by Dave MacPherson
A couple
decades ago I learned how serious Tim LaHaye had become when it came to my
pretrib history research----and it wasn't very becoming.
On
January 5, 1981 he had sent a letter from the Scott Memorial Baptist Church he
then pastored in the San Diego area to an evangelical publisher in another
state. In the letter, which later came into my hands, LaHaye bluntly discussed
yours truly and told the recipient: "Praise God you're going to answer
this turkey----if I didn't already have 89 irons in the fire I'd take it
on----some one should!"
Back in
those days LaHaye was well-known for his bestselling Spirit-Controlled
Temperament book (temperaments that fundamentalist and evangelical critics
have traced to the world of the occult!). Unfortunately that book didn't reveal
the type of temperament LaHaye could possess (a LaHaodicean one?) in order to
call me a "turkey." Maybe his pretrib "feathers" had been
ruffled by the many evangelical leaders who'd "gobbled" up my
research and then praised it during the previous decade:
In his
1974 book When Is Jesus Coming Again, J. Barton Payne reflected it
when he wrote that "the dispensational position...began only in 1830 with
J. N. Darby's acceptance of Margaret Macdonald's revelation in Port Glasgow of
a dispensationally divided return."
During
the same year Christianity Today called it a "staunch
defense" and Moody Monthly (while Jerry Jenkins was a top name
there) referred to my "careful, factual sleuthing."
In Canada
The Prairie Overcomer at Prairie Bible Institute concluded that
"MacPherson's case seems to be watertight" while The Witness (the
oldest and largest Darbyist Brethren magazine in England!) declared: "What
he [MacPherson] succeeds in establishing is that the view outlined was first
stated by a certain Margaret Macdonald...early in 1830." (Who knows the
British, and the British ways of speaking, better than the British do?)
Some
other comments during that period came from Harold Ockenga's letter ("You
have done your research well"), Ian S. Rennie's Dreams, Visions and
Oracles ("it is likely that [Margaret's revelation] was grist for
Darby's mill"), and J. Gordon Melton in the Encyclopedia of American
Religions ("The best scholarship available [views Margaret as the
pretrib originator]").
With
reactions like these coming from a noticeable percentage of the evangelical
literati, you can see why Tim was dispensationally distraught over the
possibility that comments from thinking evangelicals might have a dire
effect on his ability to keep on making pretrib (la)hay while the sun was
shining!
But now
let's fast forward until we reach the year 1992 and the arrival of LaHaye's No
Fear of the Storm----a book that's had no fear of being exposed as one of
the most shabby, slipshod, slovenly (and, yes, even dishonest) prophecy
books ever!
While
flipping LaHaye's pages in order to spot his comments on the pretrib origin
(the way my book The Rapture Plot describes it), I quickly found one
sentence on page 180 that has four historical errors.
In
it he asserts that 19th century (Plymouth) Brethren scholar S. P. Tregelles
claimed in two of his books, spaced 11 years apart, that
fellow Brethren member J. N. Darby derived pretrib from the Jews and Margaret
Macdonald. Since Margaret wasn't Jewish, LaHaye sees Tregelles naming two
different sources and contradicting himself.
If you've
been totally immersed in pretrib rapture origin research since 1970 (as I
have), you'll soon find (as I did) these four errors:
1. The
two Tregelles works were not two books but an article (1855) and a book (1864).
2. They
were nine years apart.
3. The
article spoke only of "Judaisers" within Christianity. (This was the
first time I'd ever found anyone claiming that the Jews had been
blamed for originating pretrib!)
4. The
book referred to "an 'utterance' in Mr. Irving's Church." (Margaret
never even visited Edward Irving's church!)
LaHaye
obviously had been influenced by other writers, including R. A. Huebner and
John Walvoord, who had previously aired the supposed Tregelles contradiction.
(Elsewhere in the present book I show that Tregelles did not contradict
himself.)
After
being flabbergasted by this blunder-packed sentence, I decided to check the
accuracy of LaHaye's reproduction of Margaret Macdonald's key 1830 revelation.
With all 117 lines of her revelation in front of me (as found in my books
including The Incredible
Cover-up and The
Great Rapture Hoax), I began comparing LaHaye's version with it.
Everything matched perfectly during the first few lines.
But when
I got to lines 10-11, LaHaye's copy spoke of Margaret's "great
burst." Was this a reference to the "inbreaking of God...about to
burst on this earth" (lines 42-43)? Or perhaps her vision of the final collapse
of the pretrib view? Well, neither. Between the words "great" and
"burst" LaHaye had omitted "darkness and error about it; but
suddenly what it was." This omission can keep his readers in the
dark concerning her cultic pride in thinking that only she could
really explain "the sign of the Son of man" (Matt. 24:30)!
