Unraptured
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But that’s not the only timetable that’s up for debate in end-times theology. There’s also the matter of the rapture and the tribulation. As we’ll see in a moment, the rapture is actually a fairly recent invention. The rapture is the idea that Jesus will whisk the saints away to heaven in the twinkling of an eye. It’s different from the second coming, in which Jesus returns to earth to be with his people rather than taking them away from earth and up into heaven. You can believe in the second coming without having to worry about being left behind, because the rapture and the return of Jesus are two very different events. While this may not initially seem like a big difference—why does it matter whether we go there or Jesus comes here?—the implications play out in rather massive ways, not just in the future but also and especially in the here and now. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll come back to those implications later.
When exactly the rapture will occur is yet another matter of great debate in dispensational circles—and not just in the sense of picking an exact date. The debate over the timing of the rapture revolves around whether it will happen before, during, or after the so-called tribulation: a period of seven years during which God will supposedly rain down hellfire on those who haven’t been raptured—those who have been “left behind.” It’s during this seven-year tribulation that most of the exciting stuff associated with Revelation and the end times is supposed to occur. This is when the Antichrist is supposed to reign and when the mark of the beast will be stamped on hands or foreheads as a requirement to buy or sell anything (Revelation 13:16-17). This is also the period when all the nasty things from Revelation will happen; I’m talking about the bowls of wrath, the moon turning to blood, locusts, plagues, the four horsemen of the apocalypse—all of it (see Revelation 6:1-8, 12; 8–9; 16). Fun times.
At the center of all this madness—before, during, and after everything unfolds—is the nation of Israel. Israel is the driving force and center of attention for all biblical prophecy. Every single episode of Jack Van Impe Presents, every chart John Hagee has ever created, every book that’s ever been written about the end times: they all either center on or constantly reference Israel. It’s there, specifically in the city of Jerusalem, that the Antichrist is supposed to sign a peace treaty to usher in his one-world government. It is there that the temple will be rebuilt, there that the Antichrist will defile the temple, there that all sorts of plagues will happen, and there that Jesus will return to establish a new heaven, a new earth, and, at its center, a new Jerusalem—or at least so dispensationalism claims.
Opposing Jerusalem is Babylon, the ancient enemy of Israel that plays a prominent role in Revelation as a coded stand-in for Rome. Babylon worked as a stand-in for Rome because, like Rome, Babylon was an ancient enemy that had conquered and oppressed Israel. John was writing under the yoke of the Roman Empire, so to just come out and call Rome the devil and predict its fall would have been, well, not smart. The same goes for calling the Roman emperor the beast. Some theories hold that since Roman letters also had numerical values, 666—the infamous number of the beast—was a reference to the emperor Nero because his Latin-lettered name adds up to 666. Or maybe it was the fifth-century, Rome-sacking Vandal king Gaiseric, whose numbered name comes out to the same sum. You remember him, right? Of course you don’t. Nobody does. So maybe the Antichrist is the pope. Which one? Pick one. Or maybe it was Ronald Reagan. Or Barack Obama. Or really whoever you need to help move your prophetic map along; it’s dealer’s choice.
As overwhelming as all that information might be to wrap your head around, those are just the bullet points of what you need to know going forward. But if you still find yourself feeling confused, know this: you’re not alone. Everything I just shared is the dispensationalist perspective. Very little of it is orthodox Christian theology. Why? Because for the entire two thousand years of its existence, the church has argued and debated about what the end of all things will look like. But not as much as you might think. There has also been plenty of debate about the millennium, but the rest of that stuff? It’s all pretty new. What makes it all seem so deceptively orthodox—that is to say, a true and essential part of the Christian faith—is the fact that while the rapture and dispensationalism are relatively new inventions, thinking and talking about the “end times” does have a long tradition and plays an important role both in the Christian faith and in the Bible.
Scripturally speaking
The end of all things begins in the middle, biblically or dispensationally speaking. Though please don’t hear me saying that dispensationalism is synonymous with being biblical. It very much is not. But both share a beginning place for their end-times theology. Although Revelation gets all the end-times press, a book in the middle of the Bible—Daniel—also plays a very important role in end-times theology. That might come as something of a surprise, particularly if all you know about Daniel is that he was tossed into the lions’ den for refusing to bow down to an idol of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.
But the story of Daniel doesn’t stop there. Nor does it stop with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace. After those now famous stories, we encounter several prophecies in the book of Daniel. Daniel was, after all, more than a lion tamer. He was also an apocalyptic prophet, at least in Christian tradition. It is from the book of Daniel that many end-times prophecies spring, including purported descriptions of foreign invaders in the north and potential descriptions of the Antichrist (although the Antichrist is never actually mentioned anywhere in Daniel, since Christ didn’t appear until several centuries after the book of Daniel was written). Most consequential of all is Daniel’s description of “seventy sevens,” which were supposed to “put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place” (Daniel 9:24). It is from those “seventy sevens” that the idea of dispensations is derived. The seventy sevens are treated by end-times theology as seven different periods of history, or dispensations. We supposedly live in a holding pattern before the final week, which is what makes the era we currently live in “the end times.” Now, there is nothing in the text of Daniel that describes a holding pattern, nor is there anything to support the idea of seven dispensations. Both concepts have been invented out of whole cloth by dispensationalists because they give a structure from which to build out their various interpretations of passages in Revelation. Regardless of their origin, the dispensations are kind of like the contents of Pandora’s box. The box has been opened, and there’s no putting the dispensations back inside—at least not for those who believe they’ve uncovered a great biblical secret.
