Rapture Fever

20 RAPTURE FEVER
turned out - by premillennial, dispensational authors. The
book received guarded praise from the dean of dispensational
scholars, John F. Walvoord, who for three decades served as
the president of Dallas Theological Seminary. He said modern
dispensationalists can “learn from it many important lessons
applicable to interpretation today.”s But one dispensational
scholar failed to learn a single lesson fi-om Wilson’s book: John
F. Walvoord.
As a U.S. war with Iraq loomed in late 1990, Walvoord
revised his 1974 book, Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East CrMs,
and it sold over a million and a half copies - a million by February,
1991.4 It did so by rejecting Dr. Wilson’s warning: do
not use sensational interpretations of Bible prophecy in order
to sell books. If you do, he warned, you will look like a charlatan
in retrospect, and you will also injure the reputation of
Christ and His Church. But the tremendous lure of sensationalism’s
benefits - book royalties and fame - was too great for Dr.
Walvoord. A dispensational feeding frenzy for prophecy books
was in full force as war loomed in the Middle East in the second
half of 1990. Dr. Walvoord decided to feed this fi-enzy.
It was at that point that Walvoord publicly rejected his earlier
belief in the “any-moment Rapture” doctrine. This was proof
that he had abandoned traditional scholarly dispensationalism
and had adopted the pop-dispensationalism of Hal Lindsey,
Dave Hunt, and Constance Cumbey - what I like to call dis@nsensationalism.
(Most of his colleagues at Dallas Theological
Seminary remained, as usual, discreetly silent. They know
exactly how their bread is buttered: by donations from laymen
who are thoroughly addicted to sensational prophecies.)
The leaders of American dispensationalism have not resisted
the lure of huge book royalties and a few moments in the pub-
3. J. F. Walvoord, “Review of Armageddon Now!: Bibliotheca Sacra (April/June
1981), p. 178.
4. Tim (Feb. 11, 1991).