Reorienting the Rapture

What is a Pre-tribulation Rapture?

    We have lived in a culture embedded for the past 200 years in the idea of a pre-tribulation Rapture. The Rapture is believed to precede the Tribulation at the end of the world. Obviously, the Rapture precedes the timeline which it triggers, and no one knows what triggers the timing of the Rapture. In actuality, there is no specified timing of the Rapture. Because the return of Christ is believed to be imminent, the Rapture could happen at any time, completely independent of perceived cause. Christ's "return" must be distinguished, of course, from His "appearing" at the Rapture, for His return at the Second Coming is indeed intricately timed.

What Does Belief in a Pretribulation Rapture Do?

The fact that this distinction is something pastors always explain when referencing this event should be a red flag: if a pastor must alert his congregation that an apparent description of Christ's return is not His return but His appearing, he is reinterpreting what would otherwise be read as evidence without his intervention. The layperson cannot take the text at face value or trust his own eyes. Simply put, Occam's razor--the belief that the most obvious interpretation of any text is the right one--does not apply to a study of the pre-tribulation Rapture.

It should come as no surprise, then, that separating the "return" of Christ from His "appearing"--to allow for a pre-tribulation Rapture seven years prior to His Second Coming--triggers a chain reaction of other redefined terms and even an entirely new vocabulary--all by way of supporting and validating an otherwise unnatural way of reading the text. This revised terminology masks the fact that the Rapture itself has been retimed. But just here we find a recalcitrant snag: if we claim the pre-tribulation Rapture is imminent--timed exactly seven years before the actual return of Christ, such that nothing, not even Christ's Second Coming, triggers it--then what triggers the pre-tribulation Rapture? There is no other prophecy in Scripture that requires no conditions of fulfillment, not even of time itself.

If this is so, how do we presume even to find a pre-tribulation Rapture in Scripture, if we have erased the controls of its timing? With what right do we point to any Scripture out of context and claim, "That's the Rapture?" And yet this is exactly what pre-tribulationists do. They have decided it is imminent precisely because they have snipped the context of its timing away. In strict logic, then, it cannot be timed at all, and if it cannot be timed, can it even be identified? Its imminence becomes--rather than a sacred urgency--an arbitrary whip, a causeless cause severed from any historical timeline that would otherwise appear to have made its timing inevitable. We are expected to believe that anything can trigger the pre-tribulation Rapture because nothing does.

If the Rapture's timing is, thus, completely unpredictable as an event triggered by nothing, then how does the timing of the Rapture, in turn, trigger everything--everything as epic as the timeline unraveling the entire cosmos? We are left with a concept floating in unreality, such that the most significant End Times event for the Christian prior to Christ's return cannot happen in direct fulfillment of prophecy. We are left not only with a prophecy that requires no terms of fulfillment but also with a massive logical void in which no prophecy of any kind can claim to have been fulfilled if we are entitled to change definitions and timelines. Timing is everything in prophecy, and the Rapture is no exception.

If this sounds like a Chinese puzzle to you, it is. In fact, it is a one-thousand-piece puzzle for which the picture on the box--the original reading of the text--has been lost in arbitrary reinterpretation. Because the original picture has been lost, we don't realize that many of the original pieces have been reshaped by new definitions or that new pieces have been created from invented vocabulary to make everything fit. In reality, they never do. If they did, we would not need a pastor explaining away what we see with the naked eye. The pieces would lock seamlessly with the terms used consistently in the original text all throughout Scripture, such that a host of new terminology would not be necessary. Nor would it be necessary to clone those terms already present in the text in order to stem-cell them into something else.

To be sure, you don't learn this new set of vocabulary by direct instruction, but when no pastor I have heard preaching about the pre-tribulation Rapture identifies this event as merely one piece of an entire worldview, that's another red flag. The impression given is always that his is the only biblical interpretation the text allows and that the teaching of the pre-tribulation Rapture is doctrinally neutral. But when the text fails to deliver evidence of his dogmatic assertions, or rather, when he makes dogmatic assertions independent of the text, I am left not only confused but also frustrated and even a bit suspicious. Why can't he convince me that that's what the text means when that isn't what it says?

If I am going over and over God's Word with a magnifying glass, the problem isn't with the text or even with me. If the text of Scripture cannot interpret itself even to the most dedicated reader, then one of two things is true: either the text cannot be taken at face value by anyone, or it has to be read with someone else's glasses.

What Do Dispensational Glasses Do?

I didn't know until this summer that this set of glasses is John Nelson Darby's Modern Radical Dispensationalism. Even though I have heard bits and pieces--and even sometimes entire sermons--on the pre-tribulation Rapture, I never realized that dispensationalism was its elaborate birthing system. But something happened to unearth dispensationalism as the cavern in which a secret Rapture had been hiding. I was watching a short video announcing that Kirk Cameron had "left behind" Left Behind, when someone crammed dispensational glasses on my head.

