He's at it again, trumpeting the beginning of the end, "the rapture." Edgar Whisenant misdated it before, incorrectly exciting a lot of people. But now he's touting a new deadline - next Friday.
"Everything points to it," says the retired NASA rocket engineer. "All the evidence has piled up."This time, however, warning criticisms were being sounded against buying his revised end-time scenario, although there were indications of another Bible Belt surge of attention to it.
Heavy circulation of Whisenant's new, 96-page book, "The Final Shout: Rapture Report - 1989," was reported across the South, in many cases in free mailings by the Nashville, Tenn., publisher, World Bible Society.
"The time is short," said Whisenant. "I'm telling people the end is near and to get their children and everyone they care about under the blood of Jesus."
The Rev. Bill Gordon of Atlanta, associate director of the Southern Baptist interfaith witness department, issued a paper urging people not to be deceived by Whisenant's "rapture" predictions.
Gordon said Whisenant's book reads more like an "Indiana Jones" movie than good theology.
Whisenant, 56, of Little Rock, Ark., said in a telephone interview, "I don't care what they call me, or what they say about me as long as they've heard what I'm telling them.
Whisenant, formerly a Kennedy Space Center electrical engineer involved in the early rocket launches and moon-landing program, retired in 1968. He said he has concentrated since then on analyzing biblical prophecy.
Whisenant said he was mistaken in setting the date of the "rapture" as September 1988, chiefly because his mathematical calculations were off by one year due to a quirk in the modern Gregorian calendar.