Rapture: The End-Times Error That Leaves the Bible Behind (4 page)

But more important than any one person’s life, truth is at stake. Either the rapture, the Great Tribulation, the Millennium, and eternity will unfold as rapturists claim, or they will not. Although no human can peer into the future to give us absolute certainty, we can and should study the teachings of divine revelation to determine what is really revealed there.

Further, truth is vitally important when raising children. Untold thousands of young Catholics have left the Faith after being exposed to rapturist ideas about the end times. Knowing the
truth
about biblical prophecy will enable parents and children to be prepared for the rapturist challenge when it comes. And it will come. The frenzy over the end times is running hot, and—if the success of the
Left Behind
books is any indication—it looks to continue for some time.

“Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”

Paul

2 Timothy 2:15 (KJV), first century

“What, pray, can be more sacred than this sacred mystery of the Scriptures?… What honey can be sweeter than to learn of God’s wise plan … and gaze on the mind of the Creator? Let the others, if they will, have their wealth, and … bask in popular applause.… Our delight shall be to meditate on the Law of the Lord day and night, to knock at His door when it is not open, to receive the bread of the Trinity.”

Jerome

Epistle 30 to Paula
, fourth century

“Study. Study in earnest. If you are to be salt and light, you need knowledge. Or do you imagine that an idle and lazy life will entitle you to receive infused knowledge?”

Josemaría Escrivá

The Way
, twentieth century

Is this fascination with the end of the world unique to our times? You may be surprised to find that it is not. In fact, the modern fascination with the end of the world is actually very unmodern. Join me in a short stroll through history that will illustrate that the end of the world has always been upon us.

In 156 A.D., a charismatic leader named Montanis surfaced in Papuza, in what is now Turkey. He convinced many of the Christians in that part of Phrygia that a private revelation had predicted that Christ would return at any moment. They sought to bring the Church back to its “original simplicity” under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit. Montanis’s followers came to believe that they were the spiritual elite of the millennial kingdom that Christ would set up at His return. Christ would rule on earth for a thousand years, with Papuza as His seat of government. Because of their stubborn misuse of The Apocalypse, the Church in the East found herself questioning the canonicity of the last book of the Bible. Perhaps most disturbing, Montanis taught that the ecstatic utterances of their prophets (private revelation) were more authoritative than the teachings of the Apostles (general revelation). This led to the Montanists’ splitting from the Church. Eventually Montanis’s followers became radically heretical, and the movement died out by the sixth century, but not before they became the blueprint for a multitude of later schismatic movements based on the promise of an imminent corporeal Millennium here on earth.

Almost all variants of the modern rapturist position cite the writings of St. Irenaeus as early evidence for their belief system. In 177 A.D., he was appointed bishop of Lyons. His life work was to combat the Gnostics. In that role, he began to teach that there would be a thousand-year earthly Kingdom of Christ immediately following the second coming. (This is called millenarianism, premillennialism, and chiliasm. But by any and all names, it was strongly and repeatedly rejected by the other leaders of the early Church.)

Irenaeus predicted that the world would end six thousand years after it had begun. He based his calculations on the Bible verse that says that a thousand years is as a day with God (2 Pet. 3:8). “For in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years shall it be concluded.… In six days created things were completed: it is evident, therefore, that they will come to an end at the sixth thousand year” (
AH
, V:28:3). This means the end of the world would have been around 1000 A.D., although some now claim he meant 2000 A.D. Either way, he was wrong.

A student of Irenaeus, the priest Hippolytus, also did what would be repeated throughout history as a logical conclusion of millenarianism. Around the end of the second century, he predicted that the world would end soon, and he set a specific date. Based on the size of Noah’s ark, he determined the date to be 500 A.D.

Around the same time, Julius Africanus (b. 160) also wrote that the second coming would occur six thousand years after the Creation. He calculated that by the time of Christ’s Passion, the earth had already been in existence for 5,531 years. As a result, he agreed with Hippolytus that the second coming would occur no later than 500 A.D. Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Julius Africanus ended up like so many other men who have made these predictions: with egg on their faces.

In Carthage, around 200 A.D., Tertullian developed a scenario for the end times that now seems rather provincial. He wrote that “the Goths will conquer Rome and redeem the Christians; but then Nero [come back from the dead] will appear as the heathen Antichrist, reconquer Rome, and rage against the Christians three years and a half. He will then be conquered in turn by the Jewish and real Antichrist from the East, who … will return to Judea, perform false miracles, and be worshiped by the Jews. At last Christ appears, that is, God Himself with the lost Twelve Tribes as His army, which had lived beyond Persia in happy simplicity and virtue. Under astounding phenomena of nature He will conquer Antichrist and his host, convert all nations, and take possession of the holy city of Jerusalem” (
WQT
, III).

St. Martin of Tours (316–397) believed the end was so near that the antichrist was already alive. “There is no doubt that the antichrist has already been born. Firmly established already in his early years, he will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power” (
ETV
, 119). Of course, this would necessitate the end of the world within sixty or seventy years at the most.

The next six centuries saw somewhat less speculation about the end of the world. Perhaps it was the bracing influence of St. Augustine, who explained prophetic texts in understandable and irrefutable language. But there were still a few speculators. At the end of the eighth century, Beatus, Abbot of Liebana, announced that the world would end on Easter eve of 796. Around the same time, St. Gregory of Tours speculated that the end would occur sometime between 799 A.D. and 806 A.D.