Unsurprisingly, the comments section of this video exploded--and this wasn't even the primary source showing Cameron's thinking. The comments were actually more riveting than the video, and when I replied to someone else's wall of convoluted text--for he had said there were something like seven different gospels--this ill-tempered know-it-all told me I needed to learn how to read the Bible and how to divide the Word of Truth correctly. When someone else dismissed him as dispensational, the picture all started coming together. I now had a picture on the pre-tribulational Rapture box.

I started researching dispensationalism as never before, and--wearing dispensational glasses--I could suddenly see the pre-tribulation Rapture landscape. I now had an intricately defined worldview in which to place the untimed Rapture. The pre-tribulation Rapture wasn't an inevitable reading of the text; it was a logical necessity of dispensationalism itself. What I was learning wasn't how to find what I couldn't find in the text; it was how to un-find what was already there. The dispensational glasses worked like those red overlays we used to use on vintage overhead projectors to hide the answers from the questions on the test. Talk about rightly dividing the Word of Truth? These glasses worked like blinders making me "see" only what a dispensationalist wanted me to see.

What is Darby's Dispensationalism?

So what is dispensationalism--specifically, Modern Radical Dispensationalism--and how do we know that Darby and not God created it? It is a theological system that interprets human history as having seven separate and rigidly insulated compartments. These compartments necessitate, among other things, two distinct destinies for the Church and Israel. We need to pause right here and say that two things can both be true: we can believe that God still has unfinished plans for Israel as a nation and yet that the Church is inseparable from those plans--and, most significantly, that Israel is part of His Bride as the original olive tree into which the Church was grafted (Romans 11:17-24). This defines Historic Premillennialism. It does not define Replacement Theology, which denies ultimate fulfillment of God's promises to Israel--and with which Historic Premillennialism is often erroneously equated.

What Darby invented was an elaborate path around Occam's razor to hide the plain sense of this truth: Scripture makes abundantly clear that the Bride of Christ is the new Israel and yet that Israel is the original olive tree. We might say that the original olive tree is the Vine (John 15) into which the Church has been grafted. Paul not only writes, "he is a Jew who is one inwardly" (Romans 2:29); he makes crystal clear that any saved Jew is part of the Bride of Christ: "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (Galatians 3:28-29). Paul's letter to the Ephesians locks this unity of Jew and Gentile with three analogies: a building, a body, and a family (Ephesians 2). There are not even two separate compartments in redemption's plan-- let alone seven.

Darby's vision, however, didn't merely see double destinies in God's plans for the Church and Israel; it plunked a big red overlay on the entire Old Testament as irrelevant to the Dispensation of Grace, making law disappear entirely under grace. Rather than seeing the Old Testament as being fulfilled in the New or the Cross as the fulfillment of the law, Darby reset the dispensational clock seven times, making each dispensation irrelevant to the next. This idea becomes most shocking when we discover that Darby's "vision" required blocking out Jesus' own interpretation of the Mosaic Law in His Sermon on the Mount--for it was applicable "only" to the Jews before the Dispensation of Grace and after the Church Age in Christ's millennial Kingdom. In fact, Darby's system categorically severed the relevance of most of Jesus' teachings from the Bride He came to save. Virtually all that remained for Darby in the Dispensation of Grace were the New Testament Epistles penned after Pentecost.

Intriguingly, Darby's dispensationalism rendered irrelevant to the Church the very timeline of End Times events Christ articulates in His Olivet Discourse, which each of the Synoptic Gospels features with dovetailing nuances. Darby argued that, because the Church would not go through the Tribulation (insert dispensational glasses), Christ was speaking only to the Jews about events during the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and during the Tribulation at the end of the world. He was not speaking, Darby concluded, to the Church, since the Church was not yet born at Pentecost.

This is eisegesis at its finest--the practice of wearing glasses that render textual exegesis irrelevant because those portions of the text in question aren't even "there." The most puzzling piece that does not fit Darby's reshaped landscape is, of course, the disciples themselves--who were both Jewish before Pentecost and the infant Church afterward. It would not be absurd to wonder which parts of them fit into which dispensation. Obvious also should be the fact that the Church itself was born strictly in a room of entirely Jews (Acts 2)!

But the point is this: because Darby completely remodeled the architecture of redemption, reading the blueprint as seven separate narratives rather than as one, he also had to change the endings. God's plans for the Church had to end before He could redeem Israel. This meant that Israel must go through the Tribulation to coerce them back to God, but the Church must likewise be excused from this crucible of faith, having already been perfected by grace alone.

The pre-tribulational Rapture had come out of hiding at last; the cat was finally out of the bag. If Darby had invented the dispensationalism that made a pre-tribulation Rapture necessary, then it wasn't necessary apart from his dispensationalism. This explained perfectly why I never could find it in the text. If his dispensationalism thesis collapsed, then so did its claims.

What Happened to Darby's Dispensationalism?

Darby's logic was clear to himself but, apparently, not to any of his contemporaries. Once his ideas had found time to germinate after first surfacing in 1830, even his own closest companions stood against him by the next decade. George Müller fought a noble battle against Darby's inventions and their necessary implications for the Gospel--to the point that he found himself excommunicated from the infant Brethren Church by Darby himself. Dispensationalism had divided not only the entire Canon of Scripture into seven blocks rather than two Testaments; it had divided his own church. There was never a godlier man than George Müller, who paid the price for standing against a bully. The story of the Bethesda Civil War (1845-1848) deserves its own careful study.

