False Prophecies for Fun and Profit
By Gary North
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This originally appeared as a portion of the foreword to The Beast of Revelation by Kenneth Gentry. The entire foreword and the entire book is well worth reading.
Those Christians who believe that we are drawing close to the last days are continually trying to identify both the beast and the antichrist. This game of "find the beast and identify the antichrist" has become the adult Christians' version of the child's game of pin the tail on the donkey. Every few years, the participants place blindfolds over their eyes, turn around six times, and march toward the wall.
Sometimes they march out the door and over a cliff, as was the case with Edgar C. Whisenant, whose best-selling two-part book announced in the summer of 1988 that Jesus would surely appear to rapture His church during Rosh Hashanah week in mid-September. Half the book was called On Borrowed Time. The other was more aptly titled, 88 Reasons why the Rapture is in 1988. I can think of one key argument why his book's thesis was incorrect: no rapture so far, and it is now February, 1989. So much for all 88 arguments. The anti-Christian world got another great laugh at the expense of millions of fundamentalists who had bought and read his two-part book. The story of Mr. Whisenant's book was front-page news briefly around the U.S. But Mr. Whisenant is now ancient history, one more forgotten laughingstock who brought reproach to the church of Jesus Christ while he piled up his press clippings.
This is the whole problem. The victims self-consciously forget the last self-proclaimed expert in Bible prophecy whose predictions did not come to pass. They never learn to recognize the next false prophet because they refuse to admit to themselves that they had been suckered by the last one. Thus, this sucker's game has been going on throughout the twentieth century, generation after generation, a pathetic story chronicled superbly by Dwight Wilson in his well-documented book, Armageddon Now!, a book that was not regularly assigned to students at Dallas Seminary, I can assure you.[13] Again and again, some prominent world political figure has been identified as either the beast or the antichrist: Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and even Henry Kissinger.[14] (It was President Reagan's good fortune that he was a conservative so beloved by fundamentalists, given the remarkable structure of his name: Ronald [6] Wilson [6] Reagan [6].)
The back cover promotional copy of former best-selling author Salem Kirban's self-published book, The Rise of Anti-Christ, is representative of this paperback prophetic literature. Published in 1978, it boldly announced:
We are already living in the AGE OF ANTICHRIST!
The world is on the threshold of catastrophe. Scientific advances are really scientific tragedies that will spell chaos, confusion and terror.
Within the next 5 years . . .
DESIGN YOUR OWN CHILD by going to the "genetic supermarket."
YOUR MIND WILL BE PROGRAMMED without your knowing it!
Within the next 10 years . . .
YOUR BRAIN WILL BE CONTROLLED by outside sources!
YOUR MEMORY WILL BE TRANSFERRED into a live embryo.
And so on. None of this has happened, of course. My favorite is this one: "HEAD TRANSPLANTS will become a reality." I wonder who will be the first two volunteers? Who will get what? This book is to Bible exposition what the National Enquirer is to journalism. (The trouble is, the National Enquirer sells 7 million copies each week; it is by far America's largest-circulation newspaper.)
If we take Mr. Kirban's words literally - as literally as he expects us to take the Bible - we are forced to conclude: "This man simply did not know what he was talking about when he wrote those predictions." But he sold a lot of books in the 1970's - 30 different titles on prophecy by 1978 alone, the back cover informs us, plus a huge study Bible, plus a comic book. By 1980, the total number of Mr. Kirban's book titles had soared to 35, according to back cover copy on Countdown to Rapture(published originally in 1977).
He concluded on page 188 of this book:
"Based on these observations, it is my considered opinion, that the time clock is now at 11:59. When is that Midnight hour . . . the hour of the Rapture? I do not know!"
He wisely avoided the mistake of putting a date on the rapture - a mistake that Mr. Whisenant made (assuming that the publicity and mailing list from well over four million books sold constitutes a mistake) - but his book was sufficiently explicit. Given the fact that the supposed "clock of prophecy" reached 11:56 in 1976, when the world's population passed 4 billion people (p. 45), and then reached
11:59
in only one year with the peace accord between Israel and Egypt in 1977 (p. 175), you get the general picture. Only "one minute" to go in 1977!
The rapture will be soon!
Once again, however, pre-tribulational dispensationalism's notoriously unreliable "clock of prophecy" stopped without warning.[15] The years passed by.
No beast. No antichrist. Few book sales. Scrap the topic! Try something else. Why not books on nutrition? Presto: Salem Kirban's How Juices Restore Health Naturally (1980). Oh, well. Better a glass of fresh carrot juice than another book on the imminent appearance of Jesus or the antichrist. Nevertheless, a stopped "clock of prophecy" is always good news for the next wave of pop-dispensational authors: more chances to write new books about the beast, 666, and the antichrist. There are always more opportunities for a revival - a revival of book royalties. After all, a sucker is born every minute, even when the "clock of prophecy" has again ceased ticking. The next generation of false prophets can always draw another few inches along the baseline of their reprinted 1936 edition prophecy charts. They can buy some new springs for a rusted prophetic clock. These stopped clocks are a glut on the market about every ten years. Any fledgling prophecy expert can pick one up cheap. Clean it, install new springs, wind it, make a few modifications in a discarded prophecy chart, and you're in business! Example: as soon as Salem Kirban retired, Constance Cumbey appeared.
