Rapture: The End-Times Error That Leaves the Bible Behind (53 page)

Jesus further said, “Whoever does not bear his own cross … cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27). The choice presented by Christ is quite stark. Later in His ministry, Jesus warned His followers that “in the world you [will] have tribulation” (John 16:33). In Christ’s prayer for His disciples and future Church, Jesus never once prayed that His followers would be exempted from suffering. Even less did He intimate that they would be secretly raptured away from this world’s sufferings. He prayed that His followers would have the strength to
endure
the trials He knew would be coming: “I do not pray that Thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldst keep them from the evil one” (John 17:15). Meditation on this verse undermines the assumptions behind the purpose of a secret rapture.

Endurance in suffering was the constant message of The Apocalypse, as well. Christians must expect suffering and endure it for the sake of salvation. This was the teaching of the early Church without exception. In the first century, the Pastor of Hermas reminded Christians, “Those who continue steadfast and are put through the fire will be purified by means of it … wherefore cease not speaking these things into the ears of the saints” (
TSV
, IV). Suffering is to be expected in the Christian pilgrimage because it is a means to holiness.

Many committed rapturists believe they will be exempted even from the suffering of death. They take great comfort in their belief that Christ must rapture away this generation, the “generation of the fig tree,” the one that has witnessed the founding of Israel. As we have seen, however, there is actually no biblical basis for this false comfort.

I have known some committed rapturists as friends and have seen some of these friends meet death. They—and everyone in this generation and in generations to come—will continue to die until Christ returns in all His glory, and there is no guarantee that it will occur within this generation any more than during the generation of Montanis or of Joseph Smith. Remember them? They, too, were certain that Christ would return before their generation died.

The same human instinct that causes people to visit palm-readers and fortune-tellers makes rapturist theology so popular. When world events seem to spin out of control, the rapturist can sit comfortably in the knowledge that he has the inside scoop on the future. This appeals to anyone’s innate sense of curiosity and promotes a sense of security.

Unfortunately, pride is a very natural result of this thinking. I do not say this with pleasure. I myself was an integral part of the rapturist movement for most of my life. Just like all the other “end of the world” sects that have sprouted since the Montanists ruined the Church picnic almost two millennia ago, we are supposed to believe that we are the final generation, that we have the blueprint for all of history in our back pockets. This puts us, and the leaders of this movement, at the apex of history. Nothing in history is as important as what is happening now. Our generation is involved in the final battle of good and evil, and no other generation has a more important role to play than ours. And not only do we know all of history; we know the important events of the next few years before they even happen. This can be a tremendous ego-booster!

In contrast, the Catholic Church teaches that we may or may not be in the final confrontation between God and Satan. God took at least two or three millennia to get the world ready for His greatest creation, which is Christ’s Bride, the Church. Why should God now end the work of the Church after a mere two millennia? There is no scriptural basis for believing that the Church will not continue growing here on earth for ten thousand years or more.

This perspective need not make our present generation feel unimportant just because we will not consummate the entire plan for the last days. In fact, it should do just the opposite. Everything we do now will have repercussions for generations to come. Our actions today—good and evil—can lead to consequences in five hundred years that we can hardly imagine!

The pride engendered by claiming to have the blueprint to history is the original “hook” that gets many Catholics interested in rapturist beliefs. The Catholic Church tells us how this world will end, but it often seems to be so far in the future. In contrast, rapturists promise to clue us in to events that are unfolding before our very eyes. At first, their system seems to answer to the biblical data, give meaning to the daily news, and satisfy our curiosity, all at the same time. Why go to a palm-reader when the local preacher at the corner church will answer many of your questions about the immediate future?

Believe me, this appeal of the rapture and the Great Tribulation is not lost on rapturists, who use their premillennial system as a wedge for pulling people out of the Church. Most Catholics do not understand rapturist theology. After all, it is not even two hundred years old! It is so far afield from the traditional understanding of the Church throughout the ages, that even Catholic leaders are sometimes caught flat-footed when asked to respond. I have gotten letters from Catholic pastors at a total loss as to how to respond to rapturists.

As a result, the most anti-Catholic of the Protestant groups find that when they teach about an imminent secret rapture and the ensuing Great Tribulation, they have an extremely effective method of drawing Catholics away from the Church. Many former Catholics admit that they first considered leaving the Church after being introduced to this doctrine. By the time a faithful Catholic family figures out what this teaching is all about, they have lost a child, a brother, or a spouse to the local Fundamentalist group down the street.

Although I believe that these psychological reasons are an important aspect of rapturism’s appeal, there are two important theological reasons as well. They rely on opposite, extreme views of Scripture.

The first view is
sola Scriptura
, which seeks to place the Bible on a pedestal that the Bible itself flatly rejects. Rapturists stand firmly in the tradition of the radical, Anabaptist Protestant Reformation. They accept no other authority than the Bible. They do not accept bishops or any type of spiritual authority vested in any man. They firmly believe that if a person approaches Scripture with a pure heart, the Holy Spirit will unerringly lead him to the truth. Their faith is completely individualistic.

This approach leads to a problem. What would happen if one of these Christians were to admit that a Bible passage was symbolic or figurative? Well, then whoever had the authority to determine what was symbolic, and what was not, would really be more authoritative than the Bible itself. At least, that is the way they view the situation. They do not want to open that Pandora’s box.

