Hal Lindsey (1929-2024): The end times theologian who popularised the rapture

The US author Hal Lindsey promoted a dispensationalist view of the end times which continues to hold influence among some evangelicals. But Lindsey’s predictions in his widely read 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth, haven’t aged well, says Rev Ian Paul

When a student in Oxford in the 1980s, I walked into a church bookshop and picked up a landscape-format book full of complex diagrams. It was setting out the seven dispensations of history, apparently according to the Bible, in which God gave humanity in each era a distinct challenge, which it failed, and a unique means of redemption. Jesus’ atoning death applied only in one of these seven, the ‘church dispensation’, but not to others. I thought this was rather odd, and when I asked the assistant in the shop about it, she replied, “Isn’t that just what the Bible teaches?”

This was one measure of the influence of Hal Lindsey, who died last month aged 95. I don’t think his name is well known in the UK anymore, but through his series of best-selling books in America, and the Left Behind film series based on the novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins (whose son, Dallas, is behind The Chosen film series) which were informed by them, he shaped Christian thinking about the end times for a generation or more.

Many Christians still think that the rapture and the seven-year tribulation are clearly taught in the Bible, that we…