Recently, a rather ollie-ollie-in-free "theological" discussion group posed the rather odd question: "Are YOU Rapturable? When Jesus calls His Christians into the clouds, will you be there?" Here is my cranky response. It didn't go over too well.
The "rapture" as it is presently taught in so many places is a relatively new innovation that is part of an older diversion from apostolic doctrine.
The diversion is called "chiliasm," which is the teaching that the Lord will establish an earthly millennial kingdom, but will come under attack in a final conflagration. It is called "chiliastic" because it suggests a disruption of the Lord's Kingdom.
Despite the fact that Saints Justin Martyr and Irenaeus tended to embrace this doctrine, it was finally condemned as heretical by the Second Ecumenical Council.
Consequently, the Nicene Creed reads "And He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, and His Kingdom shall have no end." Every pre-millennial preaching, any chiliastic doctrine (especially Rapture Theory) is cancelled by this affirmation: "His Kingdom shall have no end."
Bear in mind that we all accept at least the relative authority of these Ecumenical Councils whenever we hold to the authority of canonical Scriptures, or the doctrines of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the Virgin Birth.
I say this to wonder, openly, why there is such a strong gravitation to this chiliastic doctrine -- so strong that it produces such flagrant departures from apostolic doctrine as "rapture eschatology."
The Church has always known that true Christians never escape Tribulation, but suffer with Jesus under the attacks of the Beast. The Antichrist is never escaped: he must be fought, as St. Paul tells us in Ephesians, on the battlefield, where we must stand and not seek, cravenly, for escape.
If you ever think the Rapture jailbreak is coming, and the door is made open for you to escape, the better and more Christian thing to do is to say, "Well, if you don't mind, I'll stay here with Jesus and His friends."
I was fed this stuff in an Evangelical boarding school in the 60s, and I never thought it was a plausible reading of scripture. But they managed to get some blinders on me, and convinced me that "amillenial" means "Jesus isn't really coming again," and I didn't believe THAT.
Mid-70s, I discovered that vast swaths of the Protestant world don't even believe it.
Rule of Thumb: If you can't find anyone who believed doctrine X before the Second Great Awakening, doctrine X is, er, baloney.
Posted by: Intellectualoid.wordpress.com | July 03, 2012 at 06:13 PM
Excellent, Father. Right to the point.
Posted by: Aaron Taylor | July 03, 2012 at 09:59 AM