{"id":16415,"date":"2013-07-19T18:57:20","date_gmt":"2013-07-19T22:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=16415"},"modified":"2013-07-19T18:57:20","modified_gmt":"2013-07-19T22:57:20","slug":"nra-the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/07\/19\/nra-the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"NRA: The Restaurant at the End of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist;<\/em> pp. 165-166<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this scene, Jerry Jenkins achieves a vivid, palpable realism. The effect is brief, but it is powerful, visceral.<\/p>\n

Rayford and Hattie were welcomed expansively by the maitre d\u2019 of the Global Bistro.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You, the reader, suddenly realize that you are about to be swept along, accompanying Rayford Steele and Hattie Durham for an entire meal. Your fight or flight instinct kicks in, your pulse quickens, your breathing becomes shallow and rapid. It becomes difficult to articulate your thoughts into anything clearer than a primal, howling Noooo!<\/em> You wish you were anywhere, absolutely anywhere, other than here, in this restaurant, with these two people.<\/p>\n

And that is exactly<\/em> what this experience would be like in real life. Jenkins has made you feel the very same emotions with the very same intensity that you would be feeling them if you were experiencing this scene in real life. Few writers ever achieve this effect quite so successfully.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help but respond exactly the way I would if I were there in the flesh. I start examining my surroundings, looking around the restaurant for any blessed distraction from the horror of accompanying these two people on this intensely awkward dinner date.<\/p>\n

And here, alas, the spell is broken. The initial emotional realism \u2014 the head-to-toe dread and longing to escape \u2014 quickly dissipates in a flurry of incongruous and contradictory details. This restaurant, we were told, was the finest in all of New Babylon and a personal favorite of the Antichrist himself. Yet I can\u2019t make any sense of the place. Nor can I reconcile what we\u2019re shown of it with the principles of Nicolae Carpathia\u2019s \u201cGlobal Community\u201d that it is said to embody.<\/p>\n

Rayford and Hattie were welcomed expansively by the maitre d\u2019 of the Global Bistro. The man recognized her, of course, but not Rayford. \u201cYour usual table, ma\u2019am?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, thank you, Jeffrey, but neither would we like to be hidden.\u201d<\/p>\n

They were led to a table set for four. But even though two busboys hurried out to clear away two sets of dinnerware, and the waiter pulled out a chair for Hattie while pointing Rayford to the one next to her, Rayford was still thinking of appearances. He sat directly across from Hattie, knowing they would nearly have to shout to hear each other in the noisy place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Earlier, Rayford fretted about dressing for dinner, making sure he wore something formal enough to be acceptable at this upscale restaurant. We were led to imagine a fine dining establishment \u2014 the kind of place with cloth napkins, real silver, crystal water glasses and maybe even live music played on a harp or a grand piano. The fussy maitre d\u2019 and solicitous staff reinforce that impression. So did the idea that this is where the global potentate himself has a \u201cusual table.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t generally imagine global dictators eating out regularly. I picture them, instead, usually dining at one of those long tables in a palatial dining hall with chandeliers, high-backed chairs and a dizzying assortment of goblets, glasses and silverware at every setting. I picture them having personal chefs and probably even a food-taster screening for poison back in the pantry. (All of that is probably inaccurate, but I admit that my sense of the dining habits of global elites comes mostly from old movies and New Yorker<\/em> cartoons.)<\/p>\n

So now I\u2019m trying to square this idea of a fancy-schmancy high-class restaurant with being told the Global Bistro is a \u201cnoisy place.\u201d<\/p>\n

And I\u2019m even more confused by the next bit of detail we learn about our surroundings: Instead of tasteful artwork, Le Bistro apparently has TV sets all over the place.<\/p>\n

Televisions throughout the Bistro carried the continuing news of war around the world. Hattie signaled the maitre d\u2019, who came running. \u201cI doubt the potentate would appreciate this news depressing patrons who came in here for a little relaxation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m afraid it\u2019s on every station, ma\u2019am.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s not even a music station of some kind?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll check.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within moments, all the television sets in the Global Bistro showed music videos. Several applauded this, but Rayford sensed Hattie barely noticed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So now I\u2019m trying to recalibrate my mental image of the restaurant. \u201cTelevisions throughout\u201d makes me think of a TGI Fridays or a Buffalo Wild Wings, but places like that don\u2019t have maitre d\u2019s. And what kind of restaurant has TV sets tuned in to cable news?<\/em>\u00a0(Jenkins seems to be confusing restaurants with his preferred setting \u2014 airports.) I used to stop for breakfast after work at a diner in Marcus Hook where patrons watched the morning news on a TV behind the counter, but that doesn\u2019t seem like the kind of vibe Jenkins is aiming for here.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
This is the Restaurant Vila Tusa, which TripAdvisor tells us is the 14th-best restaurant in Cluj, Romania, Nicolae Carpathia\u2019s hometown. Note the absence of TV sets.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Restaurants with TV sets usually keep them tuned to only one thing: sports. Unlike either the news or music videos, sports can be watched with the sound turned off.<\/p>\n

