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Recently, the Global Center for Religious Research was featured in a CNN article by AJ Willingham on "rapture anxiety," just one of several manifestations of religious trauma perpetuated by a belief in the rapture. As part of Dispensational Theology, the rapture doctrine typically holds that the antichrist will rise to power on earth, leading to a seven-year period of hell-on-earth tribulation for all of humanity (i.e., wars, pestilence, natural disasters, famine, microchipped babies, 666 barcodes . . . dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!). Depending on the particular rapture theory of each prophecy pundit, all true believers in Christ will instantaneously be whisked away into the sky to meet Jesus in the clouds either before, during, or after the seven-year tribulation. And that's the rapture!
Who Popularized the Rapture?
Dispensationalism arrived primarily through John Nelson Darby’s unique exegetical work in the early nineteenth century. Darby grew up in a wealthy Irish home but renounced materialism and his aristocratic lifestyle. At the time, Great Britain saw a dramatic rise in the popularity of apocalyptic eschatologies in the late 1700s, an era that also launched a distinction between the Christian church and the Jewish nation of Israel. Darby eventually became disillusioned with the state of Christianity in Ireland and sought to create a denomination that would accept only the truly saved, believing that most of Christianity had apostatized.
In the 1820s, Darby co-founded the Plymouth Brethren, which believed that anticipation of Christ’s imminent return should occupy a prominent position in the Christian’s mental focus here on earth. Hence, Darby and the Brethren held a rigorist lifestyle and enforced strict church discipline in preparation for the Second Coming. As fundamentalists tend to do, Darby eventually had a falling out with his new denomination and eventually separated from them.
Most historians and theologians recognize that Darby’s particular brand of theology was an abrupt innovation in Christian history, tantamount to heretical escapism that entertained wild and imaginative interpretations of the Bible. Darby himself even recognized his rapture beliefs as a new invention in church history.
Darby viewed salvation history as broken into eight distinct “dispensations” where God chose to deal with humanity through different laws. However, humanity was destined to fail immediately in each of the dispensations. According to Darby, the church age was only a temporary “parenthesis” that would not have appeared had the Jews allowed Jesus to establish his kingdom on earth. In other words, God’s primary focus has always been the nation of Israel and the church is a mere contingency plan that God will later remove from the earth before giving Israel rulership over the planet. Because the church age is like any other dispensation, Darby believed that most Christians have ultimately failed and apostatized from the faith. Only "true Christians" would experience the rapture. His ultimate goal was to convince the church that Christians had not replaced the Jews as the focus of God's divine plan. For Darby, the rapture was the most significant element of dispensationalism, not the dispensations themselves.
Not surprisingly, Darby was an ill-tempered and scornful human being. Biographies of him consistently showcase a vindictive and confused man who was incapable of coexisting with different viewpoints. He was cruel, petty, tyrannical, disgruntled, arrogant, and ultimately anti-Christian. Darby’s own writings reveal a legalistic, condemnatory figure who pathologically slandered others as evil apostates. These are the marks of a cult of personality, especially when learning that Darby believed he was destined to reestablish “the true Church” and “the true Christian faith.” To this day, many dispensationalist factions of American Christianity adamantly denounce interfaith dialogues in fidelity to their expectant hope for the slaughter of millions of people during the tribulation.
Though it was common since the colonial days to believe that America was the new Israel, it was not until the carnage of the Civil War that the American public embraced rapture theology. Gradually, theologians and commentators started to spread Darby's dispensational beliefs, though these American writers rarely (if ever) credited Darby for their eschatology. In fact, Darby’s seven tours to the United States generally went unnoticed. By the time Darby left America, eighty-eight Brethren meetings had been established, which initiated the American Bible and Prophecy Conference movement. Through these conferences, a focus on biblical prophecies became a cultural phenomenon in America. Later, the fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century thrust dispensationalism into mainstream significance. It was people like C. I. Scofield who popularized dispensationalism in America.
The Unsettling 1800s: Was Darby high or what!?!
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The socio-political context of Darby's era was rife with apocalyptic fervor. English Puritanism originally had amillennial and postmillennial trajectories within its ranks. The restorationist movement, which asserted that Jews needed to establish a sovereign nation in order to fulfill biblical prophecy, did not gain any credibility until the works of seventeenth-century Puritan Thomas Brightman, though his eschatology held more affinities with postmillennialism than it did with modern-day dispensationalism. Over time, different theologians and different factions of the Puritan movement came to view the church and Israel as distinct entities. Eventually, restorationism became a major religious fad in the United Kingdom, predominantly out of a reaction to the anti-Semitism of earlier generations.
In Darby's day, there was intense economic confusion as the United Kingdom transitioned into an industrial society. Political and social institutions dramatically changed in Europe as a result of things like the industrial revolution and the French Revolution. This created an environment where people began obsessing over the end times. Then came the writings of Edward Irving and Margaret MacDonald.
