Liberal Christianity

Lesson 7: Prophecy and The End Times

The Rapture

[Excerpt from] The Inconsistency of the 'Rapture', by Fr. Dimitri Cozby, St. Anthony the Great Mission, San Antonio, TX (Eastern Christian Orthodox Church)

Link: Inconsistency of the Rapture

"Some of our evangelical or Pentecostal neighbors occasionally speak about "the Rapture" as one of the events leading up to Christ’s Second Coming. By this they mean the physical removal from earth of the true believers in Christ in preparation for the "Great Tribulation," a seven-year period of unparalleled calamity which will herald the end.

(A few advocates say that the Rapture will follow the Tribulation. Most who believe in it, however, contend that it precedes the Tribulation.) The Rapture’s purpose, according to its advocates, is to safeguard the righteous during that horrible time. Its most familiar champions are Hal Lindsey (author of The Late, Great Planet Earth and other books), John T. Walvoord (of Dallas Theological Seminary), and the late Cyrus Scofield (author of The Scofield Reference Bible).

These ideas are popular with groups who are enchanted, even obsessed, with speculation about the Second Coming and who have convinced themselves that they see in current events signs that His return is near. These speculations form part of a broader ideology called "dispensationalism."

Dispensationalists come in all shapes and sizes and what we say about one may not apply to all. Still we can list some general characteristics which virtually all dispensationalists share. The name comes from their division of history into eras or "dispensations." They believe that the Bible outlines the whole course of mankind’s religious history.

Each stage in God’s program is a dispensation, and in each dispensation God relates to the world and His chosen peoples in a different way. Some dispensationalist schemes encompass all human history; others include only Christian history since the time of Christ.

Most often these systems are based on a symbolic interpretation of the "letters to the seven churches" of Revelation 2 and 3, with each church standing for the Christianity of a particular period. Dispensationalism presents a detailed program of events leading up to the Second Coming.

Two of the events in this master plan are the Rapture and the Great Tribulation. Proponents of the doctrine of a pre-Tribulation Rapture claim that it rests on Scripture and has always been a part of Christian teaching.

The truth is that it dates from about 1830 and was largely the creation of John Nelson Darby, a one-time Anglican priest and founder of a sect called the Plymouth Brethren. He contributed much to the dispensationalist scheme, and in particular he was the first to include the Rapture among the catalogue of phenomena of the last times.

The Rapture’s recent origin is one of the things which should make us skeptical. Neither the Apostles nor the Fathers expounded any such teaching. Even Darby’s circle, although they claimed to find support for their teaching in the Bible, did not maintain that they had arrived at this doctrine through study of the Scriptures, but that they had received it through a revelation.

According to its supporters the pre-Tribulation Rapture is an extremely important part of the Christian message. Yet it was unknown before 1830. The Rapture’s supporters derive their opinions ultimately from a single Scripture verse, I Thessalonians 4:17, "Then we who are left alive will be carried off together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord."

Less popular but often cited is Matthew 24:40-42, "Then there will be two in the field. One will be taken and the other left. Two will be grinding at the mill. One will be taken and the other left. Therefore, be vigilant, for you do not know on what day your Lord will come."

Exercises:

1. It has been said that both Jesus and Paul lived and taught within an eschatological worldview. All the eschatological themes appear because they preached that people were living AT THAT TIME in the End Times.

a. Define in your own words the meaning of eschatology.

b. Do you accept the End Times proponents’ idea that New Testament writers thought that God intended to bring the world to an end and replace it with life in a disembodied condition in heaven? Why or why not?

c. Using your own research, define the terms “New Heaven” and “New Earth.”

2. Scripturally, Mark13:32 declares that Jesus says in regard to the Second Coming that “of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, not even the son, only the Father.”

a. Is Jesus saying that he doesn’t know when the Second Coming will happen? Explain your answer.

b. One of the ways End Timers try to gage the Second Coming is by looking for “signs” on the current stage of world events. Yet Jesus and Paul both use the metaphor of Jesus coming as “a thief in the night.” Again using your own research, can you find a reasonable refutation of this idea by those who advocate the End Times?

3. Ben Witherington III, a columnist at Beliefnet, writes that “Neither Jesus nor Paul would have been pleased with the current "Left Behind" craze. Let’s look at the notion of the pre-tribulation rapture. Don’t both Jesus and Paul, and even John of Patmos (the author of Revelation), speak of this concept? The answer is no. Indeed, no Christian interpreters seem to have come up with such an idea before the 19th century. Here is a good rule of thumb—if no Christian commentator understood the NT to refer to a pre-tribulation rapture during the first 1800 years of church history, there must be a good reason why not."

a. Ben says that the scriptural “One is taken, one left behind,” in Mathew 24 is preceded in that chapter by Jesus warning his disciples that they would be taken by the authorities, persecuted, prosecuted and possible executed. What follows then is not a prediction of a supposed “rapture” as described in the Left Behind novels some 2000 years later, but a prediction of uncertainty – some will be arrested and some won’t. Do you agree? Explain your answer.

b. Ben’s article link: Beliefnet Witherington Whether you agree or disagree, what might be the most effective way to rebut Ben’s argument?

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