Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 315-318
Last week, we discussed how Nicolae and the rest of the Left Behind series are mainly plot-driven. That can be hard to see, at times, because the plot here is so incoherent, haphazard and arbitrary. It’s not a story arc, but a disconnected checklist of “Bible prophecy” events, occasionally interspersed with random set-pieces (a car-bombing in London, a check-point in Egypt) that have nothing to do with those “prophecies” or with any larger narrative.
But in this chapter, even that loosely defined “plot” screeches to a halt as we attend Bruce’s memorial service. This chapter does nothing to advance the plot or the checklist and, as we’ve seen, refuses to take any opportunity to develop character. It’s one of the rare places where the authors turn their focus to that other storytelling element: theme.
The authors have a theme here and they want to make sure you know it. That theme is this: The duty of evangelism is Very Important.
“Theme” is probably an overly generous term, given the didactic quality of this chapter. This is a Lesson. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins want their readers taking notes here and studying this important Lesson on the Very Important duty of evangelism.
Rayford Steele makes this Lesson the theme of the memorial service for Bruce Barnes. He has little to say about Bruce other than to repeatedly state that if Bruce were there, he would take the opportunity to remind everyone that the duty of evangelism is Very Important. Then Rayford opens the floor to allow any members of the congregation who wish to say anything more about Bruce to do so. We’re assured that this went on for more than an hour, but we only hear on such testimonial, from Loretta, who also says little other than that if Bruce were there, he would remind them all that the duty of evangelism is Very Important.
The problem with this Lesson is that it’s impossible to take it seriously. It’s a Lesson that won’t take Yes for an answer. If we attempt to approach this Lesson with the studious earnestness the authors seem to desire, we’ll wind up frustrated and at a loss to know what to do with this Lesson we’re eagerly learning. “Very well,” we can try to say, “the duty of evangelism is Very Important.” But when we try to regard it as such — as something Very Important — we’ll find that the chapter and the Lesson have nothing to teach us other than only that. All we can learn here about evangelism is that it is Very Important. We have no clearer idea of what evangelism means or how to do it, or why.
In a sense, then, this chapter could almost work as a harsh parody of the kind of insubstantial, self-referential “evangelistic emphasis” that can be found in many places in the white evangelical subculture. What does it mean for a congregation to make evangelism its primary focus — to make “winning people to Christ” their “main, whole, and only goal”? It means filling the pews with a bunch of already converted people and having them sit around, for hours, reminding one another that the duty of evangelism is Very Important.
The quotations there are from Loretta’s testimonial about Bruce/the Lesson:
“Y’all know me here,” she said. “I’ve been Bruce’s secretary since the day everybody else disappeared. If you’ll pray I can maintain my composure, I have just a few things to say about Pastor Barnes.”
Here, as always, Loretta’s accent is as erratic and contradictory as everything else we’re told and shown about her character. This is simple, innocent, homespun Loretta speaking — the Chicago native who talks like a Southern Belle in a community theater production of a Tennessee Williams play. She’s portrayed as earnest but somewhat dim. She’s a faithful servant, but not someone who can be trusted to understand or to participate in the secret conspiracy of the Tribulation Force. Yet this same woman is — sometimes unwittingly, sometimes explicitly — portrayed as the omnicompetent dynamo who has overseen almost everything at New Hope Village Church. While Bruce preached the sermon on Sundays and spent the rest of his time holed up in his study or traveling the world, “someone, probably Loretta” was organizing and leading every other aspect of the congregation’s life.
Simple Loretta has supposedly been kept in the dark about Bruce’s secret shelter beneath the church, and the Tribbles refused to tell her that this is where the renegade rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah is about to go into hiding. Yet from the moment Tsion arrives in Chicago as the Most-Wanted fugitive in the Global Community up until the very moment when he is tucked safely inside that shelter, he is entrusted to the charge of the only person capable of ensuring his safety and secrecy: Loretta.
The easiest way to reconcile these contradictory portrayals is to assume something the authors don’t seem to have intended — that simple, folksy, sporadically Southern Loretta is a pose, a cover persona designed to divert attention from the ingenius leader who has orchestrated everything at New Hope since “the day everybody else disappeared.” The character I’ve come to think of as “meta-Loretta” may not be a deliberate creation of the authors, but she makes more sense than the otherwise-contradictory simple old woman the authors imagine they’ve presented.
Loretta finished with this: “Brother Barnes was a very bright man who had made a very huge mistake. As soon as he got right with the Lord and committed himself to serve him for the rest of his days, he became pastor to the rest of us. I can’t tell you the countless numbers that he personally led to Christ. But I can tell you this: He was never condescendin’, never judgmental, never short-tempered with anyone. …”
The dropped ‘g’ there on the word “condescending” is a masterstroke of self-refuting characterization. This is the authors’ way of telling us that Bruce was never condescending even to the kind of simple folk who pronounce it “condescendin'” — which is to say, to the sort of people they think it would have been appropriate to regard condescendingly. They want us to admire Bruce here for his generosity in acting as though his inferiors were equally deserving of being treated with dignity. It would be hard to pack more actual condescension into a phrase than we find here in this statement that Bruce “was never condescendin’.”
