Leaving it Behind
Part 1 of a series on Eschatology
(Apparently the rapture was supposed to happen a couple days ago, according to a collection on social media. Serendipitously, I was already working on this piece. If you are concerned that you might have been, or will be “left behind,” read on!)
“So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’ He replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.”
—Acts 1: 6-7
Those of us who grew up in 90s and early 2000s evangelicalism no doubt well remember some rather influential novels that were simultaneously terrifying, exciting, and ostensibly theological. I’m talking about Left Behind, a series of novels that follows a group of people who missed the Rapture and try to survive the earth’s final seven years of judgment preceding the final return of Christ. The protagonists must not only survive earthquakes, disease, starvation, and pestilence, but also resist the Antichrist’s totalitarian one world government which demands everyone prove their loyalty by getting marked with a chip implant (the Mark of the Beast from Revelation 13). The books were loads of fun, and what made them even more fun is that these books purported to give us a fictionalized, yet basically accurate, blueprint of what the future held.
The end times scenario in these books comes from a method of interpreting the Bible known as Dispensationalism, which originated in England in the mid 1800s among a group of Plymouth Brethren under a minister named John Nelson Darby. Dispensationalism basically says that God works with humanity in different ways during different periods of history, called “dispensations”. For example, God gave the Israelites the law during one dispensation, but now we are in the dispensation of grace. It also maintains that in a future dispensation there will be a unique form of grace available to ethnic Israel that will be fulfilled when Christ returns to establish his millennial kingdom and is finally recognized by the Jews as the Messiah. Basically, the promises of God to Israel are not fulfilled in Christ, but are still awaiting a future fulfillment under a rebuilt temple with a reinstituted sacrificial system where Jesus will preside over the sacrifices as High Priest during the millennial kingdom.
Dispensationalism is, of course, most known for its “prophetic timeline” of the end times. While there is some variation on the details among Dispensationalists, it can be roughly summarized like this:
The Jews must return to their homeland and establish a nation in order to start the end times clock. Dispensationalists point to the formation of the nation of Israel in 1948 as a fulfillment of this prophecy. The Jews must also build a third temple—this has yet to happen.
Israel will be attacked by its enemies and they will supernaturally be defeated.
Jesus will secretly return in the clouds to take all the true believers up to heaven, leaving everyone else behind to endure seven years of judgment.
The antichrist will take control of the world governments and sign a treaty with Israel starting the seven years of Tribulation.
After seven years of war, natural disasters, disease, and persecution of the Jews and those who have become Christians during this time, Christ will return to destroy the antichrist and his followers. Christ will then set up a 1000 year earthly kingdom where the sacrificial system in the temple will be reinstituted.
At the end of 1000 years Satan will try to deceive the nations again, then will be finally defeated, Christians will enter the new heaven and earth and everyone else will be thrown into Hell for eternity.
I don’t want to get too lost in the weeds, but suffice it to say, that when this system first emerged in England, it was largely regarded as a theological oddity. The mid-1800s was one of those historical periods that seem to recur from time to time, when the Christian world sees an upsurge in the number of sects whose focus is on predicting the return of Christ and the end of the world. The decades leading up to the year AD 1000 was a similar time, as were the years surrounding the European discovery of the Americas. The 1800s gave us groups such as the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s witnesses, both of which were initially very convinced that the return of Christ was imminent. Dispensationalism was another such movement, though it never caught on in the land of its birth to the same degree that it did when it migrated to the United States and found widespread acceptance in the burgeoning Fundamentalist movement. However, it received its biggest popular boost with the publication of the best-selling Scofield Reference Bible in 1909 with its study notes clearly laying out the Dispensationalist schema and promising to illuminate notoriously arcane portions of the text such as the book of Revelation, portions of Ezekiel, and the latter half of Daniel.
Dispensationalism consolidated itself quite comfortably within certain streams of American evangelicalism throughout the twentieth century, but it then in the 1970s it received another major boost with the publication of Hal Lindsay’s The Late, Great Planet Earth and then again in 90s with the Left Behind novels. A great deal of its appeal and relevance lay in the fact that these books connected the anxieties of the present age (for example, the cold war, war in the middle east, globalization) with Biblical texts in such a way that they could assure believers that nearly everything that was going on had already been predicted, more or less, thousands of years ago, again, mostly in the most obscure passages of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation; one only had to know how to piece the verses together to crack the code. Elaborate timelines and “prophecy charts” promised that the global and social chaos on the news every night was not random, but rather it was all part of a prophetic timeline leading us to the imminent end of the world.
