Rethinking the Rapture
First in a series on the Bible's vision of "the end of the world as we know it."
People suddenly disappearing, infrastructure collapsing, wailing people wondering what happened to their loved ones and why they’ve been left behind, apocalyptic signs in the heavens, antichrists running amok. These are just a few of images from the popular Left Behind series of books that also sparked a couple of movies all about what has become popularly known as “the Rapture,” or the time when some Christians believe that God will suddenly evacuate true believers from the earth (leaving behind their clothes, apparently, which makes the Rapture quite a sight) and “leave behind” on the earth those who are unbelievers and evildoers to be subject to a “tribulation” of a thousand years of torture under the rule of the antichrist and/or Satan. Of course, other Christians believe that the Rapture happens after the tribulation, and there are lengthy screeds supporting or denouncing one or the other all over the internet.
The Rapture has captured an interesting and theologically puzzling hold on many Christians in America. In effect, the idea is that the world is so corrupted that God will eventually abandon the earth and destroy it violently and completely. The only way out, then, is to be spiritually saved so that one might be part of the raptured few who escape to heaven where they can enjoy an eternity with Jesus (and, hopefully, get some new clothes to wear). As for the rest of the world—to hell with it! Literally.
A lot of Christians are thus waiting around for the ultimate Calgon moment when God "takes them away. “Heaven is our home!” is the rallying cry, and some have even gone so far as to try and use the Scriptures to discern when and how God will evacuate them from a dying creation. Back in the 1970s, Hal Lindsey published the bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, the literary ancestor of Left Behind, which brought speculation about the end into pop culture consciousness. Whenever things in our world become dicey or dangerous, people start looking for signs of the end of the world. In the 70s, for example, Lindsey’s “beast” in Revelation was the Soviet Union, but when the Berlin Wall fell in the late 80s he had to come up with another beast, and then another, until we have a sort of “Beast of the Month” club going on among Christians in some circles (interestingly, the Beast is never us). Whenever the news turns ominous—and when isn’t it this days—many Christians turn their eyes to skies and wait for Jesus to pull the ejection handles that will launch them from their earth to their true home in heaven.
But is this really what the Bible says about the last days of the world? Is our destiny to leave the world behind completely, or is it something else? A lot of people assume that this is what Revelation is talking about. Actually, however, there’s virtually nothing in Revelation about the Rapture. In fact, there’s very little about it anywhere except for a few passages that some interpret as outlining the scenario I outlined for you above.
These are the passages which deserve a closer look as we wrap up our series on The Good Book. Understanding the biblical vision of the end is essential to understanding how we are to live in the present in light of it. I would argue, along with many biblical scholars, that what the Bible is actually talking about isn’t the end of the world but rather the end of the world as we know it. As New Testament scholar N.T. Wright likes to put it, “Heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world.”
Before we look at these texts, however, keep in mind that virtually no one in the first 1800 years of Christian history thought about the Rapture in the way that the Left Behind series and its ilk present it to us. The doctrine is in none of the historic creeds of the church. Even today, the historic “mother” churches of the Christian faith, the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, do not teach anything like it. The history of the Rapture as a part of Christian theology is actually quite recent, relatively speaking. It first appears in earnest around 1830 in Glasgow, Scotland, when a teenaged girl named Margaret MacDonald, was at a revival and had a vision the included a kind of rapture of the saints from the earth. One of the people who heard her was a man named John Nelson Darby, who began preaching what came to be known as dispensationalism, or the idea that God has related to human beings in different ways in different periods of history, which are called “dispensations.” Dispensationalism holds to a very literal reading of Scripture where even figures of speech and other non-literal passages are taken to have literal meaning. Darby saw the millennium described symbolically in Revelation to be a literal millennium and that Christians would either have to be raptured out of it or suffer through it and then be raptured; hence the debate between pre-millenial and post-millenial dispensationalism.
Darby’s views would have been a curious historical footnote had he not traveled to America and spent time with Dwight L. Moody, who was the Billy Graham of his day. Moody began fervently preaching dispensationalism and the Rapture and in a country where Protestant religious fervor often ran high, this idea of Rapture soon became part of the American religious landscape. It really took off a few years later when a man named Cyrus Scofield published a reference Bible with headings in it that pointed the average reader in the direction of his own dispensationalism. Readers who picked up a Scofield reference Bible and read a heading like “Jesus predicts the Rapture” for Matthew 24:36-44, didn’t or couldn’t differentiate between Scofield’s notes and the biblical text and would have thought, “Well, there it is in print. That must be what it’s about.” Scofield’s Bible is still out there today in various forms, and many people still accept the ideas of Scofield and his spiritual descendants to be gospel truth, including the writers of Left Behind.
But, again, for 1800 years the church read these passages quite differently and contextually. I would argue, in fact, that Darby, Moody, and Scofield, though well meaning, actually interpreted the biblical text in a way that the original writers and their audiences never would have recognized and a lot of dubious theology has been the result—theology that has sent part of the church, especially part of the evangelical church, on a wild goose chase away from the actual message of the gospel—a message that, in the end, brings heaven and earth together and renews both God’s creation and God’s people.
As with any discussion of the “end times,” this series of posts is sure to generate debate. My goal isn’t to demean anyone’s views but rather to offer a contextual vision of “eschatology” (the study of last things) through a biblical/historical lens. The bottom line is all of this is that Jesus is coming back in person to judge the living and the dead—on that point any creedal Christian would agree. The question is, coming back to do what? To take us away? Or, given God’s covenant commitment to the creation project, is it better to say that Jesus is coming to take over? I’ll argue the latter. At any rate, join me this week for what I hope will be some stimulating Bible study!
Tomorrow: Matthew 24:36-44 - Why being “left behind” is actually a good thing.
Wednesday: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 - The Return of the King
Thursday: Philippians 3:20-22 - Citizens of Heaven, Colonizers of Earth
Friday: 2 Peter 3:1-13 - A Purging Fire
Saturday: Revelation 21:1-8 - A New Heaven and Earth
If you’re interested in going deeper, I encourage you to check out these “Seven Minute Seminary” Videos from Seedbed:
Where Did Rapture Theology Come From? Dr. Ben Witherington III
Do Matthew 24 and 1 Thessalonians 4 Teach the Rapture? Dr. Ben Witherington III
You state that "virtually no one in the first 1800 years of Christian history thought about the Rapture in the way that the Left Behind series and its ilk present it to us." I would highly recommend studying this in more depth. The Darby argument against the pre-trib rapture has been debunked several times, and it is simply a straw man argument. According to Margaret McDonald's vision, the Church is to be tested and purified by the Antichrist, which is rather the equivalent of a post-Trib rapture, and was contrary to what Darby taught. Darby himself reported that he discovered the rapture teaching in 1827, actually 3 years before Margaret McDonald even had her vision. Moreover, there is no evidence that the two ever had any contact.
While it is true that Darby popularised the doctrine of the pre-tribulation rapture, he wasn't the first to write about it. Emmanuel Lacunza, a Catholic priest, had already written about it in his book "The Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty", published in 1812. There are even earlier references, even in the very early Church Fathers. There is already good literature on the subject available, but scholarly research on the subject is not yet complete because not all the texts of the Church Fathers have been translated. But to say that no one before Darby taught the pre-tribulation rapture is simply wrong.
Two books I'd recommend for further study:
"Dispensationalism Before Darby: Seventeenth-Century and Eighteenth-Century English Apocalypticism", by William C. Watson
"Recent Pre-Trib Findings in the Early Church Fathers", by Lee W. Brainard