Rapture Fever

206 RAPTURE FEVER
believed what they have been told for the last two centuries.
Except for postmillennialism, which is believed by very few
Christians, the other systems of eschatological interpretation
offer only historical despair. But the pretribulational system
offers a glimmer of hope in the darkness of historical despair,
namely, an escape from history the Rapture.
“We’re under grace, not law.” So runs the theology of most
Protestants. But pretribulational dispensationalists assert a
radical judicial discontinuity with both the past and the future.
Today’s Christians, they argue, have escaped the heavy moral
burdens of law-enforcement in history, unlike Israel prior to
the cross and also during the millennial era to come. Victmy in
history is correctlj seen by dispensationalists as Christians’ ability to
enforce Godk law, bringing sanctions in terms of it, including cim”l
sanctions. But this ability supposedly has nothing to do with the
Church during the Church Age. Christians therefore need not
concern themselves with legal matters because in this dispensation,
unlike the one behind us and the final one ahead, God’s
law has nothing to do with Christ’s gospel.
This is a two-fold deliverance: from total defeat in history
and from the responsibility to study God’s revealed law and
develop its principles in practice. Of course, the price of this
rejection of the Church’s victory in history and this rejection of
responsibility is the open affirmation of the Church’s cultural
irrelevance. This affirmation leads to a rejection of any work
that might produce victory or extend Christians’ cultural responsibilities.
It is not just that dispensationalists reject the Bible
as a legitimate guide to social ethics in our dispensation; they
reject the very legitimacy of studying social ethics. Why bother
with social ethics? If three-quarters of the Bible is not a valid
guide to ethics, then to become masters of social ethics, Christians
must also become humanists: either natural-law humanists
or some far worse variety. The Christian should ask himselfl
Why work hard for a lifetime in order to become just one more
ethical humanist? The answer is obvious.