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Left Behind?: The Facts Behind the Fiction
by Leann Snow Flesher
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Judson Press (2006-06-30)
ISBN: 081701490X
EAN: 9780817014902
Dewy Decimal #: 236.9
Paperback: 163 pages
SKU: 08030517
Condition: Like New As issued n
Comments: Paperback. Like new condition with no markings and no creases to spine or cover. Beautiful book.
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Customer Reviews
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The Flawless Truth
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-01-25
As a student of Dr Flesher, I tried by best to prove her wrong. Unfortunately, I was wrong. This book has been throughly picked apart by countless seminarian students of ABSW @ the renown GTU at UC Berkeley. This book is the flawless truth. This book will take you are a journey to the truth behind the falacy robbing too many of us from the truth.
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A Much Needed Sanity Check!
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-08-15
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book is a refreshing alternative to all the "Left Behind" propaganda creeping into our churches from fundamentalist extremists and far-right televangelists. I found the fact that Ms. Flesher is a Baptist theologian very encouraging after the recent bloodbath in the Southern Baptist Convention. The book is well written, easy to understand and is ideal for anyone who is curious about a more educated approach to the Biblical end-of-times stuff. Seminary professors and theologians will already be familiar with this material. However, pastors may want to consider using this book as helpful reading material to recommend to church members who are eschatologically confused due to the LeHaye books.
If you're a non-fundamentalist Christian and unsure about how you feel about the "Left Behind" series, I recommend this book as a sanity check. If you're a fundamentalist, you'll probably be offended by it, but what's new there, eh?
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Disappointed
Rating  (1)
Date: 2006-08-07
21 out of 35 customers found this reveiw helpful
I am no lover of LaHaye & Jenkins' Left Behind series of novels. Neither do I accept their pre-trib rapture theory of the end times. Therefore I was looking forward to reading this book. I had hoped to find it to be a scholarly and Biblically based critique of this popular series and the theology behind it. I was disappointed.
Ms. Flesher (a professor at The American Baptist Seminary of the West in Berkeley, California) is a liberal Protestant who has an intense dislike for evangelicals. Her prejudice is evident throughout the book. For example in the first chapter (pp. 13-14) she warns her readers that to accept LaHaye's view of the end times is to start down a road that leads to the extremism of David Koresh and the Waco Branch Davidians as well as to the Heaven's Gate suicide cult. This is unwarranted and unjustified. She might disagree with LaHaye and Jenkins' interpretation of Biblical prophecy, but they are no threat to themselves or anyone else.
Her main complaint with the Left Behind novels is that they are ethnocentric, chauvinistic, anti-Semitic, homophobic and anti-ecumenical - thereby revealing her own political and social agenda. She even devotes a whole chapter to defending Secular Humanism from the unjust attacks of evangelicals! Apart from her anti-evangelical bias, even her analysis of eschatological systems is flawed. On page 23 she has a chart which categorizes the dominant eschatological systems. Of the six classifications, four are amillennial and nontribulational. She classifies all rapture positions (pre-, post-, or mid) under the category of dispensational! That is inaccurate historically and theologically. Dispensationalism is a late-comer to the pre-millennial family (which she admits in her history of it) and is entirely pretribulational. Dispensationalism should be charted as a subgroup of Premillennialism and not the other way around!
Flesh paints all premillennial positions with the same dark brush - as an extremist, right-wing fringe movement. She reinterprets history (in true post-modern fashion) to make the amillennial position appear to be the only reasonable interpretation of the Bible. Flesher calls those who believe in rapture eschatology "an ethnocentric subculture in the United States" and "a minority of a minority" (quoting Pieters) among Christians. This is simply untrue. Even though LaHaye's view of the end times is (in my opinion) erroneous, I have to admit that it has become the majority opinion among evangelicals.
She is best (as an Old Testament professor) in dealing with the prophecies of Daniel and its influence on Revelation. But even then she assumes a second century date BC for the Book of Daniel (she actually uses the "spiritually correct" terms BCE and CE) without considering the idea that it may actually be prediction! She even says that it includes an "inaccurate prediction" of the death of Antiochus Epiphanies IV (p. 84) thereby making the book of Daniel false prophecy!
In short, I had hoped that this book would be a reasoned and balanced critique of the Left Behind series and its rapture theology. Instead I found a liberal anti-evangelical diatribe. Flesher accuses LaHaye and Jenkins of having an "ideological agenda" (page 36) and being captive to unexamined cultural norms and values. In response to those accusations I will paraphrase Jesus: She who seeks to take a speck out of her brother's eye needs to take the plank out of her own.
A much better book on the same subject is "Rapture Fiction & the Evangelical Crisis" by Crawford Gribben, published by Evangelical Press.
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