Irving was a defunct premillennial minister in the Church of Scotland who started publishing his ecstatic utterances as genuine prophecies from God. While Darby denounced Irving as a heretic because of his views on the incarnation, it appears that Darby stole many of Irving's prophecies as his own in the early stages of the Plymouth Brethren. The MacDonald sisters likewise began having ecstatic experiences, as well, which became a national sensation. Darby personally attended a session where Margaret MacDonald gave prophetic utterances, which (again) likely influenced his own end-time interpretations of the Bible.
The truth of the matter is that Dispensationalism grew out of the same European and American apocalyptic obsession with biblical prophecies that created other end-time cults in the nineteenth century, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter-Day Saints, Christadelphians, and Seventh-Day Adventists.
But make no mistake, there is no Christian text (including the New Testament) that mentions anything about a "rapture" for the first eighteen hundred years of Church history.
“The doctrine of a pretribulation rapture is an inference from several passages, all of which are disputed. Moreover, even if one believes this doctrine to be in Scripture, it is taught with such little clarity that it was not discovered until the nineteenth century. This does not make it seem likely." Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, p. 1134.
At first, Darby was indifferent to the notion of a rapture, but then he later said it was his sole guide. So why did he become such a staunch proponent of the doctrine? The answer is that Darby’s disillusionment with Christianity ultimately resulted in a search for any theological system that would abolish the “church age.” The invention of the rapture gave him a reason to reject Christianity and return to the legalistic behavior of ancient Judaism.
A Grave Warning to All
It should go without saying, but the current state of misinformation and conspiracy theories in the world today requires yet another word of caution: Please remember that sensationalist prophecy-pundits like Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, John Hagee, Walid Shoebat, and Harold Camping are not considered scholars in either biblical exegesis or eschatology.
One of the more common tactics among dispensationalists is a concerted effort to portray opponents as having been deceived by an apostate church to further racial hatred against the Jews. They love to use pejorative epithets like “replacement theology” or “replacementism,” labeling other Christian beliefs as gross supersessionist distortions designed to suppress God's Word. In other words, non-Dispensationalists are often demonized as anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizers. Only Christian Zionists are heirs to God's kingdom. Criticisms of Israel are automatically labeled as pro-Palestinian propaganda meant to revive the church's centuries-old hatred of Jews.
But this type of thinking has some serious consequences. One of the more disturbing aspects of rapture theology is its opposition to any and all peace talks between nation-states. Dispensationalists believe that the antichrist will be a great humanitarian, someone who will have the ability to solve the Middle East problem and unite the planet in peace. Thus, for the Dispensationalist, peace talks and reconciliation are actually a sign of the devil's rise to power.
Needless to say, a theological system that concludes the devil is behind attempts to bring peace to the world is both fanatical and dangerous.
"Rapture theology portrays the end times as marked by wars and rumors of wars. Working for peace might actually get in the way of the rapture and the second coming . . . .Rapture theology and the 'Left Behind' novels are filled with violence . . . .God and Jesus are violent, involved in the destruction of the world and evildoers. Jesus’s followers are violent; they war against the Antichrist.....What kind of theology are you likely to have if you think of God and Jesus as violent?" Marcus J. Borg, Speaking Christian, pp. 192-93.
Because dispensationalism has an invested interest in seeing a violent end to world history, dispensational politicians with the authority to influence foreign policy also have the potential to cause serious harm by trying to kickstart the rapture.
For Dispensationalists, the world must end in destruction or else the Bible is wrong. Humanity cannot and should not change the world for the better. Indeed, the antichrist is secretly planning to manipulate peace talks in the Middle East, so beware!
These eschatologies are especially harmful because they create a convenient cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies, which believe that the deterioration of society is actually the will of God who will destroy the earth anyway. The pseudo-expertise of prophecy pundits and rapture enthusiasts simply capitalizes on mass hysteria, paranoia, and global crises. Dispensationalism is particularly adept at inflating current events to fit their wildly misconstrued biblical interpretations.
What rapture theology reveals is that life is apparently more terrifying than death, and people are desperately seeking an escape from the uncertainties of life. It becomes a self-destructive death wish that reinterprets the prophetic visions of the Hebrew Scriptures while marginalizing Jesus’ message about the present reality of God's kingdom.
Concentrating solely on escaping to heaven creates a people who simply want to run away from the injustices and problems of the world, falsely announcing that war and poverty are part of God's perfect plan and, thus, are impossible to cure. The world is going to end in catastrophe regardless of human effort, resigning rapture-believing Christians to think that the worse the planet gets, the closer Christ is to rescuing them.
"If the earth is a lost cause to you, then you will abandon this life and world for the afterlife. You will choose the way of withdrawal, isolation, self-protection, and self-distancing." Brian D. McLaren, Finding Our Way Again, p. 71.
