Did Archie Really Introduce Me to Eschatology?
My introduction to eschatology goes back a long ways. I was six, perhaps seven years old. Our family was living in the high Arctic town of Inuvik. Dad was a pilot in the RCMP and he was stationed there for a couple of years, so I got to experience life in the “Land of the Midnight Sun.” During that time, we officially remained members of the Canadian Reformed Church in Edmonton, but we attended the local Baptist church. There I was exposed to the doctrine of the last things for the first time.
Our Sunday School teacher, evidently quite in tune with the latest in children’s ministry, handed comic books to all of us. These were Christian Archie comics. Yep, that was a thing. You see, Al Hartley, a writer and illustrator of the regular Archie comics, became a Christian in 1967. He asked the publisher if he could license the characters for a Christian version. Hartley got the go-ahead and so beginning in 1973, there were Christian Archie comics.
In my memory, I received one of these comics where the theme had to do with the end times. I remember reading about something called “the rapture” or “the snatching up.” Archie, Betty, and Jughead were the virtuous Christian characters in these comics and they were taken up in the air to heaven. You can guess the ones left behind – naturally, Reggie and Veronica. I don’t believe anything was said about Moose, Midge, Ethel, Mr. Weatherbee, or any other characters.
I was thinking about this memory recently and thought I might check whether my recollection was accurate. Sometimes your memory isn’t so sharp, especially with things that happened in early childhood. It turns out that there were definitely Christian Archie comics, but only 19 issues. However, try as I might, I couldn’t find an issue on the end times. But I’m sure I couldn’t imagine something like that when I was six or seven.
As I learned more about Al Hartley, I discovered he did other Christian comics not based on the Archie characters. Among them was a comic version of Hal Lindsey’s 1973 book There’s a New World Coming. In that one, there’s definitely a page portraying the Rapture, although no individuals who look like Archie, Betty, or Jughead. So I think what happened is that my memory conflated those two, introducing Archie and his gang into the Hal Lindsey story.
That piece of eschatology lodged in my brain at any rate. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized this idea of the Rapture was a key component of an erroneous system known as premillennial dispensationalism. In that system, the Rapture happens at the end of what they call “the Church Age.” Christ comes and takes all Christians with him into heaven, leaving behind the unbelievers on earth. Then follows seven years of tribulation. At the end of that, Christ comes again and establishes his 1000-year kingdom (the millennium). After one last Great Deception of Satan, the present world is destroyed and the new heavens and new earth arrive. If that approach sounds familiar, it was later popularized by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins in the Left Behind series of books and films.
There’s a lot that could be said about what’s wrong with all this. Books have been written. Among them is Kim Riddlebarger’s A Case for Amillennialism – highly recommended (my review is here). I’ll only say this: not only is the Rapture based on a misinterpretation of passages like 1 Thess. 4:13-17, but it’s also intertwined with an erroneous eschatological system. That system teaches, amongst other things, that the temple will be rebuilt in Jerusalem and that the sacrificial system will be reinstituted. This is why so many American Christians are fixated on Israel.
Eschatology has never really been a strong emphasis in my Reformed tradition. When it’s brought up, we generally just focus on the basics: Christ’s imminent return, the resurrection of the dead, the last judgment, the new heavens and the new earth. We could say more, but usually we don’t. I’m thankful that eventually I learned that the dispensationalist Rapture is wrong. But what if today there’s some young boy curiously learning about the Bible from YouTube and he stumbles across someone teaching it for kids? Who will clear it up for him?
