After the Rapture - [game review of Left Behind: Eternal Forces]

LA Weekly ^ | January 3, 2007 | JOSHUAH BEARMAN

[Alex Murphy]

It begins suddenly: a flash, and they’re gone. Leaving behind just wisps of smoke and personal effects, the righteous are transported to heaven. The rest of us stay trapped on Earth, confused about our missing colleagues, friends, spouses and children, without whom we will enter a period of biblically foretold carnage called the Tribulation. So begins Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a game of interactive spiritual warfare, where the Rapture comes to your PC.

It was inevitable, really. Left Behind, the 12-book series of eschatological potboilers by evangelical minister Tim LaHaye and former journalist Jerry Jenkins, has made a huge commercial success out of selling the Rapture. That starting gun for the sectarian End Times scenario has formed a morbid fascination for many American evangelicals since William Eugene Blackstone first wedded the dispensationalist ethic to the spirit of bootstrap capitalism and moved a million copies of his book Jesus Is Coming as early as 1908. Sixty-three million copies of the Left Behind books have been sold, and the franchise has spawned audio books, a kids’ series, study guides, calendars, maps, greeting cards, an amazing Tribulation timeline and multimillion-dollar film adaptations infamously starring Kirk Cameron as hero Buck Williams. In 2001, Left Behind Games was founded in Murrieta, California, to help spread the Left Behind message through video games.

“Throughout history,” the Left Behind narrator intones after the light of souls escapes Earth, “people have chosen one of three paths. Those who love God. Those who don’t know enough about God. And those who choose to ignore God.” After being promised that God will come to take his people home, we learn that “for those Left Behind, the Apocalypse has just begun.”

Described by its manufacturers as “an evangelism tool for teens,” the game takes place in a chaotic post-Rapture New York City. Newly born-again Christians are waging a guerrilla struggle against the Antichrist, who has chosen a name befitting any good Antichrist trying to hide his evil intentions: Nicolae Carpathia. Ensconced in the New World Order headquarters at the site of the former United Nations, Nicolae Carpathia wants to erase religion and rule over his secular Global Community government with an army of “peacekeepers.” (Recognize any political subtexts here?) Left Behind is a real-time-strategy game (RTS), in which you must thwart Carpathia by evangelizing, housing your spiritual army, and creating a supply infrastructure for the eventual battles with the forces of evil.

Ergo the game’s epigraph, from Ephesians: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high [places].” When praise music and preaching aren’t enough, that sacred wrestling requires soldiers, snipers and tanks. Between levels, players are directly confronted with “matters of eternal importance”; questions about evolution and salvation are accompanied by Christian rock and hip-hop, all with the option to buy. Those who have already purchased the collector’s edition ($59.99) can follow along at the source with their very own metal-bound New Living Translation Bible.

The idea of systematically converting or killing nonbelievers in a video game has its detractors. Liberal groups, both secular and religious, recently mounted a campaign against Left Behind, objecting to the game as “faith-based killing, marketed to children.” Supporters note that players do lose “spirit points” for killing — although that spirit can be regained through prayer, which perhaps only reinforces the questionable religious ethic of prayer absolving all sins. The Rev. Tim Simpson, who heads the Christian Alliance for Progress in Jacksonville, Florida, has publicly said the many theological shortcomings of Left Behind are “antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

True enough, but so are most video games. In this case, the axiomatic hypocrisy of the religious right, usually first out of the gate to denounce violence in games but staunchly defending Left Behind, is surely matched by that of a group called Campaign to Defend the Constitution, a group asking that the video game be removed from store shelves. It may seem sinister (or ingenious, depending on your perspective) to embed millennial religious war into a goal-oriented interactive experience, but it’s just a game. No one is going to ponder eternal salvation from clicking an icon of hands clasped in prayer. For the same reason that Doom did not create any sociopaths, Left Behind will not flood the ranks of Christian warriors.

The game’s lack of a proselytizing punch would be especially apparent to anyone who’s tried to play the damned thing. Sadly, I must report that the real problem with Left Behind is that it’s a tiresome, glitchy bore. And believe me, I had high hopes. There have been plenty of bad Christian-themed video games, from the original side-scrolling Mario Brothers knockoff Bible Adventures on Nintendo to Catechumen, a failed attempt to make the first-person shooter conform to family values.

