Thoughts on Revelation (pt. 2) The Rapture

One person in my Bible Study was so surprised to hear that I do not believe in the Rapture that she asked me if I believed Jesus was coming again.  I understand the feeling.  I quite clearly remember as late as my sophomore year of high school reading that someone taught that there would be no rapture and thinking that the person was a heretic.  Evangelical culture has become so diffused with Rapture theology that the entire Bible has been read through a Dispensationalist lens, so doubting the Rapture feels like doubting the Bible.  My opposition to the doctrine of the Rapture comes from the Bible.  It also comes from the teaching of the Church concerning how the Bible should be read.

First off, a conversation about Rapture is actually out-of-place in a conversation about Revelation.  Nothing in Revelation even suggests a Rapture.  When Revelation is assumed to be a description of an end-times scenario, then a Rapture must be inserted within the time-line at some point in the text.  Even those who believe the entire point of Revelation is to reveal the events of the end-times agree that Revelation implies a Rapture but does not describe it.

These teachers believe that Revelation describes a persecution/tribulation that will come after the Rapture takes place.  They say that the Rapture is described in 1 Thess. 4, which is the very first book of the New Testament written.  Paul wrote it to a group of Gentiles who were unfamiliar with the doctrine of the resurrection and yet had embraced Paul's idea that Jesus would return during their lifetimes.  They were concerned that their loved ones who had died before the Lord's return had missed the opportunity to live in a world renewed in the presence of the Christ.  Paul's point is to give hope: "I do not wish for you to grieve as those who have no hope."  He teaches them that their loved ones will be resurrected first, and then the bodies of "we who are alive and remain" will be renewed.  The point is about bodily resurrection, not rapture.  He then says that we will all meet Jesus in the air, but the terminology that he uses is that of a welcoming party going outside the city to escort a king into a city he is visiting.  The point is that we usher in the Lord upon his return to earth, not that he takes us up to heaven to abandon the earth.

Rapture theology has also cited texts in which Jesus speaks of judgment and describes two in a field, or two in a bed, or two threshing, and one is left behind.  It's important to recognize that this is common language of judgment and true to the lived experience of anyone who has had survival guilt when they were left behind after something terrible happened.  Also, in all judgment passages in the Old Testament, it is those who are left behind who are the righteous.  To be "taken" is to be taken in judgment.

There are many eschatological texts, but no others (as far as I can remember) have even been understood to directly describe rapture.  Pretty weak foundation on the Bible side.

The Church has given us a Creed that teaches us what limits all true Christians have recognized within the broad world of Christian teaching.  The Apostles Creed says nothing about a rapture.  It does teach about eschatology.  It says that we believe that Jesus will come again to judge the quick (living) and the dead.  It does not specify when or how.  It also says that we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.  While rapture teaching and affirmation of the resurrection of the body are not incompatible necessarily, rapture teaching is incompatible with Paul's teaching on the fruits of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15.

Generally speaking, those who do not believe in the rapture should not consider those who do to be heretics just because they believe in the rapture.  At the same time, those who do believe in the rapture should understand that those who do not believe in the rapture are not heretics either.  In fact, they are still in the majority among Christians around the world.  And they are in the overwhelming majority among Christians throughout history, because no one ever taught the doctrine of the rapture until Nelson Darby in the 1870s.  That means that of every Christian who shaped Christian belief from the time of the apostles, through Irenaeus, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, until just over a century ago, not a single one of them ever read the Bible and dreamed of anything like a rapture.  And no good, solid, thoughtful theologian since has taught rapture, either.  There have been plenty of good preachers who happen to write books who have believed in the rapture, but no true theologian has (to my knowledge).  The burden is upon the rapture teachers.

Here's why it matters: When we read texts that are not about the specifics of the end of the world and make them about something they are not, we are distracted from the salvific message they hold.  We are also let off the hook from the claim they make upon us.  It's easier to make charts of the end of the world than it is to take seriously the call to faithfulness in the midst of tribulation that Revelation calls every Christian in every time and place to answer.

Here's another reason why it matters: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whosoever believes in Him might not perish but have everlasting life.  When God saw a sinful world, he remembered the rainbow and ran into his world out of love.  He joined with its suffering.  He had made a good world and he showed that he would not give up on it until it was made good again.  The rapture says that God will yank his people out of a world he will let descend into chaos and destruction.  We are the salt of the earth, the light of the world.  We follow a Savior who ran toward a suffering world.  Like the heros who ran into burning buildings on 9/11, we run into a hurting world, not away from it.  All vestiges of my belief in the rapture went away the day I heard Tony Campolo say that if we were true disciples of Jesus Christ, and we were offered the opportunity to fly into the sky while the world plunged into uncontrolled destruction, we would say, "No thanks.  I'll stay right where I am.  It looks like the world is going to need a few Christians."