Money Winter 1998

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Eclipse of the Sun, by Michael O'Brien (Ignatius Press, 1998) 850 pp.

Strangers and Sojourners, by Michael O'Brien (Ignatius Press, 1997) 573 pp.

Father Elijah, by Michael O'Brien (Ignatius Press, 1996) 597 pp.

Frank Peretti has created a vast problem of literary appreciation: he's convinced an entire generation of evangelicals, and Roman Catholics who sneak into Baptist bookstores, that his novels of spiritual warfare are as good as the genre gets.

It's not just Peretti who's done this, of course; he's had plenty of help.

For reasons that remain obscure to me, it seems to be required that '90s evangelical celebrities write (or have ghostwritten for them) novels about the Last Days. All are very low on any possible literary scale. They are not written for the sake of compelling characters, or a tight plot, or apparently even for the sheer joy of writing, but seemingly to present the author's cultural agenda in tandem with his dispensational theology.

This theology leads Pat Robertson, Tim La Haye, Larry Burkett, Paul Meir, and others to see the Apocalypse as a series of events possessing a certain rhythmic logic. There are warnings, signs, wonders, tribulation, rapture, a millennial kingdom, final unleashing of Satan, Last Battle, Final Judgment. It is a pre-formed narrative for their novels upon which they can hang characters and events (the building of a Third Temple, the imposition of a world-wide personal identity code by the United Nations), which when interpreted leads to a further development in the plot. These novels have a curious didactic quality—a strange combination of textbook, newspaper, and scavenger hunt—pre-determined by their author's definition of Apocalypse.

While the novels of Michael O'Brien, collectively ...

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