bun, and she had made a mess of her mascara trying to wipe away her tears.

That short paragraph displays several of Jenkins’ signature touches in these books: an obsession with travel logistics, clichéd sexist stereotypes, and a casual disregard for massive suffering and death.

Hattie hasn’t been crying because flying into Milwaukee instead of the recently destroyed O’Hare forces her to think of the nuclear destruction of Chicago a few days ago. She isn’t crying over the many friends, colleagues, memories and beloved places she lost in that very recent senseless horror. No one in these books will ever cry about that, or even give it much of a second thought.

No, Hattie has been crying because her relationship with Nicolae Carpathia has been going badly. Sure, he may be People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” two years in a row, beloved by nearly everyone on the planet, but he’s also apparently a sub-optimal boyfriend.

She had wept off and on almost the entire flight. Through two meals, a movie, and a snack, she had unburdened herself to Rayford. She had lost her love for the man. She didn’t understand him. While she wasn’t ready to say he was the Antichrist, she certainly was not as impressed with him behind closed doors as most of his public was with him.

It’s the little things, you know? He’s inattentive. He can be moody, distracted. Oh, and some days he just goes around nuking cities and killing tens of millions of people for no apparent reason.

Most troubling to Rayford was Hattie’s turmoil over her pregnancy. He wished she would refer to what she was carrying as a child. But it was a pregnancy to her, an unwanted pregnancy.

Do you sense that Rayford and the authors are warming up for a big sermon on abortion? Because, yes, Rayford and the authors are warming up here for a big sermon on abortion.

Do you expect that such a thing may be horrible? Right again. It’s horrible.

I’m not sure if it’s worse for readers who are opposed to abortion or for readers who support abortion rights. In the latter case, you’re certainly not going to want to read a clumsy, straw-man anti-abortion rant delivered by Rayford Steele to his former pseudo-mistress. But in the former case, I would imagine that Rayford is probably just about the last person you’d want to see made the official spokesman and embodiment of your perspective.

We’ll contend with the particular horrors of that in our next installment. Here I just want to step back and focus on the context that prompts that discussion, which is this: The Antichrist is having a baby!

DaimonThis is not part of the usual End Times check list or an idea even considered in most “Bible prophecy” conferences. It’s just not part of the Rapture/Tribulation/Armageddon story as told and re-told over the years. Tim LaHaye is introducing a new element here — something that never would have occurred to Scofield or Ironsides or Hal Lindsey or John Walvoord.

None of those other “Bible prophecy scholars” have included any discussion of the Antichrist’s baby in their versions of this scheme.

That’s partly because it’s not a “Bible prophecy” that’s prophesied anywhere in the Bible. That’s true of most of the items on the usual End Times check list, of course (which is why, after all this time, I still use scare quotes for that phrase “Bible prophecy”). But there’s still a logic of sorts that’s usually invoked to justify most of the things “Bible prophecy” types say the Bible predicts about the future. Some of these predictions are based on specific texts — the massive earthquake described in Revelation 6, for example. Other predictions are justified indirectly — through the application of the “prophetic” decoder formulas, or through numerology, or even raw assertion based on the flimsiest of pretexts (“Magog” = Moscow!).

But nowhere in any of that has anyone previously located a verse, or a hidden coded message, or a symbological divination, that suggested that the Antichrist is going to have a baby.

Remember where this character — “the Antichrist” — comes from. It’s a composite gleaned from tyrants and villains scattered throughout the Bible. You start with the “Beast” and the “conqueror” in John’s Apocalypse, and then you add a bunch of details from every other biblical story that involves any wicked ruler — Pharaoh, Ahab, Nebuchadnezzar, Herod, etc. A major theme in most of those stories is that wicked rulers will not ultimately prevail — they will be cast down, overthrown, and cut off. Remember what happened to Pharaoh’s first-born? That’s the general pattern. And since “the Antichrist” was assembled as the culmination of this pattern, the character has never been presented as having an heir to the throne.

The idea also just doesn’t fit with the rest of the scheme. It doesn’t work with the End Times timetable: Rapture, Antichrist, Tribulation, Armageddon, The End. That all takes place in seven short years. So even if the Antichrist gets busy gettin’ busy immediately after the Rapture, his oldest children would only be 6 years old when Killer Jesus came back to wipe out their daddy and all his minions.

So what’s the point? Why introduce the idea of the Antichrist’s baby into the established story? Why would the Antichrist bother with this, and why would the authors bother with having him do so? And what does it mean for the rest of the story to change this part of it in this way?

One thing it might suggest is that Nicolae Carpathia doesn’t know that he’s the Antichrist. He doesn’t seem to realize that history is in its final throes, with the last curtain closing in less than six years from this point in the story.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to work with the rest of what we’ve been told or shown about Nicolae. I’ve wished it were true, because I think his character — and the entire story — would be a lot more interesting if he had no idea that he was the Antichrist, and no idea of all the “Bible prophecies” and End Times check list events he was required/predetermined to fulfill. But the authors have never given us any other motive or explanation for Nicolae’s behavior. His agenda — from the construction of New Babylon to the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem — is just too weird and arbitrary to be explained by anything other than his working from the same prophecy check list that’s pinned up on the wall of Bruce Barnes’ study.

So he’s gotta know he’s the Antichrist, and he surely knows the final countdown of the seven-year Tribulation is under way.

But maybe he really thinks he can win. Maybe he imagines that he’ll be able to change the predetermined outcome at Armageddon, preventing the End of the World and thereby continuing his reign as global dictator for the rest of his natural life. In that case, it might make sense for him to want children — to raise an heir who could inherit his throne. Maybe Nicolae really thinks he has a chance of keeping history and the world going longer than just the next five and a half years, long enough to see his child graduate from school, maybe get married some day and make him not just a father but a grandfather. …

But that scenario — the Antichrist-who-thinks-he-can-win-Armageddon possibility — raises another huge problem. It turns the whole story upside-down. It gives us a story in which powerful forces are at work trying to bring about the end of the world, while one man rises up to oppose them — fighting to save the world and to prevent the slaughter of billions of people. If that’s the story, then there’s no way that guy isn’t the hero of the story — even if that guy is also the Antichrist.

Fighting to save the world makes you the hero. That’s how that always works.

So what’s left? What else could possibly explain why LaHaye and Jenkins felt the need to change the existing folklore and storyline of the End Times time line? What made them decide to have the Antichrist have a baby? There’s nothing in their “Bible prophecies” to require such a change, and it doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the story they’re trying to tell, so why add this?

I suspect it has to do with that horrible sermon Rayford is about to give Hattie on the evils of abortion.

Hal Lindsey wrote a series of blockbuster best-selling “Bible prophecy” books back in the 1970s. White American evangelical Christians loved The Late Great Planet Earth and There’s a New World Coming, embracing those books as a reflection of their beliefs and values and concerns. But neither of those books had anything to say about abortion.

By 1995, it was no longer possible to write for that white evangelical audience without mentioning abortion. Abortion politics had become a central part — perhaps the central part — of white evangelicalism, and for LaHaye’s reboot of Lindsey’s earlier formula to work in the 1990s, it was going to have to include plenty of anti-abortion material, even if that meant shoe-horning it into the story through an awkward innovation that doesn’t otherwise fit and serves no other function.


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