As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
Are there seven problems with pretrib? Some prewrath folk recently came together and contributed to a documentary highlighting problems with pretrib. My first thought was, “Only seven?” Of course I’m being sarcastic.
Incidentally, one of the gents involved produced a video ominously asserting that the pretrib rapture is dead! Apparently they’re still trying to kill it.
Most likely you remember where you were when you first learned of the terror that came to America’s shores on the morning of September 11, 2001.
It is not at all difficult for me to remember, as I first heard of the attacks after teaching a class on the book of Daniel at Maranatha Baptist Bible College, where I was serving as an adjunct professor.1
(Read the entire series.)
This is the final part of this exploratory series on the rapture of the Church. Its main purpose has been to show that none of the competing positions on the “taking out” of the saints merits more than an “inference to the best explanation.” Within the Rules of Affinity this would be a C3. I have looked at posttribulationism and midtribulationism in the last post; here I shall look at the prewrath and pretribulational views.
This view is of very recent vintage, but for all that, it has articulated its position well and has won many advocates. In my opinion this position mounts some serious challenges for the other approaches. It deserves to be taken seriously.
This installment may be thought of as a digression, but I think it belongs to the overall argument.
Imagine a world where the removal of the saints from planet Earth happened but no one had the foggiest idea of when that might be. If the NT alluded to such a thing there would still be some hope that we just may be the ones to get called up. The doctrine of the rapture would still be a “sure thing”, it just wouldn’t be very concrete in our minds. Well, as a matter of fact, as a starting place for considering the rapture this isn’t that bad; there are far worse ones. A “worse” one would be the dogmatic insistence that the catching away of the Church as pretribulational is a dead-certainty. Another would be the blithe notion that the rapture occurs when Jesus returns to earth and any theories to the contrary are speculative fancies.
Discussion