rapture

I've gone from believing in a pre-Trib Rapture to not believing in a Rapture at all. The entire doctrine is relatively recent -- it stems from "revelations" and visions a woman in Scotland had in the 19th century, and connects verses that have very little bearing on one another.

If this really were the "blessed hope of the Church," as Assembly of God doctrine holds, I think Jesus or one of the New Testament writers would have talked about it at more length. The closest we get is Paul's "We shall not all die" passage in 1 Thessalonians, but that seems to me like a Second Coming passage, not a "Last train out of here" passage.

Saying you don't buy into the escapism of the Rapture and consider it a phony-baloney doctrine is like professing to be a liberal in an evangelical church. It's enough to get you run out of many churches and to get people praying for your eternal soul.

You should have been there when I told my students several years ago that Jesus probably had zits when he was their age. And when I said he probably hit himself on the thumb with his hammer from time to time, even as an adult ... woo-HOO! Not knowing Aramaic, I have no idea what he would have said. I don't doubt the equivalent of a few four-letter words could have been in there. (One only wonders what they would have thought if I had said that Jesus probably was a social drinker.)

I've watched the fascination and cultic devotion the "Left Behind" books have sparked with a morbid fascination. I've read a few End Times novels before -- Dave Hunt's "The Archon Conspiracy" and Michael Yousseff's "Earth King" are two that spring to mind, although my all-time favorite has to be Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's "Good Omens" -- and I mostly see them as harmless, if badly written.

Note I said "mostly." The books do feed a tendency at least among American evangelicals to escapism and to a bit of self-righteousness. Readers who take the Rapture seriously get a kick of seeing all that they won't have to go through from the books, which isn't healthy.

Beyond that, I don't think the books' eschatology is sound, I think the writing is fairly atrocious, what I've read of it, and I think it also reflects a conservative Protestant American view of things rather than necessarily a biblical one. Notice the Antichrist is going to be Russian; if the books were influenced by a more contemporary theologian/scholar type, the Antichrist probably would be an Arab. Fifty years ago, the books probably would have made him Catholic.

Then there's the sects of Christianity are taken up. The pope is included, but mostly as a token Catholic, meant to widen the book's appeal. The pope in the books is a fairly Protestant pope. This is more just the writers' biases, I think, than actual eschatology resulting from Bible study. (Yeah, I know I'm treading on thin ice there, since Jenkins is a scholar of sorts, though probably not much more credible than Hal Lindsay when you get down to it.)

I also don't get the fascination with the Second Coming in Christian writing. The Bible says the Day of the Lord will not be a day of rejoicing, but one of terror; and while it's a day we're told to pray for, we're also told to keep our feet firmly planted in the now, sharing the gospel with those around us and ministering to those in need.

For some reason, though, the Second Coming ranks what I would consider disproportionately high on what we like to read about. There are far more books on prophecy and the End Times at the Evil Christian Bookstore than about feeding the hungry or missions.

Anyway, I've probably shot my mouth off enough now. I'd recommend looking at the book of Revelation in a different way if it helps you get past the poison. Mike Card once described the book as a series of hymns in praise of Jesus Christ; that is, it's a revelation not of the end but of Christ in all his glory. That's a good approach; another is to say "Never mind the prophecy, what lessons can I draw that apply to the here and now?" I've always found that one makes sense.

Then there's the preterist view of Revelation, but I don't really hold with that either; it's a fairly recent doctrine too, growing out of the notions of the Great Century 100 years ago, and doesn't really square with what I understand the views of the early church were. It holds that the events of Revelation all have been fulfilled.

Interesting tangent: Apokalipsis is a Greek word that means "unveiling." We usually think of Apocalyptic literature as being about tremendous calamity or disaster -- Apocalypse is synonymous with Doomsday in the common parlance -- but the whole idea behind the word is that it's making plain something otherwise considered mysterious.

Our problem is that we lack the cultural clues to properly understand the writing, so we often get rattled by stuff like the thirty-headed beast of Jehoboazarrihim and the seventh moon of Timbuk Two, but a lot of the clues to understand it all are found in the Tanakh and the imagery it uses.