Left Behind?

Question

I started reading the left behind books and of course I started thinking that I could be left behind. Anyway I went to confession and the father at my church told me that I shouldnt read those books. He says they are false and blah blah blah and people actaully believe that that's whats going to happen. Does the Catholic church really not approve of these books or just him? He's the only one I've heard this from...other people that I know that are catholic have read them too even a Sunday school teacher.

I dont actually believe that's what is going to happen but it does get you thinking.

Answer 1

The catholic Church does not believe in the rapture as it is presented in the books. You will also notice that the books have a very negative view of the catholic Church

The Left Behind series also involves a more direct attack on the faith of Catholics. Many passages—particularly in the second volume (Tribulation Force)—are directly anti-Catholic. It is not a particularly skillful anti-Catholicism, for the authors betray a fundamental lack of knowledge concerning the Church, but it is anti-Catholic nonetheless.

In Tribulation Force we learn that a when the Rapture took place, the Pope was one of those taken to heaven. That doesn’t sound anti-Catholic, but LaHaye and Jenkins go on to explain that this Pope "had stirred up controversy in the church with a new doctrine that seemed to coincide more with the ‘heresy’ of Martin Luther than with the historic orthodoxy they were used to." In other words, the only good pope is one who agrees with Protestant teaching.

The authors repeat a familiar litany of bargain basement anti-Catholic charges: In the fourth century the Emperor Constantine brought horrible disaster on the Church. "He turned over to the Christian leaders the temples of the pagans," with the result that "the pagan practices and teachings of Babylon began to worm their way into Christianity. These included prayers for the dead, making the sign of the cross, worship of saints and angels, instituting the mass, and worship of Mary." Babylon was the original wellspring of this evil, for "every false religion in the world can be traced back to Babylon," and Catholicism—being large and already corrupted with Babylonian paganism—makes an ideal candidate to spearhead the future One World Religion.

This is all nonsense.

Constantine didn’t turn over pagan temples to the Church. He didn’t even make Christianity the state religion. All he did was declare toleration for it so that it was no longer illegal to be Christian. Catholics do not give Mary, the saints, and angels the worship due to God (adoration); they honor them, as we are expected to do for others. (Remember "Honor thy father and mother"?) Making the sign of the cross was a Christian custom long before Constantine’s time. It can be shown to date back to the second century, if not the first. And the Mass was instituted when Jesus held the Last Supper.

Answer 2

I am not Catholic but I agree. The left behind books are fictional theories. They are not Biblical. You can get yourself into trouble if you start to believe them like so many others do. There is not one text in the Bible that supports the theory. Of course they use some texts as proof, but they do not read the entire context of the Scripture. They take only a couple of verses and form their own interpretation. They do not let the Bible interpret itself.

Answer 3

I've read both parts of the Adult Left Behind series and it's Teenage equivalent Left Behind Kids.

I'm not a christian, I was when I first started reading them, but I've become a pagan since then.

The Left Behind books are interesting parts of fiction, but they are purely that, fiction. The basis of them is an interesting topic and one that you have to draw you own conclusions of, I know of Christians that look forward to the Rapture and others that thing that it doesn't exist and that Christians will go through the same 'torture' as the rest of the non-christian populace.

All though I do not know the Catholic Church's exact stand here, I wasn't aware that a great deal of them were against it or anything. I guess the series is open to every ones opinion as to it's validity.

I personally just see it as a piece of fiction.

Answer 4

No. I can safely say, despite being Orthodox not Roman Catholic, that the Roman Catholic Church does not accept them in the slightest. They are the rambling fantasies of modern Evangelicals and belong to a doctrine known as Dispensationalism.

The first error of Dispensationalism is its chiliasm. Chiliasm is the belief that Christ will reign in an earthly kingdom for a thousand years and was condemned by the Ecumenical Councils. That clause you recite "Whose Kingdom shall have no end" in the Creed was written against any form of it.

Next, it makes a hard demarcation between Israel and the Church. Christian teaching is that the Church is Israel, and Old Israel, in rejecting her Messiah, rejected also the Covenant. The prophecies of Abraham carry over to the Church, sometimes literally, sometimes mystically.

In making that division, classical Dispensationalists state that the Old Testament prophecies must just to the Jewish people and not apply to the Christians. Originally Christ tried to fulfill them literally, but opted for the Church and Cross only because of their rejection of Him. This led Him to go with plan B and die and establish the "Dispensation of Grace" and stop the prophetic time clock in the seventieth week of Daniel. In the future, when God resumes His work with the Jewish people, the time clock will restart and God will rapture His people out.

This is rank heresy. First, if you take it seriously that the Old Covenant promises apply to Israel but not the Church and that God maintains the fullness of that covenant (it is not abrogated by the New Covenant), then you must confess that there are two peoples of God, two assemblies, and so on. This requires one of them to have salvation without Christ. To be fair, Dispensationalist apologists will do everything to avoid this and deny it, but as long as they hold to this two peoples theory, they will always affirm salvation outside of Christ. To be in Christ is, frankly, to be in the Church, and they can't deny this New Testament doctrine.

So, I've mentioned the chiliasm and the pernicious effect of their theology on the doctrine of salvation. I must also add that their over-literal reading of Scripture leads them to arbitrary divisions. This, in itself, has produced innumerable divisions in their belief system. How many dispensations are there? Are the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven the same? All those questions, which affect the core of doctrine, must be answered differently depending on how they divide things.