It’s when we get to the New Testament that end-times theology really begins to pick up proof-texting steam. The apocalyptic train doesn’t wait until Revelation to get going. It starts right up in the first book of the New Testament, Matthew, which features what is often described by biblical scholars as “the Little Apocalypse.” The so-called Little Apocalypse is found in Matthew 24–25 and is delivered by Jesus himself. (Parallels appear in Mark 13 and Luke 21.) It’s in the Little Apocalypse that we first learn about the signs of the times and about “wars and rumors of wars” (Matthew 24:6). If you’ve ever seen the classic Christian rapture scare flick Thief in the Night, you’ll recognize the source of that imagery in Matthew 24. Although the exact phrase “like a thief in the night” is taken from Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5:2, the idea of Jesus’ return being like a “thief in the night” springs from Jesus’ description in the Little Apocalypse of Matthew 24 of a home owner being unprepared for a thief to break in during the night. The Little Apocalypse of Matthew is also where we’re first introduced to the notion of being left behind, which comes in the context of a short parable from Jesus that describes men in a field and women working. In both cases, one is taken and the other left behind. Curiously, however, the text isn’t clear about whether being left behind is a good or bad thing. In this parable, Jesus certainly doesn’t mention a
rapture up to heaven. In fact, the way Jesus tells it, it’s quite possible that one would want to be left behind. Much like in a flood, you wouldn’t want to be taken away by the floodwaters; you would want to be left behind.
The Little Apocalypse culminates at the end of Matthew 25. This is the only instance in the entire gospel narrative in which Jesus describes exactly what will happen on judgment day. The surprising thing about his description isn’t the appearance of farm animals, however, but how the sheep and the goats will be separated. It’s not by their confession of faith, their prayers, or affirmation of doctrine that they’ll be sorted, but rather by how they did or didn’t treat the least of these. If I had been paying more attention to Matthew 25 as a younger lad, I might have noticed that the goats aren’t sent away because of what they did—something imperfect or sinful—but rather because of what they didn’t do. Matthew 25 offers a stark contrast from the prophecy maps of dispensationalists, to say nothing of the doctrine of salvation by faith alone. But more on that later.
The next heavy end-times hitter in the New Testament is Paul. Although we know him primarily as the missionary who took the gospel to the Gentiles, Paul also wrote letters that are thoroughly apocalyptic. How so? Paul was utterly convinced Jesus’ return was imminent. Thus, all his recommendations to the early church on how to live and behave were based on that assumption. We know this is true because Paul predicates many of his instructions, particularly in his first letter to the Corinthians, with language like “in view of the impending crisis,” “the appointed time has grown short,” and “the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:26, 29, 31). Paul also describes the faithful being caught up in the air with Jesus “in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Corinthians 15:52), which is often cited as a proof text for the rapture. (For the record: It’s not. Paul is talking about the second coming. We know that because Jesus comes down to meet the faithful; he doesn’t wait for them to arrive in heaven. Nor does Paul reference any other return. For Paul, Jesus only returns once, and it’s not to rapture the church. It’s to bring heaven down to earth.)
Along with 1 Corinthians, Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians also plays a significant role in end-times theology. It’s here that Paul offers a description of the Antichrist—or as Paul calls him, “the lawless one” who “opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship” (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4). This is the figure who, according to dispensationalism, will rise up in the last days to take control of the world via a one-world government, desecrate a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem, and cause all sorts of other apocalyptic tomfoolery before suffering a mortal wound to the head only to rise again from the dead, kind of like a bizarro Jesus.
Finally, we come to the big enchilada: the book of Revelation. If the book of Revelation seems weird to you, that’s because it is. Let’s not even try to beat around the bush about it. It’s got dragons and dead sheep and talking scrolls, and it even mentions whores. The shame! Not surprisingly, there was a lot of debate about Revelation even making it into the Bible. (Yes, that sort of thing was debated once upon a time. Contrary to popular fundamentalist belief, the Bible did not drop from heaven in its present form. There were lots of books and letters and even other gospels floating around in the early days of the church that were taken very seriously by many Christians, but that, for one reason or another, didn’t make the final cut for the New Testament.)
