Rapture Fever

90 RAPTURE FEVER
formed.”*8 It is time, he says, for Christians to give up “the
false dream of Christianizing secular culture. . . .“19
In short, let the world go to hell in a handbasket on this side
of the millennium. Christians living today supposedly will escape
this supposedly burning building because we all have been
issued free tickets on God’s helicopter escape.
This escape never comes. The supposedly imminent Rapture
has now been delayed for almost two millennia. The Biblebelieving
fundamentalist considers this delay and grows increasingly
frantic and therefore increasingly vulnerable to crackpots.
He worries: Could the theological liberals be correct? Were
the apostles cordised about God’s timing? Did they give false
information about the imminent Rapture to their readers?
Rather than conclude this, dispensational commentators have
played exegetical games with Jesus’ clear statement regarding
the tribulation that would face the early Church: “Verily I say
unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things
have been fulfilled (Matt. 24:24). The Great Tribulation took
place in A.D. 70: the fdl of Jerusalem and the destruction of
the temple, just as He warned (Luke 21:20-22). It is finished.
Dispensationalists are culturally paralyzed by their belief in
a future Great Tribulation. They want to escape both personal
and corporate responsibility. They are willing to believe anything
and anyone who promises them an excuse for continuing
to do almost nothing positive culturally and intellectually. This
is why they readily accept the idea of today’s ticking prophetic
clock, even though this belief necessarily denies the traditional
dispensational doctrine of the any-moment Rapture. They care
little about the utterly scrambled condition of their movement’s
~eology. They care only about an imminent escape from longterm
responsibility the Rapture. Rapture fnwr akstroys men’s
abili~ to reason theologically. It weakens God’s Church.
18. Hunt, Wha&veT Happened b Heaven?, p. [8].
19. Idem.