This brings up the fact that the books are written in a completely arbitrary system. It arose outside the Church (RCs can say the same thing Orthodox say, even if we mean different things by Church), and only the Church has the Holy Spirit. It was created not by God but by men. Specifically, the doctrine dates back to a congregation called the Plymouth Brethren in the 1830s. They were obsessed with finding out the prophetic time clock. Darby was a sort of tyrant amongst the group, and stole the doctrine from a woman named Margaret MacDonald and proclaimed himself its originator. Evidently Ms. MacDonald was afraid of the great Tribulation at the end and had a vision to assure her that Christians wouldn't see it. Darby simply supplied a doctrinal framework to make it make sense.

Prior to these guys (and we would consider them along the same lines as KJV-Only Baptists), the doctrine never existed. They were anti-catholic and on the extreme side of Protestantism. After them, the doctrine was laughed at until it was included in Scofield's Reference Bible. Since most Protestants lack anything like Tradition, and because there had never before been a study Bible, the doctrine spread. People confused notes with facts. Then in the 70s, it spread with the works of Hal Lindsy, specifically "The Late Great Planet Earth" (google for his name and for predictions that didn't come true to find out something about the man).

The doctrine arose in a non-liturgical anti-catholic context, is arbitrary and evolves continually (no Dispensationalist generation is ever uniform, nor are they ever like their predecessors, always changing), and is often extreme and irrational. It is, frankly, contrary to the spirit of anything resembling Roman Catholicism. The "Left Behind" books are designed to facilitate this pernicious doctrine and should, rightly, be condemned.

Answer 5

Your Priest is a wise man. I am not Catholic but I agree with much of their theology and reasoning. No the Catholic church does not believe this "fictional Left Behind" nonsense, neither do I.

Answer 6

I have not heard that the Catholic church has come out against the Left Behind series. There is nothing wrong with reading them as long as you can keep the perspective that they are works of fiction...and not a new religion.

The same goes for any apocalyptic fiction work.

The Skeptical Christian
Grace and Peace
Peg

Answer 7

According to the Bible (on which the Left behind books are based), there will be a moment in time when Jesus returns to take His family home to live forever in heaven with Him. We get to choose do we want to be in His family. All we need do is acknowledge our sins and the fact that the consequence of our sins is a spiritual death. Then, accept His sacrifice for our sins - meaning that instead of me having to die for my sins, He died. The only reason this is possible is that He lived a perfect, sinless life on earth. If He had sinned, He would have to pay for His own sins. That is why I can't die for your sins. When Jesus rose from the dead, he proved that He had power over sin and death. He was seen by over 500 people, and much was written at that time about this event. There are writings about it from people who were not believers in Him. Romans chapter 10 verse 9 says that, "If you confess with you mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved." (Look it up.) And, once you are saved, there is no power - on heaven or earth - that can snatch you away from His love. Now, you have the guarantee from the One Who created all things that you will be in heaven. That may happen when you die a natural, physical death, or it may happen when He comes back. And, He is coming back. The Book says so. I pray that you are ready.
In Him,

Answer 8

Yes I believe it is true.

True faith requires obedience, humility, and childlike simplicity; it excludes pride, self-will, clinging to our own ideas, and that unwillingness to obey which hurled the angels from heaven, and cast our first parents out of Paradise. Faith is a duty which God requires of us, and unless we fulfil this duty sincerely, we can never enter the kingdom of Heaven.

The origins of the doctrine of the rapture are hotly debated. The Orthodox, mainline Protestant, and Roman Catholic churches, which represent the majority of Christians worldwide, have no tradition of such a teaching and reject the doctrine, in part because they cannot find any reference to it among any of the early Church fathers[1] and in part because they do not interpret the scriptures the way that Rapture-believers do.




Christ did not say, "Sit down and write Bibles and scatter them over the earth, and let every man read his Bible and judge for himself." If Christ had said that, there would never have been a Christianity on the earth at all, but a Babylon and confusion instead, and never one Church, the union of one body. Hence, Christ never said to His Apostles, "Go and write Bibles and distribute them, and let everyone judge for himself." That injunction was reserved for the Sixteenth Century, and we have seen the result of it. Ever since the Sixteenth Century there have been springing up religion upon religion, and churches upon churches, all fighting and quarreling with one another, and all because of the private interpretation of the Bible.




Christ sent His Apostles with authority to teach all nations, and never gave them any command of writing the Bible. And the Apostles went forth and preached everywhere, and planted the Church of God throughout the earth, but never thought of writing.

.Christ assures us that the way to everlasting life is narrow, and trodden by few. The Catholic religion is that narrow road to Heaven. Protestantism, on the contrary, is that broad way to perdition trodden by so many. He who is content to follow the crowd, condemns himself by taking the broad way.

Answer 9

The Left Behind series is based primarily on the events described in the book of Revelations. I'm sure that Priest would have you believe and accept what you read and learn in every other book of the Bible. Why then ignore Revelation? Why accept other books as 'from God' but Revelation as a story? By the way, the first verse of Revelation declares the book to be provided by Jesus, himself. John's part, in the second verse, was to record these words.

Answer 10

The Left Behind books are pretty anti-Catholic, because they are from a Right Wing perspective....you may not see the subtle prejudices, but they are there.

The Event, which you can read for free at http://www.micklasalle.com tells a different version of Left Behind, and the radical right are the ones who are the LAST to go.

I am neither Christian nor atheist, btw.