Customer Reviews

The Last Days Are Here Again: A History of the End Times

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There is finally some solid, Evangelical scholarship taking non-scholarly popularizers like Hal Lindsey, Jack Van Impe and Pat Robertson to task. This book is dry in places, but it's handling of the past is crucial to our understanding of the present. The book does a monumental job of documenting end times paranoia from the time of the early church to today. Highly recommended...especially for those who helped make Hal Lindsey a millionaire several times over!

Kyle pulls together a diverse collection of eshatological beliefs, predictions and events in such a way that one can really get a grasp on where we (as the church universal) have been on this issue. Is the dispensational premill position the historically dominant position of the church? What about the church's historical view of the rapture, the millennium or the tribulation. How did the church deal with deviant eschatologies?

I've studied eschatology in seminary, but this book really brings the scattered ideas and events together in an understandable and thought provoking way.

This book is a MUST READ for every pastor or teacher. If you are a layman, get the book. Read it, and then give it to your minister. Before you speak on the end times read this book!

Easy reading. Easy to understand. Moves quickly.

This book was required as the text for a course at a local college. We'll written and documented, it allows the reader to research on his own if he is in disagreement with the author. A pleasure to read, I read 80% of it one saturday. Good for the beginner, in that it defines terms used in simple language that makes it easier for the reader to grasp to concepts presented. I reccomend it highly to anyone, Christian or non, who wants to know more about Christian history.

Living as we are, under the cloud of unbiblical expectations of "Left Behind," it's refreshing to read Richard Kyle's reminder that in just about every generation since Jesus went away, there have been folks who were sure they were living in "The Last Days." He is an accomplished professor and scholar, but Dr. Kyle's readable style makes it easy to understand as he documents Last Days expectations from the Church Fathers of the first and second Christian centuries through the Middle Ages and on up to Jim Jones in Guyana and the Branch Davidians in Waco in the late 20th century.

Expectations of Christ's return have ebbed and flowed across the centuries, but Dr. Kyle shows the present-day emphasis has been around less than two centuries. We can thank John Nelson Darby from the UK in the mid-1800s for systematizing the current package which puts a literal focus on the Rapture, the Seven Years of Tribulation, the Battle of Armageddon, and the Thousand-Year Reign of Christ (the Millennium). In the US, Darby's interpretation took wings when Cyrus Ingerson Scofield published his annotated King James Bible in 1909. For many, the notes at the bottom of the pages in the Scofield Reference Bible are as sacred as the words from I Thessalonians and Revelation.

Dr. Kyle may take away part of the fun for those who like to set dates, but for those who want to get the straight of it, "The Last Days Are Here Again" will be an excellent guide.