Towards the Final Countdown?

All evangelicals believe in the Rapture and the Second Coming, but as soon as they start explaining things in detail, significant differences start to emerge. You can get a serious headache listening to debates between the historicists and the modified preterists and the futurists and the dispensationalists. To their credit, many evangelicals do not try and predict the timing of endtime events, but the past fifty years has seen a rash of "the end is near" enthusiasts (some of the more foolish ones specify actual dates for Christ's return, but they never seem to learn from each others' mistakes). The worst offenders tend to be the premillennialists in general and the dispensationalists in particular. Here are some recent book titles for your edification:

Lindsey, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon (1982).

Ryrie, The Final Countdown (1982).

Sumrall, I Predict 2000 A.D. (1987).

Faird, Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come? (1988).

Whisenant, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will be in 1988 (1988).

Whisenant, The Final Shout: Rapture Report 1989 (1989).

Walvoord, Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis (1990).

Dyer, The Rise of Babylon: Sign of the End Times (1991).

Terrell, The 90s: Decade of the Apocalypse (1992).

Hunt, How Close Are We? Compelling Evidence for the Soon Return of Christ (1992).

Liardon, Final Approach: The Opportunity and Adventure of End-Times Living (1993).

Lalonde & Lalonde, Racing Toward the Mark of the Beast: Your Money, Computers, and the End of the World (1994).

Lindsey, Planet Earth 2000 A.D.: Will Mankind Survive? (1996).

Hagee, The Beginning of the End: the Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Coming Antichrist (1996).

Jeffrey, Armageddon: Appointment with Destiny (1997).

Dobson, 50 Remarkable Events Pointing to the End: Why Jesus Could Return by A.D. 2000 (1997).

Hindson, Approaching Armageddon: the World Prepares for War with God (1997).

Kirban, Countdown to Rapture (1998).

Ryrie, et al, Countdown to Armageddon: the Final Battle and Beyond (1999).

Hagee, From Daniel to Doomsday: the Countdown Has Begun (1999).

Camping, We Are Almost There! (2010).

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Don't you just love the former NASA engineer and Bible student Edgar Whisenant (two of his two books are listed above)? He writes a book in 1988 predicting that the Rapture will occur in 1988, and then (with a somewhat red face) he writes ANOTHER book in 1989 predicting that the Rapture will occur in 1989!

Way to go, Edgar.

Harold Camping (also mentioned in the above list) recently predicted that the Rapture will take place on 21 May 2011. Will these clowns never learn?

The trick, of course, is to choose your language carefully, with a dose of built-in vagueness and ambiguity. If I was foolish enough to write such a book, my evasive title would be Are We Moving Towards the Final Countdown?, which would give me lots of room to manoeuvre.