THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 1, 1995 TAG: 9509290457
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY WILLIAM P. CHESHIRE, THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
If you tune in Pat Robertson's ``700 Club'' these days, you probably will find the TV evangelist hawking his apocalyptic novel, ``The End of the Age.''
Word Publishing sent out a four-chapter excerpt last week. Robertson assures his television congregation that the book ``could change your life,'' and so I took the plunge and read the first few chapters.
The story line is uncomplicated.
On their way to the airport and a few days of romance and golf in Colorado Springs, Carl and Lori Throneberry, rich swells from suburban Los Angeles, hear on the radio that a 300-billion-pound fireball is hurtling toward the Earth at 25,000 mph and will splash down off California in another 10 hours.
The freeways are jammed. Abandoning their car, the Throneberries strike out on foot. With seconds to spare, they scramble aboard the plane.
``Do you remember my Aunt Josephine?'' asks Lori, bumping along with her husband in the first-class cabin. ``The one who used to live in Phoenix?''
``Vaguely,'' Carl grunts.
``Auntie Jo was the one who used to talk to us kids about the Bible, and she would tell us about all the spooky stuff in Revelation.''
As Carl, a high-priced advertising exec with scant interest in the metaphysical, listens with subdued interest, Lori gives him a Cliff Notes version of John of Patmos' glimpse of the apocalypse.
``Carl, don't you see?'' Lori says. (One imagines Carl yawning as Lori grabs him by the lapels.)
``It's not a made-up story. Revelation was a prophecy about what would happen at the end of the age, and in one part it says that an angel is going to throw a burning mountain into the sea, and lots of people - on ships and on the land - are going to be killed. Don't you get it? A flaming mountain? A meteor? An asteroid? Whatever! Millions of people are going to die!''
Carl laughs. A meteor larger than 10 Rose Bowls is to T-bone the planet before supper time, but the space-minded Carl - ``deep in his heart,'' we are told, ``he had always wanted to be a full-time astronomer'' - keeps his sense of humor.
Gradually, however, Lori, newly evangelized herself by the prospect of global catastrophe, makes a tentative conversion.
``You know I'm not religious,'' Carl confides shortly before the plane touches down, ``but, honey, I'm beginning to believe this may be the end of the age. Tell me again what Aunt Josephine told you.''
How the book ends, I cannot say, but my guess is that Carl is born again and puts his knowledge of the advertising trade to work converting lost souls in the manner of - well, Pat Robertson.
I know I'll catch the dickens from devotees of the ``700 Club,'' but as a literary figure Pat Robertson is no John of Patmos. His sequel to Revelation inspires neither reverence nor trembling, but, like Lori before Carl's conversion, only belly laughs.
The cover of ``The End of the Age'' gives no credit to any co-author, and so Robertson presumably wrote this stuff alone. The question is why - to make money (the book will fetch $21.99 in hardback) or to warn a sinful age of God's coming judgment?
The year 2000 is only a little more than four years off. Does Robertson think that pre-millennium jitters will fill the Christian Coalition's war chest, or is he a doomsday prophet employing science fiction to bring the world to its knees?
A phone call to World Publishing's publicity department produced no clear answer, but the author's own testimony is instructive.
``It is my highest belief,'' he says, ``that God has called me to write about His Revelation.'' The book, he says, ``is not simply a story.'' He calls it ``a modern allegory designed to make the Book of Revelation come alive to all generations.''
God may have called Pat Robertson to write the book, but He hasn't necessarily called any of the rest of us to buy it.
On the basis of what I've read, I would advise readers to stick with John's original and put the savings in the collection plate. by CNB