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Killer Ending
The new Left Behind novel reinforces a trend toward a Jesus who comes not with peace but a sword.

Jesus has been depicted as a lamb and a shepherd, a rock star and a lowly carpenter. In "Glorious Appearing," the climactic twelfth installment in the Left Behind series released this week, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins give us Christ the Destroyer.

Here's the Christ Triumphant speaking as he encounters the army of the Anti-Christ near the ancient city of Petra in Jordan: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and Last, the Beginning and the End, the Almighty." Upon hearing these words, the Anti-Christ's minions fall dead, "simply dropping where they stood, their bodies ripped open, blood pooling in great masses." Later, as the Lord rides his white horse to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the saved sing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."

This vision of Christ, who eviscerates his human foes and drops them to the desert floor, is fast becoming the Savior for our times. He is Jesus the Warrior, who has gone in and out of fashion for most of the 20th century. "We're looking for a much more martial messiah," says Stephen Prothero, chairman of Boston University's religion department and author of the recently published "American Jesus." "In part, it's a response to 9/11 and the war in Iraq," he says, pointing out that the militant Jesus was popular during and after both world wars. "In the '60s and '70s, this Jesus nearly disappears," says Prothero. "You get the sense now that we are swinging back."

To find further evidence of this shift, you need go no further than the movie theater to take in this year's other multi-million dollar Christian phenomenon, Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." Beaten with rods until his torturers are winded from their exertions, Gibson's Jesus rises to his feet with a virile grunt—if you didn't know the movie was in Aramaic, you could swear he mutters "Bring it on." Three days later, we find Jesus sitting, disrobed and staring into middle space, like an athlete in the locker room. Then, still wearing his game face (and, curiously, nothing else), he strides out into Easter morning to the beat of a warlike drum. The tomb is open; so is a major can of whoop-ass.

Jenkins and LaHaye have been spinning the Book of Revelation, the inspiration for their novels, as a tale of payback since the series began in 1990. In the debut, "Left Behind," true Christians were suddenly assumed into heaven while unbelievers either died promptly--say, if their pilot loved Jesus--or were left to deal with the ensuing chaos. For faithful readers of the series, the surprise may not be the bloody outburst, but how brief and measured it is, and how kindly the Jesus of "Glorious Appearing" then turns out to be. As Jenkins's heroes and the other redeemed stream from every corner of the earth, Jesus appears as an enormous, benign presence who can look everyone in the eye at once while whispering individual blessings. Jenkins's model could have been the stern but loving lion Aslan from C.S. Lewis's Narnia series of the 1950s and '60s. (In an interview here, Jenkins says he based it on his early impressions of Christ from Sunday school.)

Prothero believes that it is precisely this Christ, the loving friend, that we are leaving behind. "What's going on now is a kind of withdrawal from the feminine, Victorian Jesus that has been popular with evangelicals" in the past few decades, he says.

Jesus' split personality--swinging from belligerent to gentle within "Glorious Appearing's" 400 pages--is a sign, perhaps, that evangelicals like Jenkins and LaHaye are still in transition between the Jesus the friend and Jesus the general....