A generation later, C. H. Spurgeon would fiercely resist the spread of Darby's ideas. The story of this battle also deserves its own in-depth study, but here it is enough to say that what Darby insisted must be a proper "division" of Scripture not only completely fractured the timeline of biblical history and eschatology; it also blocked out 1800 years of church history and theology. Not one Bible scholar of merit had ever divided the Bible this way; nor had anyone ever heard of--much less, "found"--evidence of a secret Rapture occurring seven years before the Second Coming of Christ. Darby had created worse than a monster; his dispensational scalpel had left behind a narrative corpse.

Even where amillennialists and postmillennialists disagreed, they always agreed that the Rapture was an inseparable part of Christ's Second Coming and that it was, in fact, deeply embedded in its eschatological timeline. When John Calvin, John Bunyan, John Wesley, Matthew Henry, and Adam Clarke rise up across the centuries, as it were, to agree with historic premillennialists such as George Müller and C. H. Spurgeon that this is the plain sense of Scripture, we see that the Second Coming serves as the anchor of the timing of the Rapture, even when the timing of the Second Coming itself--as coming before or after the millennium--has been debated. It is impossible to find what is not there, and if a secret Rapture was sitting in plain sight, at least a majority of these great Bible scholars would have found it. The fact that none of them did points the finger at Darby.

What Happens When We Disorient Rapture?

His findings--not only pre-tribulationist but also dispensational--amounted to hallucinations. If a secret Rapture was right there in Scripture, we cannot explain why it had been kept secret from nearly two millennia of cumulative church history and scholarship. Darby was the maverick who reoriented the plain sense of the text to fit his personally fashioned dispensational glasses. His reorientation--more properly, disorientation--single-handedly scrambled Scripture's clearest timelines to match his new ideas--ideas which also required a whole new vocabulary not subject to Scripture.

The defense launched by present-day pre-tribulational dispensationalists--that the early church fathers did indeed arrive at Darby's timing--not only requires placing on the dead a set of glasses they did not have; it requires a falsifiable historical revision of these fathers' own writings. This revision amounts not only to a false narrative; it results in undeniable false witness against the very Scriptures that emphatically refute--on their own Occam's razor merit--Darby's violent tampering with the sacred text. All of this, too, deserves its own study.

What Happens When We Reorient Rapture?

When I found all this out--in large part, thanks to my scrapes with a caustic YouTube commenter--it not only made sense to me that I had never found a pre-tribulation Rapture; it also became clear that a false teacher had invented what has since become a household term--a term serving as the hyperlink to all his other invented terms. Unless he is creating a cult, a teacher doesn't do this; he doesn't invent a whole new framework to launch his ideas. Only a false teacher bypasses the plain sense of Scripture and then abuses those who can't find his ideas in Scripture or who eventually break his spell. Jesus associated bad fruit with a bad root for a reason, and when He told us that false prophets--oh, the irony of that term here--would be known by their fruit, I started digging for the root.

Or, to change the image, I knew--without yet seeing--that I would find the body buried down under. There had to be a motivation for this crime of textual slaughtering. A rotting body is exactly what I found. And it didn't require a magnifying glass or a microscope to see what was squirming not very far below the surface of Darby's invention. Nor is this a cold case that has never been solved. It is more like a cover-up to a crime nobody wants to talk about--nobody, that is, except a whole host of present-day reputable Bible scholars such as John Piper, R. C. Sproul, Al Mohler, N. T. Wright, Michael Bird, Scott Hahn, Matt O'Reilly, and Ben Witherington III--to name a few.

As with their historical peers, these intellectual giants of our own era cross denominational lines in one body of text-first eschatological exegesis. From Reformed, to Southern Baptist, to Anglican, to Catholic, to Global Methodist, to Wesleyan-Arminian holiness, it would appear that an entire chorus of new voices is uniting in harmonious resistance to 200 years of indefensible dispensationalism and its consequent pre-tribulationism. To be sure, pre-tribulational dispensationalists are saying that the doctrine of the Rapture is under attack, but that simply is not so. These men all believe in the Rapture. They believe what the Bible--not Darby--teaches about it. Nor is their consensus to be construed as a lukewarm ecumenism destroying fundamentalism.

All this, too, deserves its own study, as does the story of C. I. Scofield, who popularized Darby's teaching in the first study Bible ever to juxtapose commentary with Scripture in unified visual format. Scofield's popularization of Darby's terminology made us lose all sight of the term "Rapture" apart from its secret pre-tribulational connotation. It's time we reorient this wonderful word to its literal context.

If God's Word promises the Christian an escape hatch during the Tribulation, I want to know. But if it does not, I want to know that, too. Because if it doesn't, and I am expecting deliverance when I need endurance instead, I won't be ready. My oil will run out, and I will be one of the five foolish virgins who got tired of waiting.