Rapture Fever

108 RAPTURE FEVER
In the March 18, 1991, issue of Neuxweek, after the war with
Iraq had ended, the magazine’s Kenneth Woodward, who
writes the “Religion” section, wrote this:
And Walvoord, at 80, expects the rapture to occur in his own
lifetime. So many people will be suddenly missing, he muses, “I
wish I could be around to see how the media explain it.”
Dr. Walvoord will go to his reward in the same way that all
Christians have gone since the days of Christ: by way of death.
But he does not want to believe this. Neither do millions of his
dispensationalist peers. They prefer to embarrass the Church of
Jesus Christ, decade afier decade, by their crackpot prophecies
rather than face the reality of their own mortality.
The Quiet Defection of the Seminaries
What few dispensationalists in the pews realize is that even
Dallas Seminary no longer emphasizes dispensational theology
to the degree that it once did. Ever since its accreditation in the
mid-1 970’s, it has emphasized such topics as Christian counseling
far more than 1950’s dispensationalism. The departure of
Charles Ryrie from the Dallas faculty was symbolic of this shift
in emphasis. So was the departure of Dr. House.
In the late 1980’s, Talbot Theological Seminary in La Mirada,
California, abandoned traditional dispensationalism and
adopted some undefined new variant. For the sake of alumni
donations, however, neither seminary discusses these changes
openly. Within a few years, the shake-up hit Grace Theological
Seminary. First, John C. Whitcomb was fired in 1990, three
months before his scheduled retirement. In December, 1992,
Grace sent out a letter announcing a complete restructuring of
the seminary. It abandoned its Th.D. and Th.M. programs.
The problem is, dispensational seminaries keep such inside
information bottled up, concealed above all from their donors.
They refuse to tell their financial supporters what is going on.