But this time, we’re promised the epic of Revelation: God’s grace combined with masochistic fury, with the four horsemen ravaging the earth (Revelation 9:15), seven-headed, 10-horned monsters emerging from the sky (12:3), and the Beast’s armies massing at Har-Megiddo against the returned Jesus (16:16) for a culminating clash of the spiritual titans — perfect material, in other words, for a killer video game.

Left Behind never gets anywhere near the prophesied showdown in the Jezreel Valley. It’s hard enough to get the game started: For some reason, Left Behind’s programmers built a crappy game that nevertheless demands a state-of-the-art PC, hardly the best way to reach the Christian masses.

Once running, Left Behind is buggy. The plodding missions through tightly circumscribed Manhattan are numbingly repetitive. The commands are clunky. The graphics are dated. There is some unintended humor: The Antichrist’s frontline propagandists include musicians (leveled up, they become recording artists, and then rock/pop stars), activists (the “proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing”) and secularists (special ability: swearing). Strangely, your supplies come from cafés. Yes, those kind of cafés, with the accents aigu, where presumably your Christian army stays victualed alongside the anticlerical, surrender-prone French running the joints.

All real-time-strategy games are about harvesting resources, and I was hoping for a little thrill in the harvesting of souls, but after a couple hours of learning how to train builders to erect cafés and dodge street musicians, I got bored and gave up. I never even saw a Horned Demon (Level 5 evil spirit; special ability: fireball), or any of the holy war that is supposed to be the whole point for supporters and critics alike. If you’re looking for good versus evil on your computer, it’s infinitely more satisfying to stick with standbys from those other two great mythologized Manichaean struggles, The Lord of the Rings (Battle for Middle Earth II) and Star Wars (Empire at War).

I should have guessed Left Behind would be disappointing when I read that you could play, but never win, as the Antichrist. Doesn’t that undermine the whole power of temptation? Then again, Left Behind’s creators don’t really believe in the Creator’s necessity of evil. For them, the Bible rigs the outcome and guarantees salvation. They won’t even be around for the spiritual warfare of Left Behind.

Or will they? The Rapture, of course, is extrabiblical, a thoroughly modern invention. John of Patmos’ rambling Revelation provides many apocalyptic details about how sickle-wielding angels harvesting people into a wine press shall create lakes of blood (the pre-Steinbeck meaning of “grapes of wrath”), but it pointedly does not give the righteous a lift to heaven beforehand. That didn’t stop John Nelson Darby from inventing the Rapture in the 19th century, because he thought it just wasn’t fair for true believers to sit through the terror they so gleefully promise everyone else. It’s the kind of theology that turned the word sanctimonious into irony, a smug spiritual shortcut taken literally by millions of Americans. Left Behind’s LaHaye, who leads evangelical admirers on tours to Megiddo and welcomes war in the Middle East as a sign that the seven seals are breaking, even goes so far as to calculate how many unbelievers’ blood must flow to fulfill the biblical prophecy. Responding to critics of his video game, LaHaye shot back that there was more to it: “Their real attack is on our theology.” Just as it should be. And the game’s evangelical critic, the Rev. Tim Simpson, should embrace LaHaye’s clarification; because far more troubling than the holy warriors Left Behind: Eternal Forces might create are the holy warriors who created it.

[Alex Murphy]

Strangely, your supplies come from cafés. Yes, those kind of cafés, with the accents aigu, where presumably your Christian army stays victualed alongside the anticlerical, surrender-prone French running the joints.

French cafés? Not the Starbucks in the local megachurch foyer?

[rellimpank]

--I am curious about and will closely watch to see if any of those driverless cars careening down the road after the "rapture" collide with any of those with an "If It Ain't The King James, It Ain't The Bible" bumper sticker---

[Androcles]

If the quality of the programming matches the quality off the Left Behind writing, then I for one will be avoiding it!

[BipolarBob]

The Bible doesn't portray The Second Coming as secret. The "Behold I come as a thief in the night" refers to the suddeness. There is no Secret rapture.

[Zeroisanumber]

For the same reason that Doom did not create any sociopaths, Left Behind will not flood the ranks of Christian warriors.

And Doom was about 800,000,000,000 times better.