Toward the end of the tenth century, Bernard of Thuringia calculated that 992 A.D. would mark the end of the world. Around the end of the first millennium, the Archbishop of York preached a message of repentance linked to the imminent Day of Judgment that the turn of the century would bring. Even the German Kaiser Otto III proclaimed, “The last year of the thousand years is here, and now I go out in the desert to await, with fasting, prayer, and penance, the day of the Lord and the coming of my Redeemer.”

These men were evidence of the phenomenal interest in the end of the world that arose around the end of the first millennium. Many followed Irenaeus in believing that a thousand years was literally “as a day” to the Lord. Since they reasoned that there had been six thousand years before Christ’s first advent, they expected the seventh day to come to a close one thousand years after Christ’s birth. They taught that the Millennium of The Apocalypse was going to be completed at the end of that millennium.

There was intense anxiety as the last day of the millennium arrived. Many people were worshiping in church, preparing themselves for the end. When Christ did not return, however, some teachers recalculated the thousand years to begin with Christ’s Ascension, rather than with His birth. This meant that the end of the thousand years would be in 1033 A.D.

I hope I need not remind you that nothing of significance happened in 1033 A.D. But a new technique had been born, one that would serve end-times speculators for ten centuries: When a prediction concerning the second coming does not materialize, simply rework the calculations to move the date back a few years! I call this the “rolling end of the world.” Just as stock analysts will update a fifty-day or two-hundred-day average by dropping the oldest date, doomsayers update their calculations every time a prophetic fulfillment fails to arrive on schedule.

The thirteenth century was a very difficult and discouraging time to be a Christian. The Muslim soldier Saladin had conquered Jerusalem, wresting control of it away from the Christians. Into this situation stepped Joachim Fiore, who popularized (some say invented) the historicist view of The Apocalypse.

Fiore took The Apocalypse as a description of all the events that had been occurring since the first advent of Christ. He placed the letters to the seven churches and the visions in chronological order and tagged them to various centuries in history. He was also the first “dispensationalist” in that he split the New Covenant in half. He believed in three ages: from creation to Christ was the age of the Father; from Christ to Fiore’s time was the age of the Son; and from Fiore to the final judgment was the age of the Spirit.

When Fiore discovered the mention of 1,260 days in Apocalypse 12:6, he jumped to a conclusion that seemed logical to him. He modified Irenaeus’s system, based on the notion that “a thousand years equals a day,” and determined that the second coming could not come later than 1260 A.D. Until his death in 1250, many believed that Emperor Frederick II would be the one to usher in Christ’s Kingdom as Fiore had predicted. Even after his death, many expected the emperor to reappear in time to start the Messianic age.

Obviously, nothing of note occurred in the year 1260. Fiore had died in 1201, so he did not live to witness his error. But his faulty exegesis of The Apocalypse caused a crisis of faith for many. Fra Salimbene of Parma wrote, “After … the year 1260 passed [without event] … I am disposed henceforth to believe nothing save what I see.” Unfortunately, eventual loss of faith frequently accompanies belief in the end-times frenzy.

In 1501, the famous explorer and discoverer Christopher Columbus wrote
The Book of Prophecies
, in which he predicted that within 155 years, Christians would have converted all of mankind. Christ would then return, and the world would end. The date he calculated for the end was no later than 1656. As of this writing, that date is three and a half centuries off the mark, and counting.

Something huge did occur shortly after Columbus’s book was published, but it was not the final victory of Christ’s Church. It was the splintering of that Church in the upheavals in Europe caused by the emergence of the Protestants. The more anarchistic Protestants, such as the Anabaptists, made an imminent Millennium a centerpiece of their theology, taking their cue from the radical Taborites and Hussites of a century earlier.

When the Anabaptists took over Munster, Germany, in 1534, they immediately proclaimed that it would be the center of the millennial kingdom. They preached forebodingly that those outside the city of Munster were in danger of Christ’s condemnation upon His return. Catholic Mass was prohibited, and many Anabaptists flocked into the city. But the situation was far from stable. Even Protestant leaders of the day were alarmed at the developments. Polygamy was endorsed. Eventually even one of the three wives of the Protestant leader “King of Justice, the King of New Jerusalem Buckhold” was publicly executed by her husband because she resisted the teaching that all property must be shared—including wives.

In 1546 Martin Luther wrote, “All the signs which are to precede the last days [have] already appeared.… The day of judgment is not far off.… [It] will not be absent three hundred years longer” (
BET
, 25). Like Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Columbus, and Fiore, Luther fell into the trap of trying to generate enthusiasm by predicting a quick end of the world. Yet Luther was canny enough to predict the end a good distance off; no later than the mid 1800s. Need I say it again? Nothing happened.

The emerging Protestants picked up on Fiore’s discredited idea, but added a slight twist. They claimed that 1260 A.D. marked the start of the Great Tribulation rather than of the second advent. They reasoned, rather conveniently, that if the Church had been in the Great Tribulation for three centuries, then antichrist must have been on the scene since 1260 A.D. They did not look too long before settling on the Pope as the most likely candidate. This meant that the overthrow of the papacy was necessary for the millennial kingdom of God to come. Unfortunately, much of the Church’s activities during this period gave credence to this theory by resembling those of a “beast” and a “harlot.”