Lutherans and the
Dare to n my day, as we over-the-hill thirty-somethings like to say, video games were simple. As a kid, I loved to shoot those chugging, descending rows of square aliens in Space Invaders in the big stand-up machine next to Pac-Man and Donkey Kong at the laundromat. Today, there’s splattering blood, death, and mayhem on your computer or TV at home. The deep darkness that brooded inside the Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris was at least amplified, if not inspired, by DOOM, the first first-person shooter game.
I
H I G H E R T H I N G S __ 12
The good news about Left Behind: Eternal Forces, released a few months ago, is that killing (one of the objectives of the game along with converting) is not without cost. Every time you, a member of the Tribulation Force, blast a member of the Antichrist’s evil minions (the Global Community Peacekeepers), you lose Spirit Points. So, you have to maintain a balance of converting (through streetcorner preaching) and killing. Thankfully, the Spirit Warriors (Christian rock singers) are around, and one dose of praise and worship will boost your Spirit Points. The media thinks that this “Christian” game promotes intolerance, bigotry, and a “Crusader mentality.” Newspapers from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times have blasted the game for teaching kids that Christianity means “Convert, or else!” rather than the love-and-snuggles message of the Unitarian “Jesus.” What’s really wrong with this game, other than the fact that the game itself is just plain lame, is what’s really wrong with the entire Left Behind series, which includes several best-selling books, a handful of movies, and a host of knickknacks: they promote a view of the End Times that is contrary to Scripture—disguised as a “literal” interpretation of Scripture. And this false and misleading view of the end times takes such great pains to notice every detail of the Book of Revelation that, well, you can make a video game out of it. You may find it difficult to take some of these overly silly manifestations of premillennial dispensationalism (the theology behind Left Behind) seriously. On the other hand, it can be equally difficult to deal with questions raised by our evangelical friends when they quote chapter and verse and then accuse us of not taking the Bible seriously. Lutherans, you may have noticed, are very narrow-minded, but sometimes this is a good thing, as in the way we look at the Bible. For when we open up its pages, the first thing we look for is Christ. “Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ beside me,” as St. Patrick liked to say, or “Christ on every page,” as Martin Luther liked to say. When Jesus met those bewildered disciples on the Road to Emmaus (Luke 24), He began with Moses (as in Genesis) and showed them all “the things concerning Himself.” Then, they looked at the prophets and the psalms and found Jesus there too.