In
addition to a variety of other copying errors, LaHaye also omitted eight words
in lines 16-17, a word in line 51, another word in line 58, 11 words in lines
74-75, nine words in lines 76-77, and eight words in lines 111-112----sins of
"omission" that can easily result in faulty analyses of Macdonald's
prophetic words! (I wrote LaHaye in regard to his many copying errors. He never
responded.)
LaHaye's
version of Margaret's words is actually found in Robert Norton's Memoirs of
James & George Macdonald, of Port-Glasgow (1840). But somehow he had
prefaced it as being part of Norton's The Restoration of Apostles and
Prophets; In the Catholic Apostolic Church (1861). All I had to do was
find someone who had carelessly combined the 1840 text with the 1861 title.
Within
minutes, while going through my files, I ran across a 1989 publication that had
the same combination. And it had the same copying errors----including the same
48 omitted words----in the same places! The author was Thomas Ice!
(When
LaHaye decided to plagiarize Ice's reproduction of Margaret's revelation
instead of doing his own research, he didn't realize that Ice's sloppiness
would trip up himself as well as Ice. But of course they are still friends and
partners----especially in connection with the Pre-Trib Research
Center----because they are sloppy and dishonest birds of a feather!
Incidentally, Ice never responded after my letter to him asked about his many
copying errors.)
In
addition to LaHaye's "bumped" words, I tallied 84 other errors he
makes when quoting various writers on 27 other pages discussing pretrib
beginnings. LaHaye omits 11 words when quoting Walvoord's The Rapture
Question: Revised. Walvoord, echoing Huebner, was asserting that my
evidence has not proven that Margaret and Irving taught the pretrib view. But
readers are kept in the dark about the assertion in the book in question
because LaHaye somehow deletes what Walvoord was concluding!
On page
169 LaHaye says that at the Library of Congress he obtained photocopies of
Manuel Lacunza's work, the title of which is The Coming of Messiah in Glory
and Majesty. Perhaps he can explain why on two pages this title appears as
The Coming of Messiah in Power and Glory and is listed on a later page
as The Coming of Christ in Power and Great Glory. Equally serious are
his book's other copying errors including erroneous sources and page numbering
in footnotes as well as inaccurate historical dates in the text.
Something
else. If I fail to rectify some notions that LaHaye has repeated, others in the
20th century tradition of copying (and miscopying) may very well repeat and
even embellish them.
LaHaye
gives the impression that my father, Norman, changed from pretrib to posttrib during
his Southern California pastorate from which he was ousted, and that
Biola's position on the rapture was the only one ever held by that Los
Angeles school. LaHaye even has a chapter about me entitled "MacPherson's
Vendetta" and assumes that personal revenge on my part is the reason for
my decades-long research on pretrib beginnings.
For the
record here are my responses:
1. My
father changed from pretrib to posttrib before his 1944 book Triumph
Through Tribulation. Through meetings in my parents' living room, the
church in question was formed in 1947. Folks knew about his previous change,
but he was always a calm and scholarly preacher, almost never brought up
posttrib, and never made any rapture view a test of fellowship. Later on, some
pretrib outsiders joined, evidently intent on making the church a pretrib
church.
I still
have the handwritten notes that my mother took at the May 16, 1951 ouster
meeting. One of the voiced criticisms of my father that she recorded: "He
has no right to interpret prophecy contrary to Scofield." (This critic
obviously was influenced only by Scripture and not by human agency in the same
way Darby was!)
2. The
doctrinal statement in Biola's catalog says merely that the "Lord Jesus is
coming again to this earth, personally, bodily, and visibly." The school's
founders chose such a broad statement because they wanted persons to have
freedom to hold and discuss what were then viewed as non-essentials: for
example, differing tribulational and millennial views.
Nowadays
the Biola catalog includes this explanatory note (following the doctrinal
statement): "The Scriptures are to be interpreted according to
dispensational distinctives with the conviction that the return of the Lord for
His Church will be premillennial, before the Tribulation, and that the
Millennium is to be the last of the dispensations."
When I
applied in 1952 for admission to the original Bible Institute of Los Angeles
campus in downtown L. A., I was given the original doctrinal statement which
allows for non-conflicting non-essentials.
