Last week’s column, about the seeming failures of the Left Behind novels and particularly its last volume, brought many in-comment criticisms of the 16-installment series on both fiction and theological grounds. No one stepped up to defend Tim LaHaye’s understanding of the end times, or Jerry Jenkins’ style in portraying seven years of the Tribulation in fiction form.

Let me therefore be the first to support these guys more, at least here, and divulge that once upon a time, I had a few interactions with Jerry Jenkins on the (now-closed) “Left Behind” online message board. He was a great guy from what I could tell, with quite the sense of humor.

One of my first cyber-columns was a piece spoofing wacko-Christian predictions of the Second Coming: after a string of nonsensical “connections” between Biblical verses, supposed original languages and numerology, I set the date at April 1, 2000. And only a few people actually understood this as a satire — Jerry Jenkins among them. I still recall, nearly verbatim, his advice to other board participants: “The Indwelling releases March 30, 2000, so if you’re right, read fast!”

Anyway, that is my disclaimer of sorts, ensuring that my criticisms of the series do not cross over into perceived slams against its authors. My now-dislike of some of the Left Behind volumes, chief among them the most recent release Kingdom Come, in no way reflects any dislike for Tim LaHaye and “Super J,” as I used to call him.

At the same time, though, I sincerely doubt Kingdom Come will be very high on the reading list of timeless titles in the New Heavens and New Earth — or the real Millennium, assuming it does occur. Its portrayal of the prophesied “thousand years” is unimaginative, and failed to result in me, anyway, any sort of yearning for the “real” thousand-year period, or the New Heavens and New Earth to come. To me, only fantasy literature can do that — and Kingdom Come would never qualify as fantasy fiction.

Continue to the full column at Speculative Faith . . .

It’s been quite fun to observe the reactions throughout our solar system of the blog-universe, following the Washington Post’s article last week that dealt with Christ-honoring fantasy — which, of course, had a quote from our very own blogger, author Wayne Thomas Batson, right there on the very front page.

The article, though, only somewhat focused on Christian fantasy authors and books like Wayne’s Door Within series. As Wayne himself later expressed, other prolific fantasy authors such as Bryan Davis, Christopher Hopper and Sharon Hinck received nil mention, despite being with Wayne on the recent Fantasy Four Tour. Also lacking essential inclusion, I would add, was the name of one Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien, Patron Saint No. 1 of Christian fantasy; though one Prof. C.S. Lewis, the other Patron Saint No. 1, received a brief reference, it wasn’t nearly enough to match his influence on the fantasy genre.

That’s a substantive oversight, I would suggest. Surely any story remotely pertaining to Christian fantasy would have to include Tolkien and Lewis.

Meanwhile, though, two errors of pure fact crept into writer Jacqueline Salmon’s article: first, a reference to Dr. James Dobson praising the Potter books — the Focus on the Family founder quickly cried foul and said they weren’t at all good and the Post corrected; secondly, a Mormon writer’s erroneous attribution as a “Christian,” a somewhat-understandable, common mistake committed by non-Christians. (In fact, I’ve always thought that Mormonism itself, with its hierarchies of universes, with sets and subsets of Gods and Mrs. Gods, Jesuses and Satans and Adams and Eves, would make a great controversial fantasy series — far more heretical than anything Harry Potter ever conjured up.)

More perplexing, though, was the article’s strange swerve into the subtopic of Christian fiction in general. That I didn’t get at all — especially the text’s strong implication that Christian Romance Genres were somehow the latest and greatest thing right alongside fantasy. As Rebecca LuElla Miller noted last week, “Uh, no. Chick lit is entering the been-there-done-that phase.”

And that seeming misunderstanding by the author about a basic facet of the Christian literature field unfortunately leads me to conclude that maybe Salmon had also failed to grasp the existence of continuing opposition within the Christian community to fantasy-related fiction.

I can certainly hope I’m wrong, though.

But my strongest stylistic, even philosophical, objection to the article’s substance regards its implication that Harry Potter — who of course Apparated into the article from the very first paragraph — is the Big Original Fantasy Cheese right now, and all the Christian fantasy authors are coming after.

That’s just not the case. Christian epic fantasy authors were there first. And I’m not just talking about Lewis and Tolkien.