So you missed The Rapture, again

 The general root of superstition is, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.

 

--  Francis Bacon

John Nelson Darby, famous religious innovator of The Rapture, was the youngest of six sons, another example in support of Frank Sulloway's thesis

 

J.N. Darby 1800-1882

1996

Sulloway is important for challenging the crisis theory of scientific revolutions propounded by Thomas Kuhn, showing how many revolutionary personalities, who tend to be later or last borns, rebelled against well established consensus views which though long in the tooth were in no danger of going away.

Darby's innovations, interestingly enough, came to him after experiencing serious injuries when he fell from a horse when he was still 26.  

Tim "left behind" LaHaye: Obsessed with the rapture and eschatology from the age of nine when his father left him behind

Detailed here:

Tim LaHaye was born in Detroit, Michigan. His mother was the former Margret Palmer and his father, Frank LaHaye, was a Ford auto worker who died in 1936 of a heart attack. His father's death had a significant influence on LaHaye, who was only nine years old at the time. He had been inconsolable until the minister at the funeral said, "This is not the end of Frank LaHaye; because he accepted Jesus Christ, the day will come when the Lord will shout from heaven and descend, and the dead in Christ will rise first and then we'll be caught up together to meet him in the air." LaHaye later said that, upon hearing those remarks, "all of a sudden, there was hope in my heart I'd see my father again."

Tim LaHaye passed away yesterday at the age of 90.

Matthew Avery Sutton grossly overestimates how many American Christians believe in the rapture

Which just proves that you can become infected by apocalyptic while studying it.

Seen here:

"And yet the apocalyptic never leaves. It’s still there, that’s where the polls come back. It’s now assumed by hundreds of millions of Americans that the rapture is a real thing and that Jesus is coming back."

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That is said notwithstanding the fact that the country as a whole doesn't have enough population to support making it in the first place. Don't they teach geography in the schools anymore? It's pretty embarrassing coming from a Ph.D.

Meanwhile Pew polling most recently shows that 78% of the adult population is nominally Christian, with 51% Protestant and just 26% Evangelical, ground zero for the rapture theology. That puts the upper limit on who would likely believe in an apocalyptic interpretation of the Christian faith somewhere in the neighborhood of 63 million, not "hundreds of millions", if that.

This tendency to exaggerate is not limited to the sphere of religion, however, where members of all faiths fudge on polls asking how many times they attend religious services. A famous politician in America known by all, a left-wing ideologue, also frequently opines that the country is far more populous than it really is, which suggests that politics and religion often operate with the same defective spatial reasoning, not to mention the same defective enthusiasms.

Or was it the dope smoking?

When the "Rapture" comes, you'd better hope that you are left behind

Because being left is equivalent to being saved from the flood:

But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

-- Matthew 24:37ff.

Leave it to the enthusiasts to get it exactly backwards.

Where's the love, man? Daily Beast article suggests Dave Ramsey follows only half of Romans 13:8.

His critics, many of whom are the ex-employees who have been "raptured" out of the company, mock him as Dave Ramses or Dave Ramses II and suggest he's big on the "owing no man anything" part while pretty short on the "loving one another" part of Romans 13:8, saying he subjects his employees and ex-employees to a culture of fear, intimidation and spying. Here in The Daily Beast:

“As a boss, Dave Ramsey was a bully,” said one former employee, who was a member of a secret Facebook group of about 100 former Lampo employees that Ramsey managed to infiltrate without their knowledge last year. “Most of us left Lampo years ago and yet he still haunts us, lurking over our shoulders like he’s the damn Godfather. And many of us are scared of him, unsure of how far he’d go to silence us.”

Jesus' "Son Of Man" Comes To Wipe Out The World As In The Days Of Noah, Not Save It

As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they did not know until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of man.

-- Matthew 24:37ff.

As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of man. They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.

-- Luke 17:26f.

Peter Berger Misunderstands Interim Ethics

 

Peter Berger, writing in The American Interest, here:

The British writer Ferdinand Mount described the Sermon of the Mount as perhaps the greatest sermon ever, but that it was written for bachelors—that is, for individuals with no responsibility for the future. Probably Jesus’ message about the Kingdom of God was apocalyptic—a message about a radical shift in the nature of reality (which means that Paul was not far off). We know that many of his followers, and perhaps Jesus himself, expected that the apocalyptic event would happen in their own lifetime. Thus, as some scholars have put it, the moral teachings of Jesus (and possibly Paul’s as well) were an “interim ethic”—how to live in the short time before the coming of the Kingdom. If you expect the world to end next week, you won’t bother to change the oil, though you still want the windshield wipers to work. In that interpretation, the Sermon on the Mount was meant to describe the world after the coming of the Kingdom (though some of Jesus’ followers may want to anticipate this blessed condition in their present lives). Be this as it may, it is very doubtful indeed that Jesus intended these teachings to be a behavioral code for the next two millennia. In any case, any society larger than an Amish village would not survive for very long if it tried to live by such a code.

