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The Invention of the Rapture CHAPTER 2 The Invention of the Rapture EN-YEAR-OLD “JOSH” CAME HOME from school to an Tempty house. His mother, normally at home to greet him, was nowhere to be found. She might have been at the store or at a neighbor’s, but Josh was terrified. His immediate response was a terrible fear that all his family had been “Raptured” without him. Josh was sure he had been left behind. Now a grown-up in my seminary class on the book of Revela- tion, Josh told this story of his boyhood experience. Others consis- tently echo his story of childhood fear of the Rapture. These born- again Christian children were exhorted to be good so that they would be sure to be snatched up to heaven with Jesus when he returned. Raised on a daily diet of fear, their view of God resem- bled the song about Santa Claus coming to town: “You’d better watch out, you’d better not cry.” Only it was Jesus, not Santa, who was “coming to town” at an unexpected hour: “He knows when you’ve been sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.” 19 Copyright © 2007. Basic Books. All rights reserved. © 2007. Basic Books. Copyright Rossing, Barbara R.. The Rapture Exposed : The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation, Basic Books, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=879536. Created from washington on 2017-12-29 12:02:16. 20 ° THE RAPTURE EXPOSED Christian camp songs taught children to count down to the Rap- ture like a space launch: Ten and nine, eight and seven, six and five and four; Call upon the Savior while you may. Three and two, coming through the clouds in bright array. The countdown’s getting closer every day. The Presbyterian pastor who shared this song with me experi- enced an unexpected and disturbing flashback to his childhood fears even as he sang the words. Visibly shaken after one of my talks on the Rapture, he was experiencing real panic: “I thought I was over the Rapture trauma, but I guess I’m not.” All this fervor and fear over the Rapture—a principle invented only 170 years ago—for a word that cannot even be found in the Bible. The countdown image perfectly expresses the theology of the Rapture and the end-times. Christian end-times movies have been marketed as thrillers. A Thief in the Night, from 1972, is described as “the most popular end-times movie ever produced, with over 300,000,000 viewers.” The heroine “disregards prophetic biblical warnings and the truth begins to unfold. Can she escape the dra- matic, haunting circumstances? Is there a way out? The climax is riveting!” Cloud Ten Pictures’ trilogy, Apocalypse, Revelation, and Tribula- tion, employed real Hollywood stars Gary Busey, Margot Kidder, and Corbin Bernsen. And most recently the movie version of Left Behind (2000), by LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, created a huge buzz in the Christian media, but was roundly scorned by mainstream reviewers. In every depiction the Rapture divides families. Terrified parents on airplanes scream, “My babies, my babies,” as the camera cuts to Copyright © 2007. Basic Books. All rights reserved. © 2007. Basic Books. Copyright Rossing, Barbara R.. The Rapture Exposed : The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation, Basic Books, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=879536. Created from washington on 2017-12-29 12:02:16. The Invention of the Rapture ° 21 teddy bears and diapers left behind on the seats. All children under age twelve disappear. Babies are sucked out of pregnant women’s wombs as stupefied fathers watch the ultrasound machines go blank. Planes and cars crash in fireballs. Media reports come in from around the country: “Trains were involved in head-ons with lots of death.”1 God had Raptured the engineers before they had time to apply the brakes. Does the Bible really teach that Jesus will come to snatch Chris- tians off the earth, causing “lots of death,” before inaugurating a seven-year period of tribulation? The Rapture has become embed- ded in American Christian culture today, but the idea of the Rap- ture is less than two hundred years old. No specific passage in the Bible uses the word “Rapture.” Even today’s most famous Rapture proponents, LaHaye and Lindsey, admit that. Nor does the Bible clearly lay out their version of God’s prophetic timetable. Details “must be pieced together from various passages of Scripture,” explains LaHaye in his 2002 book The Rap- ture: Who Will Face the Tribulation? LaHaye is the theological brains behind the Left Behind novels, the plots of which are written by Jenkins. LaHaye has written numerous books about the end-times and is a long-time leader in right-wing Christian political causes along with his wife, Beverly. Most Christian churches and biblical scholars condemn Rapture theology as a distortion of Christian faith with little biblical basis. Critics represent the whole spectrum of churches, from conserva- tive Missouri Synod Lutherans to evangelicals, to Roman Catholics, and liberal Presbyterians. Many evangelical churches and leaders oppose the notion of the Rapture, pointing out that it is a recent and idiosyncratic development in Christian teaching. But institutional criticism is essentially irrelevant. It is through popular televangelists and writings such as Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Copyright © 2007. Basic Books. All rights reserved. © 2007. Basic Books. Copyright Rossing, Barbara R.. The Rapture Exposed : The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation, Basic Books, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=879536. Created from washington on 2017-12-29 12:02:16. 22 ° THE RAPTURE EXPOSED Earth and the more recent Left Behind novels that the Rapture sto- ryline has become central to so many Americans’ understanding of the Bible and Christian faith. DARBY’S RAPTURE The Rapture has its origins in the nineteenth century—beginning, according to one critic, with a young girl’s vision.2 In 1830, in Port Glasgow, Scotland, fifteen-year-old Margaret MacDonald attended a healing service. There, she was said to have seen a vision of a two-stage return of Jesus Christ.3 The story of her vision was adopted and amplified by John Nelson Darby, a British evangelical preacher and founder of the Plymouth Brethren. At the time, the belief that Jesus will come again was not new. Christians have always taught that Jesus will return to earth and that believers should live in the urgent and hopeful anticipation of his second coming. This teaching is central to ancient Christian creeds and is taught by all churches. But Darby’s new teaching was the claim that Christ would return twice. The first return would be in secret, to “Rapture” his church out of the world and up to heav- en. Christ would return a second time after seven years of global tribulation to establish a Jerusalem-based kingdom on earth (which they call the “Glorious Appearing,” a phrase from Titus 2:13). For Darby and his sympathizers, the search was on for Bible verses to support this two-stage version of Christ’s return. Although the word “Rapture” does not occur in the Bible, believ- ers explain that it comes from the Latin word raptio, a translation of the original Greek for the word “caught up” as it is used in Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians: “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever” (1 Thess 4:17). Copyright © 2007. Basic Books. All rights reserved. © 2007. Basic Books. Copyright Rossing, Barbara R.. The Rapture Exposed : The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation, Basic Books, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=879536. Created from washington on 2017-12-29 12:02:16. The Invention of the Rapture ° 23 Darby made a number of mission trips to America between 1859 and 1877 and won many converts to the Rapture idea. Unlike other end-times enthusiasts, such as Seventh Day Adventist founder William Miller who had specified dates for the end of the world in the 1840s, Darby refrained from predicting a specific date for Christ’s return. Instead, he invented “dispensations”—that is, intervals of time ordering God’s grand timetable for world events. From this expres- sion came “dispensationalism,” a particular system or school of thinking about the end-times reflecting Darby’s premise. Accord- ing to Darby’s view, God has divided all of human history into seven distinct dispensations, or ages, and during each time God has dealt with people according to a different set of rules. Dispensa- tionalism thus lays out a rigid master plan for all of history. An important tool for popularizing Darby’s system was the Scofield Reference Bible, a best-selling work published in 1909. It has been called “perhaps the most important single document in all fundamentalist literature.” Cyrus I. Scofield was a dubious charac- ter who embezzled money, served six months in jail for forgery even after his conversion to Christianity, and abandoned his wife and daughters, according to critics.4 Scofield hit the jackpot with his annotated Scofield Reference Bible, a version of the King James Bible in which he added dispensationalist headings and notes in the margin commenting on each prophetic passage in light of Darby’s system.
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