The inclusion of Revelation in the Bible was hotly contested. Even though pastors today like to talk a lot about how the original audience would have understood the images and language of the Bible better than we do today, that’s not necessarily true for all of Revelation. The churches mentioned in the first couple of chapters were very real, and the problems and accolades John describes were also real. Those churches would certainly have known what John was writing to them. However, we don’t know if early readers understood the rest of the book of Revelation that much better than we do today. Lots of Christians during the early days of the church dismissed it, just as lots of Christians do today. Many saw it—and still do—as a weird, irrelevant book that’s impossible to understand and which has little if any practical value. In fact, in the Eastern Orthodox Church today, Revelation is still omitted from the lectionary rotation. While the rest of the Bible is split up into various readings for each week over the course of three years, no passages from Revelation appear in that rotation.
This is not to say that no one understood or appreciated the book of Revelation. Lots of Christians did. That’s why it eventually ended up in the Bible. As mysterious as it is to us today, there were plenty of images in Revelation that would have jumped out more easily to the ancient reader. For example, the average churchgoer in antiquity would not have needed Jack Van Impe to explain to them what Babylon meant. It clearly referred to Rome, because Rome was the only super powerful, Babylon-like oppressor that John could have been referring to in the first century. Any suggestion that it didn’t would have sounded as bizarre to them as television commercials sound to my raised-on-Netflix toddlers today.
But the most awkward thing about the apocalypse in the New Testament wasn’t the strange imagery of Revelation. It was the fact that Jesus didn’t return as quickly as his first followers expected. Most of the early church believed firmly that the return of Jesus was imminent. Like, any-day imminent. Just take a look again at the writings of Paul. He was convinced Jesus was going to return any day now. When it didn’t happen, things got . . . awkward. The church was faced with having to reconcile its expectations with reality and how to explain things like Jesus saying “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place” (Matthew 24:34).
The early church made a significant transition in its understanding of the last days when it began reading books like Revelation as spiritual promises instead of literal ones. This was particularly true when it came to the belief in the millennium: that literal thousand-year reign of peace on earth. Literal millennialism was a widespread belief throughout the early church until after the pivotal Council of Nicaea in the fourth century, when an influential church father named Jerome began insisting instead that the millennium was a spiritual truth. An even more influential church father, Saint Augustine, shared this spiritual interpretation. Their authority was such that for centuries to follow, belief in the literal millennium effectively went all but extinct.
In the meantime, other important steps in the development of end-times theology were taking place. For example, in their original form, the books of the Bible were written in one continuous unit, meaning there were no chapters or verses. Eventually along came a fellow named Primasius. While he didn’t invent chapters and verses as we know them today, he was the first one to chop the book of Revelation up into sections. This became an important foundational breakdown for later dispensationalists, who base a lot of their timetables on when certain chapters and verses in Revelation begin or end.1
While the following thousand years or so of Christian theology saw theologians mostly focusing on the spiritual meaning of Revelation, Christian theology also saw a never-ending stream of predictions for when Jesus would return. Interestingly, those early predictions said nothing about the rapture. Why? Because it hadn’t yet been invented.
One thing the early church would not have recognized in Revelation—or anywhere else in the New Testament—is the rapture. Not because early believers were biblically illiterate, but because it’s simply not there. In fact, the rapture didn’t appear on the church’s radar until the late nineteenth century, when it was invented by an Anglo-Irish preacher by the name of John Nelson Darby.
Inventing the rapture
No one is more important or influential in the history of end-times theology than John Darby. Born in London in 1800, Darby was the forefather of dispensationalism and, in particular, the idea of the rapture. Ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1826, he resigned his position the following year and went on t
o help found a sect called the Plymouth Brethren. A prolific writer and preacher, as well as a hymn writer, Darby toured extensively throughout his lifetime, traveling across Britain, Europe, and the United States.
It was Darby who effectively invented and popularized the idea of the rapture. He may have initially borrowed the basic idea from a Scottish teenager named Margaret MacDonald who, while attending a healing service in 1830, is reported to have had a vision of a two-stage return of Jesus. Her vision suggested that yes, Jesus would return at the second coming, but that Jesus would have already returned once before that as well.2 Whether this vision actually occurred is a matter of some dispute, but it is unquestionably Darby who popularized the idea of the rapture, and with it the idea of dispensations. Surprisingly though, Darby himself was careful to never predict a specific date for either the rapture or the second coming.
Darby’s idea of the rapture won over many in the United States during his visits to the country between 1859 and 1877. His dispensationalist theology became so popular and so accepted as gospel truth that the popular Scofield Reference Bible modeled itself on Darby’s ideas by including dispensational commentary throughout the text.
When you consider the timing of Darby’s visit to the United States, it seems less surprising that he found an audience eager to hear what he had to say. Darby arrived at the onset of the bloodiest moment in American history: the Civil War. If ever there was a time of trial and tribulation in the young republic’s history—a time that felt like the end of the world to many white American Christians—then surely it was the Civil War, when tens of thousands could die in a single day. The South’s surrender at Appomattox brought an end to the Civil War but not to worry and strife. Reconstruction was anything but paradise, especially for African Americans. Darby’s promise of liberation from the tribulations of the day must have sounded like incredibly good news to countless souls living during that tumultuous time.