(I give little credence to the rumor that "Constance E. Cumbey" is the pen name adopted by Mr. Kirban in 1983. I also have real doubts about, the rumor that the woman who claims to be Mrs. Cumbey is in fact a professional actress hired by Mr. Kirban to make occasional public appearances. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that Mr. Kirban's name appeared on no new books after 1982, the year before Mrs. Cumbey's Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow appeared. Could this be more than a coincidence? It is also strange that "Mrs. Cumbey" seems to have disappeared from public view ever since the second book with her name on it failed to make it into Christian bookstores. 1s it possible that "Mrs. Cumbey" was fired by Mr. Kirban when the book royalties faded to a trickle and there was no further demand for her public appearances? I realize that all this may sound a bit implausible to most people, but perhaps not to someone who has accepted the thesis of "Mrs. Cumbey's" A Planned Decepion: The Staging of a New Age "Messiah." If a "Messiah" can be staged, so can a previously unknown lady researcher fi-om Detroit. The "Messiah" has not yet appeared, and "Constance Cumbey" has now disappeared from public view. Messiahs apparently come and go without much warning - indeed, without ever even appearing in public; so do those who expose them, although this takes a bit longer.)
The main problem with this never-ending stream of utterly false but sensational interpretations of Bible prophecy is that sincere Christian readers are grievously misled by authors who seem to speak authoritatively in the name of the Bible. These writers write authoritatively about topics that they know little or nothing about, or who misrepresent whatever they do know about. It takes time for each prophecy fad to fade. Emotionally vulnerable Christians are warned repeatedly in the name of the Bible that inescapable cataclysmic events are imminent - "signs of the times" - yet these inevitable events never take place as predicted. This goes on decade after decade, generation after generation, although the self-appointed prophets keep changing.
Question: If the pre-tribulation rapture can come "at any moment," then how can there be any fulfilled prophecies to write about that take place in between the New Testament documents and the future rapture? How can there be any "prophetic signs of the times"? How can anyone who believes in the "any moment coming" of Jesus also believe some self-declared prophecy expert who announces that specific Bible prophecies are being fulfilled in our day? If any event is said to be a fulfilled Bible prophecy today - an event that absolutely had to take place, as all true Bible prophecies obviously must - then the rapture surely was not an "any moment rapture" prior to the fulfilment of the allegedly fulfilled prophecy. Some prophesied event therefore had to happen before the rapture could occur. This, obviously, is a denial of the doctrine of the "any moment coming" of Christ. This fact does not seem to deter any particular decade's reigning paperback prophets or their gullible disciples.
Once a particular prophecy expert's predictions begin to be perceived as being embarrassingly inaccurate, another expert appears with a new set of prophecies. Christians who become temporary followers of these false prophets become ominously similar to the misled women described by Paul: "For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth" (II Tim. 3:6-7). Eventually, these frantic (or thrill-seeking) victims become unsure about what they should believe concerning the future. Everything sounds so terrifing. Christains become persuaded that personal forces beyond their control or the church's control - evil, demonic forces - are about to overwhelm all remaining traces of righteousness. How, after all, can the average Christian protect himself against mind control and memory transfer, let alone head transplants, assuming such things are both technically and culturally possible and imminent? (The fact that such things are not technically possible in the time period claimed for them never seems to occur to the buyers of paperback prophecy books.)
A steady stream of this sort of material tends to reduce the ability of Christians to reason coherently or make effective longterm decisions. Sensationalism becomes almost addictive. Sensationalism combined with culture-retreating pietism paralyzed the fundamentalist movemtnt until, in the late 1970's, fimdamentalism at last began to change. That transformation is nowhere near complete, but it surely has been. Fundamentalists are at last beginning to rethink th air eschatology. They are less subject to uncontrolled spasms produced by rapture fever. The back cover promotional copy on Whatever Happened to Heaven? reveals that Dave Hunt is aware of the fact that his version of pop-dispensationalism, like Hal Lindsey's, is fading rapidly. (Mr. Lindsey largely disappeared from public view about the time he married wife number three. Gone are the days of his guest appearances - and everyone else's - on "The Jim and Tammy Show." He does have a weekly radio show and a weekly satellite television show.) Hunt's promotional copy announces: "Today, a growing number of Christians are exchanging the hope for the rapture for a new hope . . . that Christians can clean up society. . . ." The promise - unfulfilled, I might add - of the back cover is that this book will show old fashioned dispensationalists "how we lost that hope [the rapture]and how it can be regained." The success of his books proves that there are still buyers of the old literature who love to be thrilled by new tales of the beast. This means, of course, that they do not want to hear about the biblical account of the beast of Revelation. They much prefer fantasy.
Footnotes
[13] Dwight Wilson, Armageddon Now! The Premillennial Response to Russia and Israel Since 1917 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1977). Go Back
[14] Salem Kirban, Kissinger: Man of Peace? (Huntington Valley, Pennsylvania: Salem Kirban Inc., 1974). As you might expect, this book is no longer in print. It sometimes appears in local library book sales for a dollar or less. If you spot it, buy it. It is a classic. Go Back
[15] Technically speaking, pretnb dispensationalism requires that the clock of prophecy not begin again until the rapture. But this kind of low-key view of prophecy sells few books. Thus, t ~e dispensationalism known to most buyers of prophecy books is the dispensationalisrr of the ticking clock, however erratically it may tick. Go Back