“… He was earnest and compassionate, and he loved people into the kingdom. Oh, he never was polite to the point where he wouldn’t tell people exactly how it was. There are enough people in here who can attest to that. But winnin’ people to Christ was his main, whole, and only goal.”
This seems to be what the authors regard as the How-To portion of their Lesson. Evangelism, they tell us, should be “compassionate,” but it is too Very Important to allow “politeness” to keep us from confronting people with the gospel and pushing them to make a yes-or-no decision. Evangelism is a hard sell that has to be sold hard. You can’t worry about being polite when souls are on the line and someone’s eternal fate is at stake. Evangelism has to be rude — otherwise we’re being “polite to the point where we won’t tell people exactly how it is.”
This exhortation to get over any qualms about being “impolite” will likely be familiar to anyone who’s sat through more than one evangelical sermon on the Very Important duty of evangelism. LaHaye and Jenkins aren’t saying anything here that I haven’t heard dozens of times over from dozens of other evangelists of evangelism.
This is a second-tier appeal to guilt. The initial appeal is simpler: You should feel guilty for neglecting the duty of evangelism. Whatever you think of the merits of that appeal, it tends to work, eventually, after it’s been repeated often enough. People who repeatedly are told that they ought to feel guilty for not getting out there and doing evangelism will start to feel guilty and, eventually, will try to appease that guilt by getting out there and doing evangelism.
Alas, this is unlikely to go well. They’ve absorbed the Lesson that the duty of evangelism is Very Important and that they should feel guilty for neglecting that duty, but that Lesson has eclipsed much of anything else they might need to know about, for example, what evangelism means, or how to go about doing it. And so they go out and flail a bit, finding that almost none of the people they attempt to evangelize at seem to know their assigned lines in the prescripted conversations this is expected to produce. And they wind up feeling vaguely ashamed and a bit dirty — like pushy salespeople for a vague and inferior product that no one seems eager to buy.
That’s where the second-tier lecture on “politeness” comes in. This is no longer an attempt to use guilt to motivate those who have neglected the duty of evangelism. Now it’s addressing people who feel guilty because they have attempted to fulfill that duty. It’s an attempt to make them feel guilty for feeling guilty about that. So you feel like a pushy salesperson, do you? And now you’ve decided that your worries about not coming across like a pushy jerk are somehow more important than the eternal fate of others’ souls? You’ve decided to be so polite that you won’t tell people exactly how it is? Well, you should feel guilty about elevating your concerns for politeness over your concerns for their eternal damnation.
This iteration of the guilt-driven pep-talk may eventually succeed in motivating them to get back out there and make their hard-sell even harder than before. That will, in turn, leave them feeling even guiltier about their pushier, but even more counter-productive attempts at evangelism, after which they can be lectured yet again about why they should feel even guiltier about feeling even guiltier. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The unpleasantness of this endless cycle of guilt is why it’s far easier, and far more preferable, to replace this concern for the Very Important duty of evangelism with the one-step-removed duty of sitting around together affirming the importance of that duty. Our friends here at New Hope Village Church provide a model for this. After a long Sunday sitting together talking about the importance of evangelism, they’re all now fired up and ready to come back here next Sunday and reaffirm that importance amongst themselves yet again.
Who can deny that this congregation embodies a heart for evangelism and a passion for “winning people to Christ”? Who could argue that such soul-winning was not their “main, whole, and only goal”? After all, it’s all they ever talk about. (To be fair, the same thing could be said about many “progressive” groups and their concern for “justice” or a “preferential option for the poor.”)
Another problem here, of course, is that y’all know that what Loretta is sayin’ ’bout Bruce is not true. “Winning people to Christ” has not been his whole or his only goal. Nor has it ever been his main focus or his primary concern.
Bruce Barnes was a “Bible-prophecy scholar.” His “main, whole, and only” focus has been on compiling an End-Times check list of prophecies about to be fulfilled in the post-Rapture Great Tribulation. That’s what nearly all of is time has been spent doing, locked in the pastor’s study with all his prophecy books and prophecy charts. Despite the vague references to his church-planting travels during the “18 months later” time-skip, the only thing we’ve actually seen Bruce doing is this feverish prophecy study. And it seems impossible that he could have been “winning people to Christ” when the only people he ever spoke to were the handful of already-converted members of his inner-inner circle.
We’re about to be reminded of that, yet again, as Rayford gets up to present the final sermon Bruce ever wrote. It’s not evangelistic, and it’s not even about the subject of evangelism, or about the importance of treating that subject as Very Important. It’s just more “Bible-prophecy scholarship.”
Despite the Lesson of this chapter, that has always been the main, whole, and only focus of Bruce Barnes’ ministry. And the main, whole, and only focus of these books.
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