In one sense, it\u2019s a positive change that we\u2019re told the news of World War III is \u201con every station.\u201d Rayford Steele is so preoccupied reminiscing about his past with Hattie \u2014 \u201cwhen they were playing around the edges of an affair of the mind\u201d \u2014 that he seems to have completely forgotten about the sort-of-nuclear destruction two days ago of London, Cairo, and a dozen major cities in North America. But in a world anything like the real world, that huge story would, indeed, be on every station \u2014 pre-empting all other programming for whatever channels still managed to be on the air, even the ones that only ever show Law & Order<\/em> re-runs.*<\/p>\n

Up until now, though, the world of this story has defied any comparison to the real world. In the world of this story, the obliteration of New York and Los Angeles is a one-day story. The destruction of Chicago does nothing to disturb the daily routine of residents of Evanston. So even though it\u2019s wholly unimaginable and unrealistic to think that sporting events would have resumed two days later, in the context of this story and this book so far, there\u2019s no reason to think that a regularly scheduled game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Pittsburgh Pirates wouldn\u2019t be played as though nothing had changed (or a game between the Charlotte Bobcats and the Memphis Grizzlies of the NBA, if it\u2019s wintertime \u2014 we readers have no idea what time of year anything in this book takes place).<\/p>\n

Just thinking about sports, though, leads me to wonder what sort of sports there might be in the \u201cGlobal Community\u201d of the Antichrist\u2019s one-world government. Nicolae Carpathia has insisted that the entire globe share a single government, a single currency, a single language and a single religion. It makes sense that he should also have imposed a single sport for the entire world.<\/p>\n

Soccer seems like the obvious candidate. (And yes, since American English appears to have become the official one-world language, it would be called \u201csoccer.\u201d) But how would that work now that all prior national and ethnic loyalties have been subsumed into a single Global Community? The One World Cup promises to be a sad, one-round affair consisting only of a \u201cfinal\u201d between GC and Israel. The Global Community squad would be heavily favored, I think, since they\u2019d draw from the very best players of every other former nation on Earth. Plus the Israeli team would need a new place to practice, what with their home stadium having been taken over by Moses and Elijah\u2019s revival meetings. In their favor, though, Israel wouldn\u2019t have lost any players during the disappearances of the Event 18 months ago** \u2014 so at least they\u2019d have all their starters still ready to play.<\/p>\n

And while we\u2019re musing about this, shouldn\u2019t the harmony-through-uniformity logic of the Global Community mean a single world cuisine<\/em> as well? I can\u2019t really imagine what that might mean \u2014 something as flavorless and uninspiring as Nicolae\u2019s one-world religion, probably. But imagining such a one-world cuisine still seems easier than making sense of the description of the menu that Jenkins gives us here:<\/p>\n

Though the Global Bistro had a French-sounding name, Hattie herself had helped conceive it, and the menu carried international cuisine, mostly American. She ordered an unusually large meal. Rayford had just a sandwich.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sandwiches and unusually large portions, I suppose, is as clear a description of \u201cAmerican\u201d cuisine as one could hope for.<\/p>\n

As this post illustrates, I wasn\u2019t joking about the near-physical sensation of revulsion I feel toward sitting down to a long dinner conversation between Rayford and Hattie. Rayford is just too creepy for comfort in these situations.<\/p>\n

They were led to a table set for four. But even though two busboys hurried out to clear away two sets of dinnerware, and the waiter pulled out a chair for Hattie while pointing Rayford to the one next to her, Rayford was still thinking of appearances. He sat directly across from Hattie, knowing they would nearly have to shout to hear each other in the noisy place.\u00a0The waiter hesitated, looking irritated, and finally moving Rayford\u2019s tableware back to in front of him. That was something Hattie and Rayford might have chuckled over in their past, which included a half-dozen clandestine dinners where each seemed to be wondering what the other was thinking about their future. Hattie had been more flirtatious than Rayford, though he had never discouraged her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Blame the waiter, blame Hattie, nothing is ever Rayford\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n

