Question: I was listening to the Bible Answer Man when someone called in to ask Hank [Hanegraaff] ...

Question (Representative of several): I was listening to the Bible Answer Man when someone called in to ask Hank [Hanegraaff] about Dave Hunt. Please respond to what he said (from a transcript): “Dave Hunt has been a popular Christian author...and I think it’s ironic that his organization is called The Berean Call, because the Bereans were counted as being more noble by the apostle Paul because daily they examined the scriptures to see if what he was saying was so....If you examine...what Dave Hunt is saying...you will find out that he errs quite consistently in his interpretation of scripture.

“He, for example, will tell you that the great whore of Babylon in Revelation 17 (he wrote a book about it) is the Roman Catholic Church, so he is slandering an already vulnerable target....This statement is absolutely reprehensible. I’m going to point this out in a book that I just finished which is called, The Apocalypse Code....

“He is also a sensationalist. He was right about Y2K for all the wrong reasons...he imposed his dispensational theology, his rapture theory...on Y2K to come up with a particular interpretation of Y2K and I debunk that in a book that I wrote called The Millennium Bug Debugged...I wrote this book and came to the same conclusion, which was that Y2K was not going to be a big problem...but a lot of people were jumping on it and making all kinds of interpretations about it, but they were doing it [by] imposing their particular model of eschatology on the scripture as Dave Hunt did when he wrote A Woman Rides the Beast. So yeah, this is a guy that you need to be very careful with because if you test what he says in light of scripture you’ll find out that he gets it wrong more often than not.”

Response: Whenever Hank is asked about me, this is his standard response. It is slanderous. I gave a more detailed response 11 years ago (TBC Q&A May 1996).

The Roman Catholic Church is the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful institution in history and the world today. Yet Hank describes it as a “vulnerable target.” What?! I’m slandering it by identifying it as the whore in Revelation 17-18? The angel gives to John fourteen identifying characteristics that fit the Vatican (and nothing else) perfectly. This is how Luther and the Reformers and the thousands of true Christians down through history whom the RCC slaughtered (including even some Roman Catholic leaders) have always identified the “whore.” Of these martyrs, the great historian, Will Durant, wrote, “The Roman Church, they were sure, was the Whore of Babylon.” Einerius, an inquisitor appointed by Pope Innocent III 350 years before the Reformation, said of the Waldensian Christians, whom the RCC was attempting to exterminate, “They claim [that] the Roman Church is the whore described in John’s Revelation.” Even St. Bonaventure, cardinal and general of the Franciscans, in his Commentary on the Apocalypse, 300 years before the Reformation, called Rome “the harlot who makes kings and nations drunk with the wine of her whoredoms.” D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “I would not hesitate with the Reformers...to [say that the RCC] is, as the Scripture puts it, ‘the whore.’” When I tried to explain this to Hank and his staff many years ago, they accused me of inventing a new idea unknown in history. Their guffaws nearly drove me out of Hank’s office.

My book, Y2K: A Reasoned Response to Mass Hysteria?, was published before Hank’s. He says my Y2K book was based upon my “dispensational theology...rapture theory”? He only needed to read the back cover (“Dave Hunt argues that...Y2K has no direct relationship to biblical prophecy”), to realize that this is a baseless charge.

For the first 165 pages I quote the doomsayers, Christian and secular, who were predicting that millions would die. I analyze the problem from a purely technical and practical basis, quote the experts, top bankers, and IT managers who were not concerned at all, and explain why Y2K was not going to be any problem. I point out the folly of church leaders who were organizing Christians to store up food and water with which to rescue unsaved neighbors and thereby win them to Christ. The churches in our own town, led by a “Y2K Preparedness Committee,” were going to rescue Bend from disaster. This was the biggest thing in the church for months. I won’t name the popular Christian leaders who promoted this craze, nor those who accused me of causing a complacency that would kill millions.

It was not until page 166 that I dealt with Y2K from a biblical standpoint because so many Christian leaders were warning the inevitable computer crash would usher in a cashless society and the reign of Antichrist. Really? A cashless society would need computers, and so would the Antichrist to control the world. I pointed out the folly of trying to tie every apparent war or disaster to Bible prophecy and quoted the predictions of Christian leaders and prophecy teachers making Y2K a part of Bible prophecy. I wrote: “Sadly, each time a correspondence has been attempted between a current event and a specific biblical prophecy and the event failed to live up to that expectation (as in the case of the Gulf War), Bible prophecy was discredited....There is a great danger of the same disillusionment occurring again when Bible teachers link Y2K with Bible prophecy....Throughout this book we provide sufficient documentation to show that there will not be a general failure of computers on January 1, 2000. Yet a surprising number of Christians say that God has been confirming the worst Y2K disaster scenario to them by revelation and dreams.”

Only on page 182 did I chide Christians for being so obsessed with Y2K that they had forgotten their hope of heaven and instead of looking for the Rapture were spending their time, money, and efforts preparing to survive Y2K on earth. For the next 20 pages I show that the Y2K disaster predictions, far from fulfilling biblical prophecy, contradicted it. Then I go back to the technical reasons why Y2K was not going to be what the alarmists were saying.

I hope that Hank’s accusations that I was “right about Y2K for all the wrong reasons [and] imposed [my] dispensational...rapture theory...on Y2K to come up with a particular interpretation of Y2K,” as well as his claims relative to the “whore of Babylon” will at last be put to rest.