Unraptured

by Zack Hunt

  But a truly biblical, truly Christ-centered view of the end times can also be the very thing that rescues Christianity and helps us rediscover our first love. After all, Christianity itself was born in the fires of apocalyptic fervor. The early church and the writers of the New Testament believed fervently that they were living in the last days. Revelation wasn’t written about a far-off future. It was written about how to prepare in the present for the imminent return of Jesus. Living as if we are in the last days can be the very thing that rescues Christianity from irrelevance and self-destruction.

  If we see the last days not as a dark moment of fear and dread but as a moment of hope that was inaugurated with the resurrection of Jesus, then the end times become what the church originally understood them to be: a time of radical transformation, when the promises of God are made manifest in the here and now as the kingdom of God comes down to earth as it is in heaven.

  I didn’t understand it then, but I see now that my professor was right all those years ago. We are living in the last days, but not because the tribulation is set to begin and the Antichrist is about to be revealed. We live in the last days because on Easter morning, Jesus walked out of the tomb as the firstfruits, or beginning, of a new way of life. With Christ’s resurrection, the old order of things began to pass away as all things are being made new, not just in some distant future, but here.

  Now.

  And we’ve been invited to participate in that redemptive work. That’s what salvation is all about. It’s not just about me not going to hell. It’s the redemption and reconciliation of all of creation with its Creator. That’s why we can and should talk about being left behind—not as a punishment for a lack of faith, but as a calling to use the power of the Holy Spirit to live out the promised kingdom of God here in the present.

  We are the hands and feet of the resurrected Christ in the world, helping to usher the kingdom of God into a world in desperate need of the kind of healing, justice, liberation, and transformation promised in the book of Revelation. To be Christian is to live as if Jesus really meant what he said when he taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” To be Christian is to turn that prayer into a way of life. To be Christian is to live as if these really are the last days promised by Jesus in which all things are being made new. To be Christian is to be filled with apocalyptic love and to live with an apocalyptic imagination that sees the powers of this world for what they are and resists those oppressive powers through acts of Christlike love for the least of these who are being trampled under the feet of the beast.

  It is this sort of apocalyptic imagination that makes Paul not only an apostle but also an apocalyptic prophet. He wasn’t spreading gloom and doom, and there is little of the mysterious imagery we typically associate with apocalyptic prophets, but Paul was an apocalyptic prophet in the truest sense of the word. He was someone who revealed the truth while calling the people of God to repentance and reconciliation with God. He recognized that in God choosing the lowly, God was turning the power structure of this world upside down, making the first last, setting the prisoner free, bringing justice to the oppressed, healing the sick, and giving new life to the dying.

  But Paul didn’t see that work as something that allowed Christians to sit idly by and passively watch God do everything alone. For Paul, it is “because of the impending crisis” (1 Corinthians 7:26), because “the time has grown short” (verse 29), and because “the present form of this world is passing away” (verse 31) that we must prepare ourselves for life in the new creation. We do that by transforming our lives into a living sacrament, so that like the eucharist, our sacrificial love for others enacts the promise of God’s future in the present.

  Nearly every page of every Pauline epistle is saturated with this expectation of the imminent return of Jesus. It’s not wistful daydreaming about the future. It’s practical advice for living in the here and now. Paul believed the present had a direct connection to the future he knew was imminent. Remember, those epistles of his are real letters to real churches; in them he gives real advice for how people in those churches should live their lives. It’s all predicated on the idea that the return of Jesus is at hand and his followers should prepare accordingly.

  But even though Paul fervently believed we would soon be caught up with Jesus in the twinkling of an eye, he didn’t believe that was justification for checking out of this life. Rather, it was a call to double down on discipleship. Christ’s imminent return was reason to incarnate the good news to as many as possible, because there wasn’t much time left to do that before judgment was at hand.

  But Paul understood something dispensationalists don’t: God is deeply invested in this world, and the end doesn’t change that. The Bible doesn’t say the world will be destroyed at the end of all things. Paul says the form of this world is passing away, just as John declares that the first heaven and first earth will pass away. According to the Bible, the end of history is really just a new beginning, a renewal or restoration of the world we live in, not a total destruction after which God starts over from scratch. That’s why salvation isn’t the finish line but an invitation, why Jesus prays, “Thy kingdom come,” and why heaven isn’t the destination, but a way of life that comes down to earth in John’s apocalypse. God is at work transforming this world and has invited us to participate in that restorative work until Jesus returns to bring that restoration to fruition. That’s the truth revealed by the Apocalypse of John.

  It’s also the apocalyptic theology of Paul.

  But what does that work look like? What does it mean to live in the last days if we’re not deciphering prophetic signs or waiting for the rapture?

  Agape for the apocalypse

  How the followers of Jesus should live in the last days is exactly what Paul tried to flesh out in his epistles. The description of end-times living that Paul gave is—as we should expect it to be—directly connected to what Jesus said should be the foundation of our faith: love.