In the past, when they were playing around the edges of an affair of the mind, Rayford had to remind Hattie to order and then encourage her to eat. Her attention had been riveted on him, and he had found that flattering and alluring. Now the opposite seemed the case.<\/p>\n

Hattie studied her menu as if she faced a final exam on it in the morning. She was as beautiful as ever, now 29 and pregnant for the first time. She was early enough along that no one would know unless she told them. She had told Rayford and Amanda the last time they were together. At the time she seemed thrilled, proud of her new diamond, and eager to talk about her pending marriage. She had told Amanda that Nicolae was \u201cgoing to make an honest woman of me yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hattie was wearing her ostentatious engagement ring; however, the diamond was turned inward toward her palm so only the band was visible. Hattie was clearly not a happy woman, and Rayford wondered if this all stemmed from her getting the cold shoulder from Nicolae at the airport. He wanted to ask her, but this meeting was her idea. She would say what she wanted to say soon enough.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We\u2019ll hear what Hattie has to say next week. Unfortunately though, we\u2019ll only get to hear it filtered through the distorting, condescending lens of Rayford\u2019s point of view.<\/p>\n

\u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013<\/p>\n

* Also, if Hattie is right that the potentate wouldn\u2019t want 24\/7 coverage of his World War depressing people, then this coverage would not be \u201con every station.\u201d The Antichrist owns and controls every station. They broadcast whatever he wants them to broadcast.<\/p>\n

** Because, in Tim LaHaye\u2019s theology, Jews are just a special sub-category of \u201cthe unsaved.\u201d LaHaye, like most premillennial dispensationalist \u201cBible prophecy\u201d enthusiasts, believes in hard supersessionism<\/a> \u2014 a theology in which real, true Christians replace<\/em> the Jews as God\u2019s chosen people and the beneficiaries of all the promises God ever made to the people of Israel.<\/p>\n

LaHaye\u2019s complicated theology requires this supersessionism for a variety of complicated reasons that we don\u2019t need to explore here. But I also think the illogic of this view is appealing to LaHaye. Just consider another piece of his life\u2019s work \u2014 promoting his wife\u2019s anti-feminist lobbying group, Concerned Women for America. Beverly LaHaye and her army of \u201cconcerned women\u201d reject feminism because, in their mind, anyone who says women and men should be equal must hate men<\/em>. Any effort to improve the lives of women is perceived as an attack on men. Take that same logic and apply it to the New Testament\u2019s insistence that Gentile Christians do not need to become Jewish in order to be counted among the people of God. If that is good news for Gentiles, then by LaHaye-logic it must be bad news for Jews. Tim LaHaye makes the same odd leap here that his wife makes with regard to feminism: If\u00a0Gentile Christians do not need to become Jewish in order to be counted among the people of God, he thinks, then Jews must have to become Gentile Christians.<\/p>\n

For the record, I think supersessionism is a really big mistake, but I tend to find the theological arguments about this confusing, so I\u2019m not sure whether that makes me orthodox or a heretic. \u201cRemember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you.\u201d That seems clear enough<\/a>. I can\u2019t make sense of any theology that sees value in being a wild branch grafted onto what it also says is a dead tree.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"NRA: The Restaurant at the End of the World","description":"In this scene, Jerry Jenkins achieves a vivid, palpable realism. The effect is brief, but it is powerful, visceral. ... You, the reader, suddenly realize that you are about to be swept along, accompanying Rayford Steele and Hattie Durham for an entire meal. 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And that is exactly what this experience would be like in real life.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/07\/19\/nra-the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-world\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/07\/19\/nra-the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-world\/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/07\/19\/nra-the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-world\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"NRA: The Restaurant at the End of the World"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/","name":"slacktivist","description":""Test everything; hold fast to what is good."","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/32666545e535b697afb93d9848dcfc47","name":"Fred Clark","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7083ccd514d4fb8d5043041756d766a0?s=96&d=identicon&r=pg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7083ccd514d4fb8d5043041756d766a0?s=96&d=identicon&r=pg","caption":"Fred Clark"},"description":"Fred Clark is a graduate of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (now called Palmer Seminary), of Eastern College (now called Eastern University) and of the fundamentalist Timothy Christian High School (still fundamentalist and still called Timothy Christian High School, but not really thrilled to have a snarky, liberal, tree-hugging, pro-choice, pro-GLBT, peacenik, commie, evolutionist as such a vocal alumnus). A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}