Now, to the uninitiated, the prospect of the looming apocalypse may not sound comforting, but to believers, Dispensationalism promises that they will not have to undergo the final years of judgment and suffering because they will be taken out of the world before things get really bad. This is known as the Rapture, Dispensationalism’s most prominent theological innovation. Again, among Dispensationalists there is some dispute regarding its exact timing, but the most popular version states that before the final years of tribulation begin, Christ will cause all true believers to suddenly vanish from earth and be caught up into Heaven, leaving the rest of humanity behind to face judgment.
Some readers might be scandalized that I refer to the Rapture as an innovation, yet that is exactly what it is. While the second coming of Christ has been a fixture in Christianity since the very beginning, literally nobody until Darby’s congregation believed that Christ would half-return to take Christians out of the world for a time until his actual second coming. Again, no early Christian, patristic, medieval, or Reformation-era writing ever suggests such a thing. And no wonder—the idea of the rapture is completely absent from the New Testament.
So where did it come from, then? The answer is that a woman by the name of MacDonald in Darby’s congregation had a vision that told her that prior to Christ’s second coming, he would gather up believers into heaven so that they would be spared judgment. This vision was apparently accepted by the congregation and it soon became the defining fixture of Dispensational theology. As Dispensationalism’s influence spread across the Atlantic, took root in American Fundamentalism, and then was taken across the world by missionaries, many people began to simply assume that the rapture is taught in the New Testament.
If you’re somewhat attuned to these matters, you will be thinking, what about 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17—isn’t that the rapture? That is the text that dispensationalists point to as the fullest description of the rapture (while claiming it is merely alluded to in other passages). It says this: “For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, 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.” While this passage definitely is describing the future return of Christ to raise the dead and gather his people, when it is read in the full context of Paul’s letter, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that this refers to anything other than a singular event. If there were such a thing as the rapture that preceded the tribulation and then another “second coming” of Christ, this would be the place to mention it, but Paul doesn’t. There is no suggestion, whatsoever, that Paul is talking about anything other than the resurrection of the dead at the end of history. Indeed, the language of rising to meet the Lord in the air is, in fact, purposefully reminiscent of how the people of a city would go out to meet an approaching Roman dignitary and then walk with him back into the town. Paul is simply telling the Thessalonians, “Don’t worry about those who have already died, as if they have missed the resurrection. When Christ returns they will rise and meet him first, then we all will go out to meet him as well.” If one believes this is referring to a rapture event separate from Christ’s second coming, one has to take this text completely out of context and force it into such a schema. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what dispensationalism does.
The thing that first made me become skeptical about rapture theology was not any personal desire to disbelieve it, but rather the opposite; I was so intrigued that I started reading the Bible for myself and trying to figure out how these things fit together. I was probably a senior in high school and I started to become aware that there were other ways of looking at the end times out there and that, in fact, the Dispensational system was not the major one throughout church history. But I started to look at the texts that they used to refer to things like the rapture and I noticed a glaring problem: the only way you can find such an order of events is by cutting random verses from many different book and pasting them together to create something that none of the Biblical authors actually said. Even as a seventeen year old with no formal training yet in Biblical studies or theology, I knew this was a major problem. So I kept reading and it wasn’t long before I came to the conclusion that the Bible simply does not teach the idea of the rapture. The second coming and resurrection of the dead, yes, absolutely, but there is a reason why no patristic, medieval, or reformation theologian mentions the rapture—it simply is not there in the New Testament.
With this realization settling in my mind, I started to read other evangelical scholars on the matter. Two major books settled any doubt that I had in my mind, they were The Last Days According to Jesus by R.C. Sproul, and Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright. The latter I will always count as one of the most influential books on my theology. Sproul helped me see why Dispensationalism was mostly wrong. But in Wright’s case, he helped me rebuild a vision for the Christian future hope that is deeply biblical and compelling for a world desperate to be remade.
To be continued…