As a result, they take everything in the Bible as literally as possible (except for the clear teaching on the Eucharist, of course). Rapturists naturally tend to the belief that the universe was created in six literal, twenty-four hour days. Because of the genealogies in Genesis, many of them would hold that the world is less than ten thousand years old. They must understand all passages of the Bible literally because they think that otherwise they will have left the barn door open for the horses to escape: once any passage is declared to be figurative, where do they stop, without an accepted authority as a guide? Rapturists choose to be literalistic in their interpretation of apocalyptic literature because they think that anything else is just too dangerous. Literal Scripture interpretation is their only anchor of stable spiritual authority.

Given their assumptions, they may be justified in their fear. Ultimately, mainline liberal Protestantism has shown that in the absence of any central teaching authority, even the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection will be allegorically interpreted. Yet the Bible itself makes clear that a literal meaning is not intended for many apocalyptic passages.
Sola Scriptura
itself is never taught in the Bible, and is actually antibiblical (
BFB
, 3). That is why I have labeled it as “too high” a view of Scripture.

Of course, the Catholic has an advantage in interpreting Scripture. As Catholics, we have a three-legged stool to support our faith: the Church’s Tradition, the Church’s Magisterium, and the Church’s Scripture. The great fourth-century Bible scholar, St. Jerome, wrote, “We do not attempt to prove either the advent of Christ or the falsehood of antichrist from … the passages of Scripture. Because our authority is more secure [and biblical], we have the liberty to understand certain passages as symbolic when warranted, without the fear that even the Incarnation might eventually be taken as a ‘myth’ ” (
CID
, 11:45). St. Jerome illustrates that the mainline liberal Protestants’ problem that the Fundamentalist worries about is not all that modern after all!

So,
sola Scriptura
actually prevents the rapturist from understanding the Bible as clearly as the Catholic can. This is true not only concerning the symbolic nature of some passages, but also concerning events that occurred after the last historical book of the New Testament ends. That book is The Acts of the Apostles, and its story ends with St. Paul imprisoned in Rome. Since St. Paul died in the Great Tribulation of 64 to 67 A.D., there is no mention of that event or of the fall of Jerusalem. Although many rapturists may not be consciously aware of this, as a group they tend to work under the assumption that events not recorded in Scripture are not essential for the understanding of their faith.

Since the fall of Jerusalem is not recorded in Scripture as history, rapturists start with a distrust of any attempt to understand the prophecies of The Apocalypse, the Olivet Discourse, and Daniel through the lens of that event. Especially in the pews, many rapturists hold to a version of
sola Scriptura
that is indefensible even among many Protestant scholars. These rapturists refuse even to consider the events of 70 A.D. as a key to understanding any prophecies of the Bible
because the events themselves are not enumerated in Scripture
. It is almost as though these events did not even occur. Therefore, they are left groping for a still-future fulfillment.

Admittedly, this is an extreme application of
sola Scriptura
, but it is nevertheless a reality within rapturist circles. This approach certainly simplifies the amount of data one needs to work with to understand the Bible, but ultimately it clouds the truth.

The second theological appeal of the rapturist system has more to do with Catholics than Protestants. I believe that this one is the most important reason people leave the historical Church that Christ founded two millennia ago to join a rapturist movement founded two centuries ago. The recent ascendancy of
modernist theology
within Catholic biblical studies stands at the center of the issue.

You may have been wondering why, in a book about rapturists, I have spent time dealing with the modernist position. Well, to a large extent, rapturists are a reaction to the emergence, or more accurately the re-emergence, of modern skepticism. Sometimes good people are attracted to premillennialism as an antidote to the modernists’ denial of the supernatural.

An important precedent to this phenomenon can be found in the early Church. Bishop Irenaeus developed the theological rationale for premillennialism. There is no clear evidence of premillennialism in the leadership of the Church before him. Why would he experiment with a theology that was more Jewish than Christian, was undoubtedly innovative, and would end up being condemned by his contemporaries and those Church Fathers who read him in later years? It is impossible to understand this good bishop in a vacuum. I believe that Irenaeus was motivated by the desire to protect the Faith of the fathers from the Gnostics.

The Gnostics were practical dualists who predated Christianity and saw the spiritual realm as innately good and physical reality as completely evil. As Christianity spread throughout the Middle East, Gnostics infiltrated and distorted the message of the Church. Their distrust of “the grossness of matter” led them to teach that salvation was obtained exclusively through knowledge, rather than through faith-filled obedience. In fact, the Gnostics were ultimately pessimists: all physical reality was so evil that it was incapable of salvation. This led them to deny the reality of the Incarnation. They could not accept that a spiritual, “pure” God (the Parent-Spirit) could unite with a physical, “evil” body. Their dualistic view of reality also led them to deny the hope of any real, physical return of Christ at the final eschaton. Of course, the true significance of the Eucharist would be anathema to them as well (
CE, NCE
).

In brief, the Gnostics denied that the supernatural could impinge upon the physical world. To anyone who has studied modern skepticism, that should sound familiar.

Bishop Irenaeus was on the front lines in the Church’s battle against this virulent heresy. He decided that the Millennium mentioned in The Apocalypse must actually entail a prophecy of a physical reign of Christ here on earth. He believed that this thousand years of peace on earth would occur after the second advent. He understood that this view of the Millennium would be a forceful argument against the Gnostic’s refusal to admit the possibility of the Incarnation. A physical Millennium would be a convincing proof that the physical world was not totally evil and incapable of redemption, as Gnosticism claimed. It could be argued from the Millennium that Christ was pure, even though He was fully divine and fully human at the same time. The orthodox belief has always been that the Incarnation was the salvation of the physical realm. A corporeal Millennium could be strong proof of that.