left behind

Chris Knight's avatar

My friend Chad had a great idea as a follow-up to my review last week of Kingdom Come, the final Left Behind book:

When did Left Behind “jump the shark”?

Inspired by the Jump the Shark website, I’m going to invite everyone to post their comments about when did the Left Behind series, which started out so awesome, start to rapidly deteriorate.

Here’s the thing that came to my mind as I thought about the books and perused back through them…

When Did Left Behind Jump The Shark?

– Never Jumped

– First Chapter of First Book

– The Movie

– Chloe wants to murder her baby

– Guns, guns, guns

– Jesus shows up looking like a professional wrestler

– The “Tribulation Force”

– Carpathia kills the pig and bathes in its blood

– Birth (Kenny Bruce)

– They Did It (Carpathia and Hattie)

– The “Loyalty

...
Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

I can’t begin to describe how much I loathe this book.

Let me state something before I go too far: I believe, quite earnestly, that the Left Behind series began with nothing but the best and noblest of intentions. I will always believe that.

But I also stand by something that I wrote a few weeks ago: “Left Behind has become a bloated whore.”

Let’s face it: when the final chapter of a sixteen-novel series is a less enthralling read than Hannibal Rising, something has gone very, very wrong.

(Yes, I’m one of the five people who’ll admit to reading Hannibal Rising. My choice of literature lately could be described as “off-kilter” and that would be a compliment.)

I bought Kingdom Come – the final book of the runaway best-selling Left Behind series – Tuesday night (the day it was published) at the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Reidsville. ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Two weeks from now will find closure coming to something that should have ended a long, long time ago. Kingdom Come, purportedly the LAST installment of the Left Behind series of novels, comes out on April 3rd.

These books have done absolutely nothing positive for Christianity. They’ve scared a lot of people into professing Christ as their lord and savior. Unfortunately a relationship with Christ has to be built on something more than fear. Being a Christian isn’t supposed to be something you embrace as “fire insurance” against Hell: there’s more to it than that. This is something you do because you realize that on your own, you really don’t have meaning or purpose. Being a witness for Christ means showing others the work that God is completing in our lives. It doesn’t mean scaring people: there’s no spiritual growth possible when fear is made out to be ...

Read more