Tim LaHaye responds to this Nick Kristof column with a letter to the editor in The New York Times:
Comparing my book "Glorious Appearing" to "fundamentalist Islamic tracts" is a real stretch. The Islamic radicals who bomb the innocent are not nice people!
Should Christ overlook their rebellion and welcome them into his kingdom? They would ruin it for everyone. You don't choose to live around people like that today; would you want to spend eternity with them?
LaHaye portrays heaven as a (pearly) gated community in Orange County. It's a good, exclusive neighborhood inhabited by good, exclusive people. God's main role is to keep out the undesirable types — the people who are not "nice" and whom the saints like LaHaye would not "choose to live around."
LaHaye's vision of heaven, in other words, sounds remarkably like that of the Pharisees — the devout evangelicals of their day. Jesus repeatedly warned them that prostitutes and tax-collectors would be getting into heaven ahead of them. (We always read this as former prostitutes and reformed tax-collectors, but that's not what he said.)
Christianity teaches that God retains the prerogative to judge the wicked — to separate the sheep from the goats and the wheat from the tares. But it also emphatically teaches that this is God's prerogative, not ours.
Yet we like to play God. Despite Jesus' insistence that we couldn't tell wheat from tares with a guidebook and a microscope we still insist that we're qualified to help out with the weeding.
So we construct our parochial little visions of heaven. We portray heaven as a place where we get to spend eternity only with the kinds of people we like to be with. Thus for LaHaye, New Jerusalem is not so much a heavenly city as an unincorporated development in the heavenly suburbs.
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