[aruanan]

It begins suddenly: a flash, and they’re gone. Leaving behind just wisps of smoke and personal effects, the righteous are transported to heaven. The rest of us stay trapped on Earth, confused about our missing colleagues, friends, spouses and children, without whom we will enter a period of biblically foretold carnage called the Tribulation.

Utter and complete crap. Not the game. It's probably as crappy as most games. Just the idea of a two stage rapture. For that there is ZERO scriptural support. And the little that others offer as support is either irrelevant (I Corinthians, I Thessalonians) or a direct contradiction of the text (the "two working in a field and one will be left") or a misrepresentation (the Ephraim the Syrian sermon on the coming of the anti-Christ). Other scriptures that directly contradict such a notion are completely ignored (cf relationship of trumpet to the end of the age in I Corinthians 15; I Thessalonians 4; Matthew 24; the timeline of the gathering of the wicked versus the gathering of the just in Matthew; the relationship of the appearing of the Lord to the end of the age, Matthew 24, II Peter 3, II Thessalonians 1).

[Alex Murphy]

...the idea of a two stage rapture...

A two-stage rapture, sorta like flying United with a stopover at Chicago/O'Hare? You get raptured half-way into Heaven, and then you have to change concourses through a long, echoing tunnel to catch your connecting rapture...

[aruanan]

A two-stage rapture, sorta like flying United with a stopover at Chicago/O'Hare? You get raptured half-way into Heaven, and then you have to change concourses through a long, echoing tunnel to catch your connecting rapture...

Well, I should have said "two stage second coming". Jesus returns to whisk away the Christians secretly first, followed by seven years of anti-Christ rule, followed by the second stage of his return to kick the anti-Christ's butt, followed (or not followed) by a 1000 year reign.

[Joseph DeMaistre]

A patristic interpretation of the Antichrist is that he isn't a person, but anyone who strives against Christ could be an antichrist. Not to mention their belief that the antichrist is the spirit of the anti-Christian age.

[Firefigher NC]

I opt for a better guerilla warfare game that's based on the new world order conspiracy theories about the UN coming to confiscate guns, where you're Joe Nobody and you gang up with your duck hunting buddies to fight the inept blue-helmeted peacekeepers as they needlessly terrorize your neighborhood with the aid of black ninja suit-wearing generic government agents. This would be an equally rediculous game but much more entertaining without making a mockery of the Bible. And of course it will drive the left insane.

[Religion Moderator]

Please do not use potty language on the Religion Forum.

[aruanan]

Please do not use potty language on the Religion Forum.

Well, okay then, I'll use the word Paul used when he compared all that he had lost for Christ: Complete and utter dung. If it was good enough for the Apostle Paul....

Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ....--Philippians 3:8

[Lounor]

MILLIONS MISSING or MILLIONS MISSLERING? Many these days are abandoning the pretribulation rapture view, and the June, 1995 article by Chuck Missler (”Byzantine Text Discovery: Ephraem the Syrian”) reveals why there is such a mutiny! First of all, the authoritative scholar that Missler cited, Dr. Paul Alexander, referred only to “Pseudo-Ephraem” and not to Ephraem the Syrian. (If an unsigned ancient manuscript resembles the real Ephraem but there is a question of authorship, they assign it to “Pseudo-Ephraem” - the word “pseudo” meaning “possibly.” For some groundless reason, Grant Jeffrey, the one who reportedly found the “discovery,” changed Dr. Alexander’s terminology! For more info on Jeffrey, Google “Wily Jeffrey.”) And Missler’s scholarship is also questionable. According to the Los Angeles Times (July 30, 1992), about one-fourth of Missler’s 1992 book “The Magog Factor” (which he co-authored with Hal Lindsey) was a daring plagiarism of Dr. Edwin Yamauchi’s 1982 book “Foes from the Northern Frontier”! Four months later Yamauchi’s publisher revealed that both Lindsey and Missler had promised to stop all publishing of their book. But in 1995 they were found publishing “The Magog Invasion” (which was either a revision or a replacement of “The Magog Factor”) - which had a substantial amount of the same plagiarism! (Dave MacPherson’s 1998 book “The Three R’s” has complete documentation on this and other pretrib scandals.) After listing “1820″ as the reported date of the birth of pretrib (he should have said “1830″), Missler sees a pretrib rapture in that Medieval writer’s phrase “taken to the Lord” and, since he evidently favors rewriting others instead of researching, is unaware that Dr. Alexander explained that this phrase really means “participate at least in some measure in beatitude” - which has reference only to doing acts of virtue on earth and not being raptured away from earth! Alexander added that the same ancient writer held to only one final second coming (and not to any prior coming) which would follow the time of Antichrist! (Readers can Google “Deceiving and Being Deceived” by MacPherson to see how groundless the Pseudo-Ephraem claim is and to learn how desperate pretribs are to find any pre-1830 evidence for their escapist view. Dr. Robert Gundry of Westmont College has also demolished the Pseudo-Ephraem claim in his 1997 book “First the Antichrist.”) Since Missler also leans on Thomas Ice, readers can evaluate Ice’s qualifications by Googling “America’s Pretrib Rapture Traffickers,” “Thomas Ice (Bloopers),” “Thomas Ice (Hired Gun),” and “Pretrib Rapture Diehards” (the latter part). For further light on the 179-year-old, fringe-British-invented pretribulation theory, Google or Yahoo “Pretrib Rapture - Hidden Facts.” Finally - why would anyone who has the brains of a rocket scientist want to be taken up with the concept of an any-moment pretrib rapture? The answer may well be that there’s more money in elevating a rapture than launching a rocket!

