It's Time to Leave Tim LaHaye's Rapture Theology Behind
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This is an excellent example of an article written by somebody who doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about.
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
it’s your basic post-mil position.
Hoping to shed more light than heat..
“ultimately untenable” made me smile. We really won’t know how untenable it is until the eschaton arrives and we can see who got it right. So… all eschatologies but one will be “ultimately untentable,” and “the one” might not quite match any of the ones currently defended. (I do think premil, pretrib is the best solution to the complex texts we have, but who’s ready to assign 100% certainty to it? Not I.)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
I am a “pan-trib”. When we get to the end it will all pan out!
And what is of note to me is that he states the dispensational position halfway decently, but he does not explain his view at all. So we are more or less left with a “fiat” argument plus appeal to history….two basic logical fallacies by the guys who look down their noses at us in terms of our thinking, ironically.
“oops”. I’m sure there are much better arguments for covenant theology and the like, but it sure wasn’t presented there.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
If somebody issues a critique of dispensationalism and (a) calls it “rapture theology,” and (b) references Hal Lindsay and the Left Behind series, and yet never mentions Walvoord’s work on the millennial kingdom and the rapture, or Chafer’s systematic, or Pentecost, then they’re simply not serious.
It reminds me of Reymond’s systematic, where he issued a scathing and rabid attack on dispensationalism, and his only primary reference source about dispensationalism in his entire section on eschatology was the Scofield Reference Bible. If you have Reymond, pull him off your shelf and take a look for yourself …
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
I had n epiphany one day while on a long fight. I read all the major prophetic passages in order. Starting with Daniel, the prophets, The Olivete Discourses, the Epistles and Revelation. It occurred to me that a pretrib rapture was more of a contrived doctrine that takes a lot of hermeneutical gymnastics to come up with.
When I understood that the resurrection is at the same time as the rapture, it made sense. It was consistent with the symbolism of the parables (the wedding party coming out of town to escort the groom to the wedding, and the entourage to welcome the king who comes to a town), that our understanding of the rapture was neither Jewish nor Roman. It was modern and western.
All the arguments about the church being in heaven before Jesus returns doesn’t hold up either because 99% of the church throughout the ages is already in heaven. The “tribulation saints” are just the rest of us who are still here at the time of his coming. We will not experience God’s wrath although we will experience the wrath of antichrist. Why should we be so special to escape tribulation when all of our brothers before us have had to endure it ?
I wonder what “The Tribulation” would look like to Christians in Russia, China, and the Middle East.
"Some things are of that nature as to make one's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache." John Bunyan
WIlliamD, I had the opposite experience. I read those passages and came away with only the pre-trib rapture accounting for all the details.
Darrell Post,
I agree.
David R. Brumbelow
Rapture timetable and “degrees of certainty” - my view (with rough “degrees of certainty”):
- Christ is coming again = 100%
- There will be a future millennium = 100%
- Christ returns before the millennium = 100%
- A future tribulation period of 7 years = 100%
- Pre-trib rapture = 70%
Conclusion (for me): The timing of the rapture less important but not unimportant
I have been wondering lately that perhaps another way to look at this is that by the time the pre-trib rapture comes, there will be so few true believers left in the world, a small remnant, that the event will go relatively unnoticed. Just a few missing person reports, for instance, and life continues as ‘normal’. The earth remains full of secular people and apostate people who claim the label ‘christian’ and then the prophetic calendar plays out from there…people come to Christ during the tribulation and then Christ returns at its end to conquer the kingdoms of the world and establish his millennial kingdom.
I read all the major prophetic passages in order. Starting with Daniel, the prophets, The Olivete Discourses, the Epistles and Revelation. It occurred to me that a pretrib rapture was more of a contrived doctrine that takes a lot of hermeneutical gymnastics to come up with.
That’s not a great methodology to be determining the answers to doctrinal questions. At some point, all those passages have to be correlated with each other.
When I understood that the resurrection is at the same time as the rapture, it made sense.
Which resurrection were you thinking of?
Why should we be so special to escape tribulation when all of our brothers before us have had to endure it ?
When have our brothers before us endured the Tribulation?
Every critic of the pre-tribulational rapture must reckon with John Walvoord’s The Rapture Question. It is an excellent source for getting a scholarly and well-thought out presentation.
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
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