Hal Lindsey, a Dallas Theological Seminary graduate who had worked with Campus Crusade for Christ, published The Late Great Planet Earth with Carole C. Carlson through the evangelical publisher Zondervan in 1970. The book restates dispensational premillennialism, the reading of biblical prophecy that divides history into distinct ages and expects a future seven year tribulation, a rapture of believers, and Christ's visible return, in the plain, journalistic prose of a current events paperback rather than a theological treatise.
Lindsey treated Israel's founding in 1948 as a prophetic marker, reasoning from the biblical figure of one generation, which he took as roughly forty years, to suggest that climactic events might unfold during the 1980s. He read the Soviet Union as the biblical power from the north poised to invade Israel, interpreted the developing European Economic Community as a revival of the Roman Empire foretold in the book of Daniel, and argued that the United States' absence from end-times prophecy hinted at national decline. The book presents these readings as probable near-term outcomes of specific, nameable current events rather than as one interpretive tradition among several within Christianity, a stronger claim than most professional biblical scholars, including other evangelicals, were willing to make about unfulfilled prophecy.