Publishers Weekly (PW) is the premier, American, weekly, trade news magazine for religious book publishers, librarians, booksellers, agents, and authors. It informs what religious books are selling best and forecasts trends in the near future for religious book publishing. Each year, the Annual Meeting of both the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the American Academy of Religion (AAR) is held the weekend before Thanksgiving in a major North American city. And in recent years PW always has a special issue published at this time, especially for this event.
This year at the Annual Meeting of SBL-AAR, PW‘s October issue forecast that two increasing trends in Christian publishing for 2015 will be evangelical prophecy and Pentecostal theology. It states, “Another Harvard release, also slated for November [2014], American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton, shows evangelical prophecy beliefs becoming mainstream.” Publishers Weekly also cites a scholar who “observes that Pentecostal studies is an up-and-coming field, and Baylor’s Newman predicts Pentecostal theology will be particularly important.” Carey Newman is director and chief acquistions editor of the increasingly-successful Baylor University Press. My son Michael graduated from Baylor University.
What PW here says is good news for what I’m writing. This year, I wrote an 85,000-word book manuscript on the Debate between Pentecostals and especially Evangelicals about Spirit baptism, which I posted briefly about two days ago. (For more information about this, see my post on November 1, 2013, entitled “Peter’s Kingdom Keys Explain Spirit Baptism.”) And, of course, I am writing a series on biblical prophecy entitled Still Here, for which I own the trademark. I am a former Dispensationalist and thus a pretribulationist. My tagline for my series of ten, planned, Still Here books is, “A Nonfiction Alternative to Left Behind Theology.” Two books in the this series have been published: The Third Day Bible Code (2009) and Warrior from Heaven (2006). (For more information about this series, see my website stillherebooks.com.)
The fiction series about Bible prophecy called Left Behind–the brainchild of Tim LaHaye and written by Jerry B. Jenkins–has sold over 63 million copies to date and thus has become the bestselling Christian book series of all time. Some people say Left Behind is old news, thus dead, and that that doesn’t bode well for my Still Here series. Tyndale House published this thirteen-volume Left Behind series between 1995 and 2007, and four Hollywood grade B films were produced that were based on it. But a new “Left Behind” film starring A-actor Nicolas Cage was just released last October. This new movie is a reboot of the first “Left Behind” film, released in 2000. Besides, the theology that Left Behind is based upon is not dead. And PW makes that glowing forecast about the near future of books on evangelical prophecy mostly due to Dispensational Theology, which is what is meant by Left Behind Theology.
Movie critics have always lambasted these Left Behind flics. It is no different with this one, perhaps worse. Even the foremost Christian magazine, Christianity Today, unmercifully disparaged it in its October 2 issue. Jackson Cuidon, the author of the review, rates this new Left Behind film with half of a star and asserts, “Not a ‘Christian movie.’ Not even close.” Cuidon explains, “Hollywood has finally caught onto the fact that Christian movies will make you a lot a money.” Cuidon further alleges, “It has many, many faults, and almost no positives.”
But don’t tell that to the box office! This new Left Behind film supposedly was budgeted for $15 million and released October 3, 2014, yet the Wikipedia article about it says two months later, on December 2, it had grossed $20 million worldwide.
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