Rapture Fever

34 RAPTURE FEVER
Edgar C. James, Armageddon and the New World Order @loody
Press, 1991)
Ed Hindson, End Times, the Middle East and the New World
Order (Victor Books, 1991)
Who are these people? Have they devoted their lives to
careful biblical scholarship? Where are the scholars of dispensationalism
in this discussion of Bible prophecy? Where is the
head of the department of Old Testament at Dallas Theological
Seminary, for example? Or the department of New Testament
at Tdbot Theological Seminary? Or any department at Grace
Theological Seminary? The trained Bible scholars of dispensationalism
are all conspicuously silent. They do not comment on
these paperback potboilers, either pro or con. But they refuse
to provide scholarly support. This is the significant fact. The
only academic figures among the camp of the dispensensationalists
are John Walvoord, who abandoned all pretence of scholarship
when he wrote his potboiler and then gave his interview
to USA Today, and his Dallas colleague Charles Dyer. Dyer’s
book, The Rise of Babylon: Sign of the End Time (1991), offered
the thesis that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was literally rebuilding
the prophesied Babylon. The book appeared in January 1991,
a few days before its tenuous thesis was blown to bits during the
30-day air war against Iraq that began on the night of January
16. That war left unmarked graves in Dallas, not just Kuwait.
This spirit of eschatological immediacy has deeply damaged
the Anerican evangelical Church, especially the premillennial,
fundamentalist wing, which has been swept again and again by
waves of expectations regarding Christ’s imminent return to
“rapture” His people to heaven. What happened after August
2, 1990, with the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, is simply the latest
example of this phenomenon. The Christian bookstores of
America were filled with books on prophecy including the
reprint of John Walvoord’s. Decades of false predictions about
the imminent return of Christ to “rapture” His saints have