[aruanan]

Thanks. A couple of things:

(If an unsigned ancient manuscript resembles the real Ephraem but there is a question of authorship, they assign it to “Pseudo-Ephraem” - the word “pseudo” meaning “possibly.”

It means a bit more than this. Ephraem was a big, big thing. Because of this, others, later, would write things and attribute it to him in an attempt to glom onto his authority.

Dr. Alexander explained that this phrase really means “participate at least in some measure in beatitude” - which has reference only to doing acts of virtue on earth and not being raptured away from earth!

He went into more detail than this. I don't remember this as his basic explanation because he said that what was proposed was unique.

Okay, I found what I wrote in 2004 on the subject:

Someone, no doubt, will cite an internet reference to St. Ephraim (or St. Ephrem or St. Ephraem) the Syrian, claiming that he taught a pre-tribulation rapture and implying that, since he was a principal theologian of the Byzantine church, the doctrine was widely believed in the 4th century. This is simply not true. There is a single ambiguous sentence in a sermon by Pseudo-Ephraim, an unknown medieval writer who sought to emulate the style of the genuine Ephraem, that some, such as Grant Jeffreys, have misrepresented as being an early instance of this teaching.

Grant Jeffrey claims 1. that the author was Ephraem the Syrian and 2. that Paul J. Alexander, author of The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition (a copy of which I own), says he believes the sermon to have been authored by Ephraem the Syrian. Neither is true. The author is Pseudo-Ephraem, a medieval writer sometime in the 6th century who (like many others) attributed his own work to the famous St. Ephraem of the 4th century. Alexander does not conclude that this sermon was by the original Ephraem. The author quoted on the website misrepresents Alexander.

I began other research into the teachings of Ephraem on this subject. Ephraem's preferred method of doctrinal instruction was the hymn. He was a prolific author and poet of that century. In his hymns, one can find the virgin birth, the resurrection of Christ, and a host of other Christian doctrines. About the pretribulation rapture (or any other), there is nothing. In a book attributed to Ephraem, though the earliest copy is from the 6th Century, The book of the Cave of treasures a history of the patriarchs and the kings, their successors, from the creation to the crucifixion of Christ. (Tr. from the Syriac text of the British museum ms. Add. 25875, by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge), there is an addendum called "Of the Coming of Anti-Christ". It contains similarities to the piece authored by Pseudo-Ephraem above but makes no mention of a pre-tribulation (or any other) rapture.

I found cited in Alexander's The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition Ephraem's (not Pseudo-Ephraem's) commentary on the scriptures that I was able to obtain through inter-library loan. I looked at all the relevant passages said by pre-trib rapturists to teach this doctrine (such as the passage in I Thess). There was no such teaching by Ephraem on the matter.

Alexander's take on this Pseudo-Ephraem passage, contrary to what Jeffreys has attributed to him, was that it was a novel way of shortening the days. The import of this is that it was something hitherto unknown as a doctrine, and also something that was not a common teaching later.