Shockwave 2000!

Harold Camping told his radio audience the world would end in September 1994. It did not, and the failure became the best-known case of date-setting in modern American religious broadcasting. Robert Sungenis had worked closely with Camping at Family Radio for two and a half years in the early 1980s, which is the vantage point this coauthored critique is written from: someone who watched the method form up close before setting out to take it apart.

What the book documents is not only the arithmetic of a failed prediction but the habit of interpretation behind it, and how a broadcaster shunned by seminary scholars came to treat that rejection as confirmation. Sungenis, quoted years later in a profile of Camping, still granted him a certain admiration while calling the ideas wacky and saying he felt obliged to tell people so. 176 pages, New Leaf Press.