Rapture Fever

A Commitment to Cultural Iwelevance 105
To justifi this otherwise embarrassing motivation – cultural
withdrawal - fundamentalist Christians adopted the doctrine of
the pre-tribulation Rapture, the Church’s hoped-for Escape
Hatch on the world’s sinking ship. The invention of the doctrine
of the pre-tribulation Rapture in 1830 by either J. N.
Darby (the traditional dispensational view) or by a young Scottish
girl during a series of trances (Dave MacPherson’s revisionist
view) was the key element in the triumph of dispensationalism.
It has therefore been the steady decline of interest in this
doctrine during the 1980’s that has publicly marked the demise
of the dispensational system. Dave Hunt wrote Whatever Happened
to Heaven? in 1988, but this is not what he really was
asking. What his book asks rhetorically is this: What Ever Happened
to Fundamentalists’ Confidence in the Doctrine of the Pre-Ttibu-
Zution Rapture? (Heaven has been close by all along; the pretribulation
Rapture hasn’t.)
Hoping to Get Out of Life Alive
The appeal of this doctrine was very great for over a century
because it offered Christians a false hope: to be able to go to
heaven without first going to the grave. Traditional dispensationalists
want to become modern Elijahs: not as he lived his
life, which was painful, risky, and highly confrontational with
the religious and political authorities (I K1. 18), but as he ended
his life, when God’s chariot carried him to heaven (II Ki. 2).
Fundamentalists regard the critics of dispensationalism as enemies
of “the blessed hope,” namely, the hope in life after life.
They fully understand what the postmillennialist is telling them:
“You are going to die!” For over a century dispensationalism’s
recruits in the pews refused to listen to such criticism. They
traded their God-given heritage of Christian cultural relevance
- which requires generations of godly service and compound
growth in every area of life - for a false hope: getting out of life
alive. It was a bad bargain. It was a mess of pottage in exchange
for the birthright.