"The Origins of Left Behind Eschatology” examines the origins of the beliefs that undergird the popular Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. How that system of belief arose has long been hotly debated. Using mainly non-fiction books and articles by authors with Left Behind views, I first seek to determine what those beliefs are. From that I draw out eight specific beliefs that are essential to Left Behind eschatology. I next conduct an examination of eschatology in certain eras of Church history, looking for the origins of each of these eight test criteria and seeking when they all first came together to form a system. I examine the early Church thoroughly, but briefly, noting that five of the test criteria were present in the first three hundred years of Christian history. However, no individual taught more than four of them. In addition, the four scholars in this period who each taught four of these beliefs also taught doctrines contrary to Left Behind. I then look at the period from the Reformation, with particular emphasis on the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. While teachings similar to two of the three remaining Left Behind concepts are found in the seventeenth century those two ideas do not properly emerge until the eighteenth century in a work by Morgan Edwards, a Welsh/American Baptist. The final criterion does not appear until the late 1820s in the thought of J.N. Darby of the Plymouth Brethren. Darby was also the first to draw all eight elements together in the early 1830s. I close with a look at how these beliefs became widely accepted and adapted in the remainder of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/285975 |
| Creators | Mr David Bennett |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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