THE PARABLE CODE

A heavily detailed work of Christian eschatology.

In this debut, Sloan delves into the Old and New Testaments to paint a complicated picture of the workings of God in the world and the duties of the Christian faithful, as Earth heads toward the end times. Throughout the book, the author returns regularly to a concept that he dubs “GGTMF” (“Giving God the Big Middle Finger”)—the idea that people willfully choose to disregard God’s rules for living a good and righteous life. He offers a wealth of detail while making his case. However, typographical and syntactical errors abound throughout the text (such as “Jesus remained silent in the presents [sic] of God”). Adding to the confusion is the work’s muddled millenarianism, which draws on a jumbled collection of works from Josephus to the Book of Revelation to support a worldview in which “God calls the predestined to Jesus Christ somewhere down life’s road; the foreordained are transformed by ‘The Indwelling of Holy Spirit.’ ” Some of the book’s specific assertions seem confused; Jesus doesn’t speak “to the dead in the religions in the synagogues of Satan” in Luke 4, for instance. Nor is it correct to state, regarding Daniel 7:26, that on “9 June AD 67 the court was opened and they destroyed #6 Emperors’ [sic] Nero’s dominion forever,” because Nero ruled until the year 68, and the Roman Empire stood for a further 400 years. The book’s most troubling assertions are that all Jews are marked for damnation and that God uses scourges like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and the Islamic State group to punish the wicked. Many Christian readers will also disagree with the book’s conception of a God who intentionally deceives people so that they may be forever tortured in a lake of fire.

A badly organized and frequently incoherent religious treatise.