  Remember that when asked to name the greatest of God’s commandments, Jesus said that everything in the law and the prophets—that is, everything about faith—hangs on, or is shaped by, the call to love God and neighbor. Augustine echoed this calling by making it his rule for reading and understanding the Bible. In between Jesus and Augustine, Paul also used love as his rule for living the Christian life. But we often miss that, not just because of the reputation Paul has as a not particularly warm and fuzzy guy, but because the place he most eloquently and beautifully lays out his own love rule is too often misappropriated for romantic purposes.

  The tradition of using 1 Corinthians 13 at a wedding reveals one of the fundamental problems of translating the ancient languages of the Bible into English. In English, we have one word for love: love. In the Koine Greek in which Paul wrote, however, there were four different words for love: agape, eros, philia, and storge. Each had a slightly different connotation. For example, philia is the sort of love that exists between friends or family. That’s why the city of Philadelphia is called “the city of brotherly love.” Eros, on the other hand, connotes the sexual sort of love found between two lovers. It’s the word for love you would expect to find in a reading at weddings. But it’s not the word Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 13.

  He uses the word agape.

  That doesn’t mean reading 1 Corinthians 13 at weddings is inappropriate—not at all. But if we relegate 1 Corinthians only to the romantic setting of a wedding, we miss the apocalyptic nature of what Paul is describing. He’s not talking about newly married couples. He’s explaining how to live in the last days. That way of living is driven not by fear of the tribulation, anxiety about when the rapture will happen, lust for vengeance against our enemies, or Machiavellian ethics. It’s shaped by love. By agape.

  If you’ve grown up in the church, you’ve probably heard agape used at least a billion times to name countless different Bible studies, Sunday school classes, and churches. Still, it’s wor
th taking a look at again. One translation of agape is “the love of God for humanity and humanity for God.” It captures how God loves us and how we are to love God. In that way, agape is like the greatest commandment summed up in one word. If it is, then 1 Corinthians 13 becomes not just liturgy for a wedding, but a commentary on the greatest commandment and a guide for applying Augustine’s hermeneutic to our reading and understanding of the Bible. And if all of that is true, then 1 Corinthians 13 isn’t just a mushy, feel-good passage to read at weddings. It’s our guide for living in the last days, a model of apocalyptic love.

  That’s the kind of love Paul is describing in 1 Corinthians 13: apocalyptic love. It’s apocalyptic both because it’s how we are to love one another in the last days and because it reveals the love of God. It’s also the kind of love I had completely forgotten about in the apocalyptic fervor of my teenage years. I was obsessed with biblical prophecy but lacked love—the kind of person Paul warns about in 1 Corinthians 13. It wasn’t that Paul was opposed to prophecy. Paul believed in prophecy—authentic biblical prophecy, the kind of prophecy that speaks the truth of God to God’s people, calling us to a life of justice and service to the least of these. That kind of prophecy is found throughout the surrounding chapters in his letter to the Corinthians. But even if we embrace the future-telling elements of biblical prophecy, even if we go even further and fully embrace dispensationalism—even then the kind of prophecy and code-breaking celebrated by end-times theology is of little value to Paul if it’s not driven by love.

  As he writes in 1 Corinthians, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:1-2).

  This would be a poignant passage in any context, but it becomes even more poignant in the context of end-times theology, with its army of experts dissecting and bloviating about every Bible verse and news headline as if they’ve got everything figured out and anyone who doesn’t accept their teaching is either a fool or an enemy. I’m not just talking about Jack Van Impe or Tim LaHaye here. I’m talking about me. For all the damage that dispensationalist television and book experts do to the theology of the church, it’s their disciples—arrogant, condescending, combative, sanctified, hateful people like me—who do far more damage to the witness of the church. Jack Van Impe and Tim LaHaye spread their theology across the airwaves and the pages of books to the masses. Then people like me put it into action, attacking people face-to-face, shaming them for their ignorance, and condemning them for whatever sin we think they are guilty of.

  I had no love in my life, only wrath. For all my faux expertise and righteous conviction that I was on a mission from God, I was nothing more than a resounding gong, a clanging cymbal, an obnoxious guarantee that anyone who saw how I treated others would not want anything to do with Jesus.

  I was also a child, both literally and metaphorically. As Paul said, “I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child” (1 Corinthians 13:11 NIV). My childhood, or at least my adolescence, was driven by childish thinking. Of course, there’s nothing abnormal about that. We all think like children when we’re kids. The problem I had was thinking that, as a child, I already had it all figured out. I was the very thing Paul warned about. I believed I had the gift of understanding prophecy and that I could fathom all the mysteries and knowledge of the end times. I knew beyond any shred of doubt that my faith could move mountains. But love? I never really gave it much thought. I had too much else on the brain, too much else to think about to worry about love.

  As great a Christian as I thought I had become, as hard as I tried to be perfect and never miss church, always read my Bible, always pray, never drink, never swear, and always call sinners to account, in my quest to not be left behind, I had forgotten my first love.

