http://www.ministrymatters.com/all/e...be-left-behind

This post is more here for the American Christians, though non-Americans and non-Christians may find it of value as well.

Not news to me. But I'm a non-believer, so I tend to check stuff like this out.

I think the historical account is not entirely fair. If it was, it would note the historical struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism in regards to futurism in general. When it instead strongly hints this interpretation is solely based on the hallucinations of a teenage girl, it does not come of as a very fair review. Also, what are the criteria for determining if something is merely hallucination or prophecy?

In addition, while it is (yet again) not explicitly stated I'm getting the impression the author is implicitly claiming that newer Biblical interpretations are more dubious. What period or point in time would be regarded as the turning point between "suspect" and "sound"?

Some people are so stupid. The rapture already happened in 1914.

Very good point. If one wants to be cynical we can say most of the book of Revelation was just a hallucination by John. Depending on ones interpretation this young girls experience could be equal in authority to the New Testament.

Oh snap! I thought I had that in my palm pilot!

From what I remember, there are two relevant verses.

I've heard it said that "taken away" means being killed, as people were "taken away" in the great flood. Except, as far as I know, 1 out of every two people weren't killed in the great flood.

You have to fill in the verses they usually leave out:

I think the context is quite clear.

I've never seen a really sound rebuttal to this verse.

But my mind is open to one.

If you're trying to build a robust eschatological theology on the basis of one verse, you're doing theology wrong.

Jesus taught transformation.

Death and resurrection = death of ego + resurrection of spiritual Self
One taken/other left. = ^^^

Thomas 61: "Two will recline on the couch; one will die, one will live"

Son of Man = spiritual Self

No need to be concerned about getting swooped up heh.

The verses quoted don't mesh at all with the standard Rapture belief today or at least not with the Pre-Trib rapture focus of the "Left Behind" books.

Their view is that 1st the believers are raptured away, then there's the 7 year tribulation, followed by the final battle at Armageddon and the 2nd coming.

The verses you quoted would suggest a post-Trib rapture.

As with most elements of Christianity, things that most people assume are critical parts of the religion are relatively recent inventions. Rapture theology is only one example. The entire notion of literalism and "fundamentalism" as we understand it is at most 200 years old, and more likely less than 150, and emerged as a reaction against new scientific discoveries. This also makes problematic a common claim by some skeptics with a poor grasp of history that Galileo was punished for challenging the Biblical account of creation. The Church didn't care about that very much--pretty much all Catholic scholars since Augustine assumed that large swaths of the text were meant to be metaphorical in nature and required exegesis. Galileo's heresy was not so much against Genesis as it was against Aristotle and Ptolemy.

Fundamentalism and literalism are easy beliefs to account for in democratic societies that are skeptical of authority, and the notion that Biblical text is plain in its meaning has a good deal of appeal for people who don't want to engage in deep study of the text.

For more on this topic, I recommend "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" by Mark Noll. I've probably referenced that book several dozen times over the years posting here.

Of course the Rapture is a recent invention. The character of Jesus in the Bible is reported to have taught his followers that the world was going to end very soon. The character was wrong, of course, as he was about a lot of things. I guess the great thing about being a fictional god is you never have to admit you were wrong.

But once the biblical character Jesus was proven to be an incompetent prophet, there needed to be new explanations of the end times....

This is a failed attempt at an explanation on multiple accounts.

1) This analysis actually suggest rapture theology should be quite old. Did it really take 1800 years before enough time had passed that "the world was going to end soon" needed to be reinterpreted? The analysis would suggest that rapture theology should have come about perhaps around 200-500 years after Jesus.

2) This analysis fails to reflect anything pertinent to what is actually contained in rapture theology.

Presumably, if Christians believed that the world was going to end "very soon" they needed an alternative explanation a lot sooner than the 19th century, and eschatology has been a topic of debate in Christianity for a long time, so it seems somewhat wrong to say that "of course" the idea of the rapture came along when it did. The eschatology of the rapture doesn't even really address the problem of the end not already occurring as far as I know, or at least not in any way that's really distinct from other schools of thought. NB: It's possible I'm just not familiar enough with it

Which is not to say that early Christians didn't believe in the coming end of the age, and it seems likely that many including Paul believed it would be in their lifetime. At the same time, Matthew writes that Jesus said he didn't know when it would happen: "But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only." There is then the problem of "this generation will not pass away until all these things take place" which is right afterwards in Matthew and also in Luke, but that is complicated by the multiple meanings of "genea" in greek, which can mean something like the modern sense of a "generation" but also can mean something more like race or ethnicity.

I have by no means made an exhaustive study of historical Christian eschatology but my impression is that for the most part there's been an asterisk about timings more or less from the beginning

I meant that "of course" the idea of the rapture did not date back to the founding of Christianity, because the original Christians were told by their supposed omniscient God that the world was about to end. Since then there have been a parade of end times theories, because you gotta come up with something if you are going to continue to believe the fairy tale.

Except that this neither follows from what you originally stated OR anything pertaining to eschatology in general.

It would not have been logically inconsistent if rapture theology existed from Jesus' time.

Not really. The types of theological innovations in eschatology (such as the rapture) have nothing to do with a failure of previous eschatological views.

It's not entirely clear to me that this is true. It is certain that early Christians believed in and hoped for the "life of the age to come", but it's not clear whether their belief that it would happen soon was due to something specific Jesus was supposed to have said.

So for example Paul re-emphasizes to the Thessalonians (considered one of the earlier letters) that the nature of the return of Jesus is unpredictable but he also speaks in a way that implies he thinks it could happen in his lifetime. Yet throughout the entire body of work that we have from him (and he's by far the most prolific earliest Christian writer) his practice of setting up Christian communities and the kind of admonitions and encouragement he makes to those communities are at best ambiguous as far as establishing any kind of expectation of the end of the world. His perspective seems to more naturally correspond to Jesus' statement that no one knows the time (but they nevertheless supposed it might be soon) more than an expectation that Jesus had guaranteed it would happen very soon.

Beyond the ambiguous reference to γενεα, I remembered one other passage that appears in Matthew, Mark, and Luke: "Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who shall not taste death till they see the kingdom of God". In all 3 books this immediately is followed by the story of the Transfiguration. It seems reasonable from the way the saying and the event are reported so closely together that they were tied together from the standpoint of the gospel authors (or author if all 3 copy from one source). It's also possible depending on the dating of the text that it could have been written after the apostles were dead, in which case it would be strange for the authors to have written in that way if they understood it to mean the second coming of Christ. That is conjectural of course. As far as I'm aware it's not possible to date that one section of the texts accurately enough.

So, from a textual standpoint it's probably not possible to rule out your hypothesis that Jesus told the disciples the world would end before they died, or within the current "generation", but I think you are stating it as though it were far better attested than it actually is, and other early Christian writings don't seem to support the assertion that they understood him to have said so, since as far as I'm aware they never make reference to such a promise.