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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
The full head of hair and the moustache are still there, though flecked with grey. The sideburns have disappeared and the sixties’ sports shirt with the rolled-up sleeves has given way to the coat and tie of an elder statesman. The ‘father of modern-day Bible prophecy,’ as the blurb on one of Hal Lindsey’s most recent books anoints him, is now 70 years old. For almost 30 years Lindsey has held his position as the guru of popular premillennial dispensationalism.
This article will compare the apocalyptic themes of Hal Lindsey’s 1970 best-seller, The Late Great Planet Earth (hereafter LGPE) with his recent 1997 work, Apocalypse Code (hereafter AC). The purpose of the comparison is to demonstrate the resiliency and adaptability of apocalypticism in face of changing cultural situations. The article will also demonstrate ways in which Lindsey intertwines culture and theology to produce an eschatological system that, ostensibly, is rigid and inflexible, but in fact turns out to be capable of almost endless mutations.
1 This article is a revision of a paper delivered in March, 1999, in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A. at the joint meeting of the Midwest Region of the American Academy of Religion and the Central States Region of the Society of Biblical Literature.
2 See, for example, Boyer, Paul, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992Google Scholar; Wojcik, Daniel, The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America. New York: New York University Press, 1997Google Scholar; and Thompson, Damian, The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996Google Scholar.
3 See Haynes, Stephen R., ‘Hal Lindsey, “The Road to Holocaust”: a Review Essay,’Fides et Historia 24 (Fall 1993): 111–120Google Scholar.
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