  I had forgotten why I became a Christian in the first place.

  I had forsaken the lessons I learned as a child in Grandma Ruthie’s Sunday school class. I had forgotten that what drew me to Christ in the first place wasn’t a fear of hell, but the love of Jesus that Grandma Ruthie displayed so selflessly for me, for everyone else in that class, and for everyone else she ever taught or came into contact with.

  I forgot that that’s what salvation looks like: God’s love made manifest in our lives, giving us new life so that we can turn around and share that love with others as all of creation is brought back into a loving relationship with its Creator.

  When I was a child I talked like a child; I thought like a child; I reasoned like a child. And like a child, I made the world all about me. I’m an adult now, and I wish I could join with Paul to say with confidence that I’ve put the ways of childhood behind me. But that wouldn’t be true. I still struggle with humility, with the need to be right, with dehumanizing my enemies, with all the things I thought I gave up when I left the rapture behind.

  My sin is the same sin Jesus called the church in Ephesus to account for in the second chapter of Revelation. They did the things they were supposed to do: refused to tolerate wicked people, tested the theology of their leaders, and persevered through persecution. But they had forgotten how to love.

  Remember the love

  It’s curious that a lack of love in the last days is the thing Jesus calls out the church in Ephesus for. It’s curious because it was in Ephesus that Paul likely wrote his first letter to the church in Corinth—the letter containing his now-famous description of love. Maybe it was that lost love that Paul saw and that inspired his words to the church in Corinth. It’s curious, but not necessarily surprising. There’s nothing unique about forgetting or forsaking our first love. If anything, it’s something of a perverse Christian tradition. If nothing else, the story of the church is the story of people who struggle to remember the love that gave birth to our faith. And in our forgetfulness we replace that love with dogmatism, legalism, and oppression.

  It’s a tale as old as the faith itself, and one that continues to be told today. We’ve forsaken our first love. Oh sure, we talk about love a lot, preach sermons about it, write books about it, and plaster it on T-shirts, mugs, and wall décor. But we’ve forgotten that love is more than just an idea, more than an emotion, more than something that makes us feel good. We’ve forgotten that for Christians, love is a way of life. If God is love and we are made in the image of God, then we are made to love. It’s why Jesus said the greatest commandment is love. It’s the defining mark of our identity not just as Christians but as human beings.

  But for too long we’ve kept that love to ourselves, sharing it only with people we deem worthy, people who already love us back. We love only those who love us back, and expect a reward for something even the pagans do (Luke 6:32). We’ve forgotten that our first love is Jesus, love made flesh. There was no one unworthy of his love, no one unworthy of his acts of mercy, healing, feeding, forgiveness, grace, inclusion, and sacrifice.

  However, even if we do rediscover the apocalyptic call to love and serve the least of these, we must make sure to keep our focus on loving them as an end in itself rather than turning them into just another checkmark in our pursuit of heaven. We have to make sure we don’t objectify them as charity cases or potential converts. Rather, we must love them fully and simply, just as we would any other person in our lives. For as Paul warns, “If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3 NIV).

  It’s only when we stop seeing people as potential converts, as potential jewels in our own heavenly crown, and start to love them for who they are—loving them simply for the sake of loving them—that we will begin to fulfill the promise of Revelation. The apostle Paul tells us exactly what that kind of apocalyptic love looks like, and it’s the complete opposite of dispensationalism.

  Apocalyptic love is
patient, kind, does not envy or boast. It’s not proud, but humble. It doesn’t dishonor others. Dispensationalism proudly boasts about its secret knowledge and condemns anyone who disagrees as the enemy damned to an eternity in hell.

  Apocalyptic love is not self-seeking or easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs and does not delight in evil. Dispensationalism is myopically focused on the self and fantasizes over the destruction of its enemies for all the various ways they’ve wronged the chosen few.

  Apocalyptic love rejoices with the truth. Dispensationalism rejoices in hearing whatever its tickling ears need to hear to confirm that its adherents are right and the rest of the world is wrong.

  Apocalyptic love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Dispensationalism neglects the present, mistrusts its neighbor, raises fear about the future, and looks to escape as soon as possible.

  Apocalyptic love never fails. Dispensationalism always does.

  Paul’s choice of words at the end of 1 Corinthians 13 are interesting. He says, “Now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (verse 13 NIV). Remain after what? Remain after putting his childish ways behind him, after deciding to follow Jesus. He has given up the legalism of the law, and what remains are his faith in Jesus, his hope in Christ’s return, and love, but the greatest of these is love. As they should, the faithfulness embodied in the Law and the hope found in the Prophets hang on the greatest commandment to love God and neighbor.

  The same is true for the Christian life. Faith in God is fueled by our love for God. Hope for Christ’s return is driven by a loving desire to be with Christ. Love is the greatest of what remains as the old order passes away, because love is the animating spirit of the Christian life, the calling we’ve been called to incarnate, the bond that holds us all together.