Since my
father had been a schoolmate of Biola's president at Princeton Seminary (hardly
a pretrib school), I saw no harm in occasionally sharing copies of my father's
1944 book with some student friends and some of my teachers. If the school had
told me to stop this, I would have. If I had been a threat all year to Biola's
"official" position, why did it wait until just two weeks before
the end of the school year to kick me out?
Throughout this century pretrib has changed from being a non-essential to being
an expedient essential at Biola and many similar schools, primarily because of
its tremendous fund-raising potential.
3. LaHaye
concludes wrongfully that my pretrib origin research of a quarter of a century
is nothing more than my vengeful reaction to what happened to my family in the
1950's.
If so, it
must be one of the slowest reactions ever. I didn't even wonder about the
origin until two decades after the California incidents. Long before
my research began, numerous tragedies including untimely death had overtaken
the ringleaders in the church trouble. During the years between the early
1950's and the early 1970's (when my research began), I was never bitter
towards anyone at either the church or Biola----and haven't been down to the
present day.
In the
same No Fear book of his, LaHaye has an entire chapter discussing my
books. The fair and honest thing, when citing books, is to list the books in
footnotes or at least in a bibliography----unless a writer has something to
hide. The reason LaHaye doesn't list any of my works in this manner is that he
is neither fair nor honest!
As if all
of the above isn't enough, there's even plagiarism in some of LaHaye's
books! I'll give an example by comparing Hal Lindsey's There's A New World
Coming (1973) with LaHaye's Understanding the Last Days (1998).
On p. 281
Lindsey wrote: "The New Testament refers to the 'Book of Life' eight
times, and although the Old Testament doesn't call it by that name, it refers
three times to a book in which names are written. This book contains the name
of every person born into the world. If by the time he dies, a person has not
received God's provision of sacrifice to remove sin, then his name is blotted
out of this 'Book of Life.'"
On pp.
192, 194 LaHaye wrote: "The New Testament refers to the book of life eight
different times, and although the Old Testament does not call it by that name,
it does allude three times to a book in which names are written...The book of
life is that book in which the names of all people ever born into the world are
written. If, at the time of a person's death, he has not called upon the Lord
Jesus Christ for salvation, his name is blotted out of the book of life."
After I
told LaHaye in a letter that I had found plagiarism in his books, he sent me
the one and only letter I've ever gotten from him, dated March 3, 1999. His
first two sentences said: "You are the first person who (to my knowledge)
has ever accused me of plagiarizing anything from anyone. And with forty books
in print I would think someone would have if it were true." I
immediately sent him evidence that he had plagiarized various books by Walvoord
and Lindsey. To this day he has never responded in connection with the proof
that I sent to him!
My book The
Rapture Plot has an appendix exhibiting plagiarism, by means of comparison
quotes, in popular pretrib prophecy books. Not only is Tim LaHaye's plagiarism
portrayed, but there's proof also of the same literary thievery in writings by
Jerry Falwell, Ed Hindson, Ed Dobson, Charles Ryrie, Paul Tan, and Jack
Van Impe, for starters!
If
students at Christian Heritage College (LaHaye's former stomping ground) or
Falwell's Liberty University were to plagiarize their neighbors' answers during
an exam, they'd be in danger of getting an "F" for the exam and maybe
for the entire course.
But when
pretrib leaders cut corners and cheat in print, which of course allows them to
turn out rapture rush jobs much more quickly, they are awarded honorary (if not
honorable) degrees----like the Doctor of Literature degree that Falwell's
school gave to LaHaye!
LaHaye
gives the impression these days that his huge book sales are proof that he's
being blessed by the Lord. Well, if financial success is the most important
standard (and it seems to be in the eyes of many pretrib authors and
publishers), then the Lord must also be blessing the Mafia and Columbian drug
lords and even Osama Bin Ladin!
But when
does success become greed? LaHaye is currently suing fellow Christians over
the Left Behind film rights! His lawsuit even states that he has
suffered "emotional and mental stress, including anxiety, worry, mental
anguish and sleeplessness"----characteristics, as you can tell, of
Spirit-controlled temperament!
Jeremiah
17:11 is a verse that LaHaye has somehow left behind. It says that "he
that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his
days, and at his end shall be a fool."
Finally,
here's the big question:
In light
of recently uncovered evidence revealing the long-covered-up, sordid history of
the pretrib rapture view, and in light of the fact that God's judgment of
careless and apostate Christendom is rapidly increasing these days, will Tim
LaHaye temper his outlook and change his temperament or will he lose his
temper, let his temperature rise, and become temperamental?