Rapture

By Heather Abraham aka Religion Nerd  

While lunching with a friend last week our conversation turned to, what else, religion.  My friend related to me an encounter she had with the Left Behind Series which a neighbor had given her in a book exchange.  Having heard about the series but not really knowing what they were about she “grabbed the first one and headed for a long soak in the tub.”  After finishing the first book she had a conversation with the neighbor about the series and was surprised to find that the neighbor understood the books, not as religious fiction but as a prophetic look into the near future.  As a Catholic, my friend had never been exposed to the concept of the rapture and was curious about its origins.  She posed the following questions:  Which branch of Christianity believes in the rapture and where did this teaching come from?   

These are interesting but complex questions that will require a bit of unpacking.  To answer the first part of the question which branch of Christianity believes in the Rapture, we will look at the two primary Christian understandings of the nature of Christ’s return.   

The dispensationalist premillennialists, primarily made up of Evangelicals, believe that Christ will return in two phases, once to resurrect the dead and rapture the living and a second physical return before the inauguration of the millennium.  In contrast, the majority of Christians (Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Luther, Calvinist, Anglican, and other non-Evangelical branches) embrace an amillennialist understanding of Christ’s return as one event in which the thousand year reign of Jesus Christ a spiritual one.  Amillennialist understand Christ’s physical return to occur after the millennium and for the Last Judgment during which he will establish his kingdom.     

 The Rapture concept, as held by dispensationalist premillennialists such as Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, authors of the Left Behind series, emerged in the mid 19^th century in the teachings of John Nelson Darby.  Darby, a 19^th century evangelist and co-founder of the Plymouth Brethren, grounded his rapture theory in New Testament

J.N. Darby

scripture, most specifically, in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 in which Paul writes “and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.”  Darby’s rapturist theory, contrary to the teachings of the majority of Christian churches, asserts that Jesus will return secretly, before the period of tribulations and physically remove or “take up” his faithful in the rapture and then return again to physically and publicly inaugurate and rule earth in a one-thousand year reign.  

Darby is also known as the father of dispensationalsim which is a belief that God’s relationship with humanity is divided up into seven historical eras or dispensations.  Each era is governed by a specific covenantal relationship between God and humanity.    These seven dispensations are often understood as:  Innocence, Conscience, Human Government, Promise, Law, Church, and the Millennial Kingdom.  According to Darby and the many who embrace his religious worldview, we are currently in the 6^th dispensation which will end with the second coming of Christ and inauguration of a golden age on earth.   

Darby’s rapturist and dispensationalist theories were first introduced to American Christians during his six lecture tours of the United States from 1859-1877 but became popularly embraced by Evangelicals after they were promoted in the 1909 Scofield Reference Bible.             

After the Rapture

Although foreign to the teachings and beliefs of the majority of Christian traditions, the rapture has become popularized in the United States mainly through the writings of Evangelical authors such as Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, and Ernest Angley.   To those who embrace the rapture event as a historical and religious certainty, the origin, evolution and relative newness of the theory is unimportant.  The believers eagerly await the coming of the end times and their pre-tribulation rescue and in the interim; they continue to make many doom eager authors immensely wealthy.

“Christian Militias” and the Unpredictable Nature of Religious Diversity

 By: Kenny Smith,  See biography at Guest Blogger menu

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is said to have taught that, “you cannot step into the same river twice,” because a river (like everything in the physical world) is continually changing and hence never the same. The implication of this insight for the study of religion can be profound: religions are also constantly changing, developing, becoming something new, and, to some degree, one can never step twice into the same church, synagogue, mosque, or temple, or religious tradition.

It is especially difficult for Westerners to think in these terms about religion.  Religions tend to have a great deal invested in the view that they represent unchanging truths, and so pointing to evidence of historical change may well be interpreted as an assault. Protestant ideas about a coming Rapture in which faithful Christians are plucked up and out of a hostile secular society, for example, are relatively new, arising in the late 19^th century.  Though many Rapturists read this theology back into the Bible and conclude that such teachings can be traced to the days of Jesus of Nazareth.  Also, as a culture, for the past three centuries or so we have tended to imagine the religious landscape in terms of distinct, walled-off religious institutions, such as “Christianity,” “Islam,” Buddhism,” “Judaism,” and so forth.  Taken together, these factors lead us to expect unchanging and uniform religious traditions where none in fact exist.   

Take, for example, what we call “Christianity.” There are currently some 2.5 billion Christians worldwide. About 1.1 billion are Catholic, 800-900 million are Eastern Orthodox, and 500-600 million are Protestant.  There are enormous theological differences separating these three branches (to say nothing of the many differences in language, culture, ethnicity, economics, politics, and history). For many Catholics and Protestants, it is Jesus’ death that makes salvation possible.  In this view, he is thought to have “paid the price” for all human sin, thus wiping away even the “original sins” of Adam and Eve.  In many Eastern Orthodox Christianities, however, notions of “original sin,” which first emerged in the 4^th century in Western Europe, never caught on.  Eastern Orthodox traditions tend to place much greater emphasis upon the birth of Jesus, in which God is thought to have taken physical form, and thus seriously “upgraded” human nature in important ways.

Catholics and Protestants, of course, differ profoundly as well.  In traditional Catholic teachings, the ideal (if not the only) path to God is through the religious institution that God Himself created and ordained, the Catholic (or “universal”) church, whereas for most Protestants one can go directly to God for forgiveness, atonement, understanding the Bible, knowing  how best to live, rather than relying upon an institution.  This may seem superficial, but it’s actually a very important difference about where religious authority (to determine what the Bible says, how to relate to God, how to live, how society should be structured, etc.) resides.  There is of course a great deal of diversity within each of these three branches.  Protestantism, for instance, is comprised of virtually thousands of denominations, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Pentecostals, being some of the largest and most well-known.  The concept Protestant” (like “river”) may lead us to expect a unity of belief and practice, but there are in fact enormously important differences here as well, differences so profound that one kind of Protestant might have serious doubts about whether other kinds are really Christian at all!  In many Pentecostal churches, for instance, one cannot be certain that one is “saved” (going to heaven after this life) unless one displays the “charismata,” (“gifts of the Holy Spirit”) such as publicly speaking in tongues (usually in a church setting). The very loud, frenetic, highly emotional, and seemingly out of control behaviors associated with this religious experience, however, would for many other Protestants be regarded as a sign of mental illness, or even demonic influence, certainly not the salvific power of the divine.

Within Baptist denominations, one debate that has been going on for centuries involves fundamental notions about God’s power and human free will.  Some (often called Predestinationists) argue that, because God is in full control of everything that happens, he must have already determined, from the very beginnings of time, who will be saved and who will be damned.  Others, however, argue that because God is infinitely good, he would surely leave human beings free to decide for themselves, rather than determining in advance everyone’s fate.  My purpose here is not to resolve such disputes, but only to point out why one kind of Protestant might fail to recognize other kinds as not properly Christian.       

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