By Kathleen Kern

A Palestinian teacher once gave me an advanced English textbook designed for Arabic speakers. One of its sidebars noted, “Americans take a very long time to say goodbye.” Until I read these words I hadn’t understood why Palestinians would visit for several hours and then abruptly stand up and say, “I want to go.” (Next time you visit a friend, count the sentences spoken between the time one of you starts to leave and the time you actually part.)

The “outsider’s” view of my reality has always fascinated me. I think this fascination kept me listening to all 12 of the “Left Behind” books on tape. I have friends and relatives who are secular, non-native English speakers, Israeli, Jewish, Arab, journalists, scientists, academics, biblical scholars and pacifists. I realized near the beginning of their first book that the “Left Behind” authors don’t understand how these people think or what they do, how history and cultural dynamics have shaped them.

The most glaring example of this outsider’s view is the fact that the books’ Arab, Chinese, Israeli, Greek and Korean protagonists all speak idiomatic American English. Greek and Chilean Christians who refuse to take the mark of the Beast even go to their deaths singing American gospel hymns in English.

People more learned than I have already weighed in on these pages about the problematic theology of the “Left Behind” series. I’ll add only that I have long considered the dispensationalism that undergirds this series a heresy because, like the Book of Mormon, dispensationalism uses the Bible to promote unbiblical teachings. For me, its most dangerous assertion is that Jesus never intended his followers to abide by his commands in this age. The Sermon on the Mount is applicable only after he returns.

Dispensationalism cheapens the suffering of the early Christians who faced torture, imprisonment and death because they refused to worship the Roman emperors. When we regard Revelation’s tribulations as things that haven’t happened yet, we imply their suffering didn’t count.

Still, the plot of “Left Behind” carried me along, which made me wonder whether I could write an end-times novel that respected both the biblical witness and the early Christians whom the book of Revelation was intended to comfort.

I couldn’t think of any new tribulations that hadn’t been happening to believers for the last 2,000 years — as contemporary Christians in Sudan and Vietnam bear witness to. And the December tsunami proved that horrible natural disasters are an ongoing reality that human beings are going to have to deal with, too.

I’d have more luck with the antichrist. When I looked up the biblical references to “antichrist(s),” I saw the term appears only in I and II John and refers to former Christians who claimed Jesus had not come “in the flesh” (see I John 4:2-3.) So my antichrist would ignore the Jesus who felt grief, pain and terror, who healed with spit and mud. This antichrist might, as the last book in the “Left Behind” series does, depict Jesus as a Godzilla-esque android who spouts Scripture and makes people explode.

I think my version would also pay more tribute to the grace of God. Those people not raised as Christians would never lose the option to repent and believe as the unfortunate souls who take the mark do in “Left Behind.”

Although I know the mind of God no better than any other mortal, I’m pretty sure that’s not how God thinks.