Rapture, Revelation, and the End Times - Conscious Evolution TV

obin-bobinJewish–Christian Relations 161The Left Behind series has been marked by the deliberate wishof the authors to convey a sympathetic evangelical understandingof the Jews, avoiding bitter or defamatory representationsthat have characterized, often unwittingly, evangelical writingson Jews, yet they would not compromise evangelical premillennialistfaith, and so theirs is an improved, sympathetic versionof the evangelical premillennialist representation of the Jews.LaHaye and Jenkins have little appreciation for the Jewish faith,which, in their novel, keeps Jews fanatically hostile to Jesus andthe Christian gospel. Yet in their novels the Jewish communityhas given rise to extraordinary figures and serves as a nursery tothe future evangelists and leaders of the true faith. The novelthus reflects a new wave of evangelical–Jewish relations, areflection of the intensive involvement of evangelicals with Jewsand Israel from the 1970s to the 2000s.Notes1. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind (Wheaton, Ill.:Tyndale House, 1995), 6–14.2. For details on this eschatological hope, see, for example, HalLindsey’s (with Carole C. Carolson) best-seller The Late GreatPlanet Earth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1970).3. Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British andAmerican Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Grand Rapids, Mich.:Baker Book House, 1978).4. A. G. Mojtabai, Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb inAmarillo, Texas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986).5. Yaakov Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jewsin America 1880s–2000 (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 2000).6. For example, Barbara Tuchman, Bible and Sword (London:Macmillan, 1983).7. See William E. Blackstone, Jesus Is Coming, 3rd. ed. (Los Angeles:Bible House, 1908), 211–213, 236–241.8. See Yaakov Ariel, “An American Initiative for a Jewish State:William Blackstone and the Petition of 1891,” Studies in Zionism10 (1989), 125–137.robin-bobin