Strozier’s breakdown of Revelation allows for us to simply soak in the main points of John’s visions without drowning in the language and warnings for morality, making it a lot easier to understand and empathize with fundamentalists, like Colby said. However, I have to say that I find myself disagreeing with some of his analysis of Revelation and also some of what he says about some of his seals of fundamentalism, particularly what he says of the letters and what he also says on the seal of revenge.
Tag Archives: language
Fundamentalist Mindset and Language
I had actually tried reading the Left Behind series a couple of years ago but never got a chance to really finish the first book. Like everyone’s mentioned, Glorious Appearing and the Fundamentalist Mindset essays go hand in hand. The Tribulation Force is trying to fight of the Antichrist, Nicholae Carpathia at the start of the novel, drenching the reader immediately in violent imagery. I think what we need to keep in mind though is that whereas the Rapture and its related events are all still hypothetical for us, the world of Glorious Appearing is a world that is undergoing the seven years of rule under the Antichrist. These characters have lost their family members to God and have been shown proof through Carpathia’s resurrection that there is more to come, which is why the language is so fundamentalist because it is happening in their concrete world. What I’m particularly interested about though is more language of the essays. We’re all using terminology that Strozier and Boyd used but I found some of their definitions lacking and, to use another of their words, ‘simple-minded’.
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