Rapture Fever

A Commitment to Cultural Irrelevance 99
dispensationalists would have to say if they had the courage to
discuss such things in public, will be swallowed up during the
Great Tribulation after the Rapture. This is a self-consciously
pessimistic view of the fiture of the Church, and it has resulted
in cultural paralysis whenever it has been widely believed by
Christians; therefore, the intellectual leaders of dispensationalism
refuse to discuss it forthrightly. It is just too embarrassing.
They deliberately adopt the language of postmillennial optimism to
disguise a thoroughgoing pessimism. They keep pointing to the
glorious era of the millennium in order to defend their use of
optimistic language, never bothering to point out that the seven
years that precede it will destroy the results of gospel preaching
during the entire Church Age. After all, every Christian will
have been removed from the earth at the Rapture (an explicit
denial of the historical continuity predicted in Christ’s parable
of the wheat and tares: Matthew 13:20, 38-40). McClain’s essay
is representative of what has passed for world-and-life scholarship
within dispensationalism since 1830: non-existent.
While McClain may have fooled those who read Bibliotheca
Sacra regularly, the troops in the pews have not been fooled.
Dave Hunt is willing to say publicly what dispensationalism
means, and without any apologies. Dispensational theology
obviously teaches the defeat of all the Church’s cultural efforts
before the Rapture, since the millennium itself will be a cuhural
defeat for God, even with Jesus reigning here on earth in His
perfect body.
In fact, dominion – taking dominion and setting up the kingdom
for Christ – is an impossibility, even for God. The millennial
reign of Christ, far from being the kingdom, is actually the final
proof of the incorrigible nature of the human heart, because
Christ Himself can’t do what these people say they are going to
do. . ..11
11. Hunt, “Dominion and the Cross,” Tape 2 of Dominion: The Wwd and New
World Order (1987), published by Omega Letter, Ontario, Canada. See his similar