Rapture Fever

A Commitment to Cultural Imelevance 101
Because this attitude toward social change has prevailed
within American fundamentalism since at least 1925, those who
attempt to dwell only in the “lower storey” – non-Christians -
have had few reasons to take fundamentalism very seriously.
American Christians have been in self-conscious cultural retreat
from historic reality and cultural responsibility for most of the
twentieth century. 13 Meanwhile, as non-Christians have become
steadily more consistent with their own worldview, they
have begun to recognize more clearly who their enemies really
are: Christians who proclaim the God of the Bible, i.e., the God
of final judgment. Thus, we are now seeing an escalation of the
inherent, inevitable conflict between covenant-keepers and
covenant-breakers in the United States.
The Great Escape Hatch
Modern premillennial fundamentalism proclaims that there
is only one biblical solution to this escalating conflict: the Rapture.
The Rapture of the saints is said to come in history, not at
the end of history, as postmillennialist and amillennialists
insist. The Rapture serves them psychologically as the hopedfor
Great Escape Hatch. This is the “hope of historical hopes”
for Bible-believing fundamentalists, as Dave Hunt insists in his
1988 book, Whatever Happened to Heaven?
The theological world of fundamentalism is a two-storey
world, and those who lived psychologically in that upper storey
were content, up until about 1975, to let the humanists run
things in the lower storey. But the Rapture has been delayed
again and again, and those who have been running things
“downstairs” are getting pushy in their monopolistic control
over education, politics, the media, and just about everything
else. Fundamentalists are at long last getting sick and tired of
New World Order.
13. Douglas W. Frank, Less Than Conqw-nms: How Euangelicals Entered the Twentieth
Centusy (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1986).