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I know this is long but here goes.

I Listened to Camping many years ago when I was a young Christian. He was on WFME which seemed like a very sound biblical station.

He was extremely legalistic and logical. Eventually he started getting into sort of a numerology. It went something like this:

God doesn’t put anything into the bible spuriously. It all must mean something, or why would it be there? So when you hear about 153 fish being pulled up, why thats a strange number, right? Why would the gospel writer count a bunch of fish? So (this part I’m making up, I don’t remember what he said really) 23 is the number of God’s wrath and you take that away from 153 and then you have 130 left, so 13 is the number of the apostles and 10 the number of completions and that means that the apostles will complete God’s wrath in a whatever...

He had many of these. It was all intensely logical and he made it all work out if you listened. In fact, it was striking how logical he made it. Trouble was, he was way off on his hermeneutics and leading others astray.

I was a new Christian and listened with interest, but I did sense he was off. One night on his advice show a woman called up that her husband was beating her. He told her that the Bible says she just had to submit to the beating (”Turn the other cheek”) and she started to cry because she was afraid he would kill her - to which he had no answer. I thought he sounded totally cold.

I also knew no Christian or pastor who understood the bible would have told her that, and realized at that point he was more than a little off - he was out in the Twilight Zone.

I listened only occasionally after that, and he started putting numbers together to figure out the return of Christ. Sadly, back in 1984 I remembering seeing banners about Christ coming in a few days and heard about garage sales where people sold everything they had and gave the money away because they thought the world was ending. He’s caused major damage.

If you listened to him, he sounded like a learned bible teacher until he started to wander into these areas. So people not fully grounded got trampled. I can’t imagine how many people had their faith destroyed by him.

I do remember Harold Camping on WFME when I lived in New Jersey. It was in the mid or latr 80’s when he went on the shackey tangent. No more people were going to be saved, so there is no point in spreading the Gospel further. Everyone should just hunker down, keep everyone from backsliding, and reduce contact with outsiders. This is what I called at the time “hidey hole bomb shelter Christianity”, and looking back now this also resembles some cult behavior.

As for the picture at the top of this thread, Harold Camping smiling? The rate he was going, I wondered if he knew the Joy of the Lord (as in the song “The Joy of the Lord is My Strength). Some of my Pentacostal friends prayed that he would be really filled with the Holy Spirit and start speaking in toungues.