Posted on 11/14/2006 5:46:32 AM PST by Alex Murphy
A Christian video game based on prophecies from the Bible's Book of Revelation takes a new twist on video game violence -- draining the "spirit" of characters who slay enemies rather than making them stronger.
"Left Behind: Eternal Forces," which ships on Tuesday after about four years in the making, is a teen-rated PC strategy game based on the wildly popular "Left Behind" book series created by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
The game is set in New York City after millions of Christians have been transported to heaven in the rapture.
Players are charged with recruiting, and converting, an army that will engage in physical and spiritual warfare with the antichrist and his evil followers.
Along the way, players collect spirit points which are essential for winning.
"It is a game with positive values; there is no blood, no profanity, no gratuitous violence, and no inappropriate content," Left Behind Games Inc. Chief Executive Troy Lyndon said in a statement.
Lyndon in the past worked on games such as the blockbuster "Madden" football game series which is considered one of the most successful video games in the United States.
The Left Behind game, described by the company as "a classic battle between good and evil," has won positive mainstream reviews but also has riled up critics.
Florida attorney Jack Thompson, a conservative Christian who has lobbied extensively against violent video games, has condemned the game for its violence -- whether or not it be Christians blowing away infidels.
"The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game," he was quoted as saying on Web site www.religioustolerance.org.
But the company said the critics have not reviewed the game.
This was the same argument put forward by Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.'s Rockstar Games studio, creator of the controversial "Grand Theft Auto" game series and the new high school fighting title "Bully" which was publicly condemned before its launch.
Sounds amusing. Too bad it's based on novels which take the heretical pre-tribulation rapture as a starting point. Check your history--the notion of a pre-tribulation rapture occurs first in the mid 19th century. Patristic commentary on the Scriptural texts evinced to support it make it clear that the uniform understanding of Christians, whether Orthodox, Latin or protestant (and I would dare to venture Coptic, Armenian or Nestorian as well), down to that point, read the texts as describing the experience of Christians alive at the time of the general resurrection, which follows all of the events poetically described in St. John's Apocalyse, being the last event prior to the Last Judgement and the renewal of the world.
Make your own game, then.
Actually a lot people are pretty disappointed with this thing. It is possible to play on the "wrong" side, as part of the Forces of the AntiChrist and I suspect a lot of players are doing just that.
Prove that a pre-tribulation rapture (or mid-trib rapture) is heresy. Use the Bible instead of Patristic texts, too.
Read the Holy Apostle Paul's description of being caught up in the clouds, in context. On the face of it, it means not what the 19th century interpreters, who invented the pre-tribulation rapture took it to mean, but what the Church has always read it as meaning: it describes the experience of believers at the time of the general resurrection. (And I know that those who appeal to the Scriptures without submitting their understanding to the Church's understanding--as you evidently do, since you forbid citation of patristic sources in your challenge--are *very* fond of the surface, or 'literal' meaning.) Nothing in the Apocalypse of St. John, nor in the apocalyptic passages of Daniel, describes believers being spared the horrors of the end-times.
Misreading Scripture in contradiction to the uniform understanding of the Church is enough to prove heresy. Heretics have always appealed to the Church's books against the Church's reading of them. A novel or idosyncratic reading of Scripture is heresy because it is an innovation, not because it is 'unscriptural' or 'extra Biblical', but because it contradicts what Christians always believed.
Yes, I'm fond of reading the Bible and letting it speak for itself - with the New Testament being written in Koine Greek - the tongue of the common man at the time. That means it was written for regular folks to understand. But if a pre-trib rapture is so heretical, then it should be an easy thing for you to prove it other than accusing people that hold that belief (and many of them not slouches on this matter, either) of being heretics.
The reason why I didn't allow the Patristic writings is that they aren't Scripture - if they were, they would be in the Canon, wouldn't they?
Once you nail down the heresy from Scripture, I would be interested in some of the church father's writings - specifically delineating that a pre-trib rapture is heresy.
First, if you agree that St. Paul's text describe the experience of believers at the time of the general resurrection (the only Scriptural support for believers being caught up into the heavens), then one merely needs to locate the general resurrection in the future chronology given in St. John's Apocalypse: the first mention of a resurrection is after the seven bowls of wrath and after the reign of Antichrist, as those raised first are those who were martyred for refusing the mark.
As to specific patristic condemnation of the notion, you will find none. Just as there are not specific condemnations of the filioque from the first seven centuries of the Church's history, nor of iconoclasm from the first six, nor monothelitism from the first five, nor monophysitism from the first four, nor Nestorianism, pneumatomachianism or Arianism in the first three.
Heresies can be condemned only after they are promulgated, and since the first teaching of the 'pre-tribulation rapture' was in the 19th century, one cannot expect to find condemnations of it earlier than that. Fr. Seraphim Rose certainly wrote urgently against the notion as contrary to the teachings of Holy Orthodoxy on the Last Judgement, and other recent Fathers, Blessed Theophylact of Bulgaria, for instance, stressed the traditional interpretation of Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians.
Of course, heresies must have a baleful effect on those who hold them, otherwise they would merely be opinions, or theologumen, which may be accepted or rejected. In the case of the pretribulation rapture, those who adhere to it will be easy prey for Antichrist because they will reason that since they have not been 'raptured' (nor anyone they know of) that the outwardly good man working wonders cannot be Antichrist, since Antichrist comes after the 'rapture'.
If it has a baleful effect on Christians who hold it, and is contrary to the teachings of the Church from the beginning, any novelty is a heresy whether a council condemns it or not.
If it has a baleful effect on Christians who hold it, and is contrary to the teachings of the Church from the beginning, any novelty is a heresy whether a council condemns it or not.
A well-reasoned post; thank you!
Even if one were to agree with your assertion, it doesn't qualify for heresy. It's not stated in Scripture "don't believe this." Pre-trib, mid-trib and post-trib rapture are all non-essential doctrine. That's my point - your assertion that belief in a pre-trib rapture is heresy is baseless. You're majoring in the minors. Be careful.
I've given you the basis for considering it heretical: the Church never believed it, it is based on a reading of Scripture contrary to that which was always believed, it is new, and it will lead those who embrace it, if they have the misfortune to live in the times of Antichrist, and do not repent of the errant belief, to damnation.
The Scriptures have no explicit prohibitions on believing that Christ has only one nature, or on separating His person into the Eternal Word of God and 'the one from the Virgin', nor on believing that Christ's human will (in the sense of capacity for willing in a human manner, not in the sense of the thing willed) was swallowed up by His divine will, yet all of these are heresies, duly condemned by councils of the Church because in one way or another they vitiate the basis of our salvation.
Ah. "Considering it heretical." That's better. I don't consider it heretical, nor do I consider mid or post tribulation rapture heretical, either. It's non-essential doctrine. Thanks. I think we're done here.
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