Glorious Appearing (Left Behind)
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Glorious Appearing (Left Behind) Customer Reviews
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potentially faith-shattering
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I felt my life being stolen away as I plowed through this volume. 200 pages in, I looked back and realized that literally nothing had happened yet. So much of this story has been characters saying and thinking the same things, same predictions about what's going to happen, regurgitating the same memories. Glacial plotting. A volume's what a chapter would be in any other book.
I became a Christian through C.S. Lewis, ravenously devouring everything he'd ever written. 25 years later, because of this series, I'm going through a serious crisis of faith. This CANNOT be what Christians want to read by the millions. This guy CANNOT be hocking his ads for how to help others write. 11 volumes ago, I thought we Christians were the most intelligent people, but I'm mistaken if this is what they're interested in reading. This volume in particular's literally stealing my faith. It's the popularity, not existence, of these books that depresses me. This's what Christians want - no plot or characterization, just mindless runaround? I started this series after seeing the movies, whose scriptwriters worked miracles.
Jesus's mind-blowingly disappointing here, quoting Himself randomly. It broke my heart to find myself skimming His words. I never want to read another Bible verse again after these writers get done with them. The plot elements consist of increasingly-contrived ways to get a Christian into a critical scene as witness to Revelation unfolding. The idea of writing a neutral perspective, or of getting into the heads of bad or neutral characters, seems to be forbidden. And that too is as very uncharitable as the rest of this monstrosity; one comes away thinking that only Christians are people and that these writers simply have never been exposed to any non-Christians. (In early volumes everyone kind of stood around waiting to be converted; but even then the writing seemed to consist of "Let me tell you about Jes-... oh, sorry, phone call.") A secretary in the darkness who'd taken the mark wanted to convert but couldn't because, well, that's what a literal reading of Revelation says; heart-wrenching, disappointing because it reads like how people who've lived in a bubble-world of Christians their whole life view outsiders.
Looking back on this series, I chiefly remember people pointlessly running around with guns, in airplanes and/or on cellphones. The Living Son of God quotes random Bible verses and inserts what everybody hears as their own name, an immensely personal experience, we're TOLD; we're SHOWN Jesus using a form-letter and inserting names from the Book of Life. Jesus (ONE good scene) calls up Rayford and discusses his life; almost a similar scene with Chang, but it's another example of the ridiculous pacing in this series. Skim over stuff like that, and give us 50 pages of Ray being dragged along on a motorcycle.
Countless missed opportunities. A huge asteroid fell into the sea, obliterating coastlines, and one sentence later we're back to our usual games of people with no money flitting about the world on their private planes to get places that they didn't have to be except that the plot called for a Christian character to witness something going on in that particular country at that particular moment. Devastating earthquakes; stores still open. (Or were people scrounging for food; it's hard to tell. The jet fuel refineries kept up at full capacity. For a novel about daily life in the Tribulation, there was very little detail about its logistics.) The earth's flattened on a page and everyone gets on with business ("Oh, look, no more mountains, isn't that - oh, sorry, phone call."). To say that these writers have absolutely no idea what to do with this material is an understatement of Biblical proportions. There's so much going on around the borders of this novel, off-screen, and all we see are the usual runarounds.
Toward the very end, there are actually a few touching snippets showing Jesus interacting with people personally. But THESE're what we've waded through 11.5 volumes of runarounds to reach? There's no concept of what's worthy of detailing, as if the writers are afraid to take chances by doing anything with Jesus, Whom we've suffered through so many airplane rides to see and hear. Jesus switches from Protestant Latin (nth Bible quotes) to splitting His infinitives (original sentence or two). They're less interested in character resolution (none of what you waited to see in this volume is actually done in detail) than they are in showing off their degrees in Biblical Engineering. I thought I was a literalist for believing in Adam & Eve, but these guys take it to a whole new level. Random passages from Isaiah, Daniel, and all the rest are used to show us in far too much detail the exacting detail of prophetic minutiae. I can't speak for anyone else, but this stuff really tested my faith: "Is this really what it means to be a Christian? Do I really have to believe every contradictory account of the endtimes in full literalness?" The more OT prophecy they spout, the more convinced I become that Isaiah etc weren't talking about the endtimes at all. I find myself praying that, faithwise, the baby doesn't go out with the bathwater, if you know what I mean.
C.S. Lewis is dead. Now you have to be a friend of these guys to get a novel published. I wash my hands of the ghetto of Christian literature. Sorry to vent, but I'm really not kidding about the faith thing. My pastor says you can't really call yourself a Christian if you don't like to be around Jesus' people. If the people praising this series are who he's talking about, I've got some serious thinking to do. Lewis made me think that Christians were intelligent; Jenkins makes me think you have to check your brain at the door.
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