I have a long history with the “Christian fiction” based on prophecy and other “peculiarities” of scripture. I read Frank Peretti’s “This Present Darkness back in the 1980’s and I was interested in my minds semi-intellectual interpretation of what I was reading. I only got a chapter into the follow-up book and threw it away. I actually rented the one Left Behind movie and was shocked to see the two witnesses actually talking in complete sentences. No specific words are attributed to them in the Bible.
The Left Behind series is like The Last Temptation of Christ. It is “admitted” fiction based on the Bible. Both offend me for the exact same reason – they shape peoples understanding and beliefs in what the Bible says according to the author’s agenda under the guise of being admitted fiction. It gives me the creeps as well as the willies.
I also am a former Pre-tribulationist who has since “converted” to Mid- or Post-tribulationism, or Pre-wrath, depending on how you define it. The web site that seems to agree with my view the best is this one:
http://watchmanbiblestudy.com/BibleStudies/Definitions/Def_Pretrib.htm
I don’t prescribe to every single thing this guy says, of course, but he covers this issue nicely and very much as I see it.
I’ve read most of the Peretti books. My son gave me one for Christmas because he likes them. God used his first book to draw him back, so I can’t complain about them. He also read, as i did, all of the Left Behind series, which were okay but I believe in the pre-wrath rapture of the church so it didn’t seem as believable to me as it could have. Since I can’t remember most of what I read, I guess it’s OK (LOL). M