This is good as far as it goes, and God knows we don't read enough people talking about these issues, but it does seem to miss two things.

One, the Sermon on the Mount isn't just for bachelors. It's also for spinsters.

Apocalyptic ethics overthrow all human conventions because true repentance is impossible without them. There are no more husbands, fathers, wives, mothers and children per se in the kingdom of God, which is coming suddenly with the appearance of the Son of Man in the clouds of heaven. There is no time for funerals, for working at a job, for building bigger barns in your retirement to hold all your increase. "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother" (Mark 3:34f.).

Two, the world after the coming of the kingdom is not really describable because it is transformed by divine action.

What is remarkable about it is how few, however, take seriously what this means in terms of justice in the teaching of Jesus. The assumption is usually that there are many human players left in a too-worldly kingdom of God populated by shiny happy people who have received the grace of God, whereas Jesus is at pains to describe God's coming judgment in which evil and evil-doers are swept away. The angels first come at the harvest not to rapture the few into the air to ever be with the Lord, but to gather the many tares and hurl them into the fire. As interim ethics, Jesus' teaching is survival ethics, and temporary because terrestrial, designed to help his hearers escape the wrath that is coming. Beyond that, the future is not really ours to see.

Perhaps more than anything else, it is the failure of this vision to materialize historically which has been lurking in the background in the mind of modernity and fueling the conviction that God is dead. 

A Computer Scientist Stumbles into the Truth about the Rapture

Here.

Funny how a little Socratic elenchus can do that, eh, Mr. Dickerson?

Which is one reason why Socrates is viewed by some as a pre-Christian saint.

Live Blogging the End of the World

Here for AOL. Here for the "rolling Apocalypse" by time zone, from Australia. Raw Story here. Lefty here.

People have nothing better to do, I guess.

Jesus didn't teach a rapture of the just

Jesus Didn't Teach a 'Rapture' of the Just

Jesus simply taught an imminent end of the world and final judgment, at which time the Son of Man (himself) would appear in the heavens with the clouds of glory and with the holy angels, who would separate the wicked from the just, cleansing God's kingdom, the world, from all evil, casting the wicked into eternal fire, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Jesus called for removing all evil from the world as a matter of first importance, then gathering the righteous together after that.

This is the plain meaning of the parable of the tares and of the wheat, which must grow up together until the end in order to preserve the just alive. We are told that the angels first bundle up the tares, and throw them into the flames. Otherwise their presence would complicate what comes next. The wheat left behind must be winnowed with a fork, and its kernel separated and gathered with the rest into God's barn.

This is also the plain meaning of Jesus' analogy to the days of Noah, when the earth was cleansed of evil by water. So of the two workers in the field and of the two women at the mill, the one removed in each instance is the wicked one, not the righteous one. They are gathered by the angels, yes even caught up in the air perhaps, and consigned immediately to the flames.

This is the plain meaning of Matthew 13, and even of Matthew 24 which is a later attempt to rationalize the teaching of Jesus from the point of view of the failure of his prediction of the end of the world during his lifetime. The evidence is conveniently assembled for you here.

 

It is the also the plain teaching of the Old Testament.

 

The earth is the LORD'S, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.

 

-- Psalm 24:1

 

The righteous shall never be removed: but the wicked shall not inhabit the earth.

 

-- Proverbs 10:30  

Larry Norman in the early 1970s is an example of one who popularized (in his music-"the Son has come and you've been left behind") the misconception that the just would be "raptured" from the earth, leaving the damned behind to suffer the end of the world.

In truth, the idea goes back to J.N. Darby in the early 19th century, and before him into the 18th, in keeping with all the other bad ideas of modernity. We seem to get things exactly backwards.

So if you're still here at 7 PM tomorrow night, count it all joy my brethren! Old men dream dreams. It's just that they might not know what they mean. 

The Rapture of the Unjust

But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat [in his field], and went his way. ... Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.

 

-- Matthew 13:25, 30

The tares are the children of the wicked one; The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.

 

-- Matthew 13:38ff.

So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

 

-- Matthew 13:49f.

And [they] knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

 

-- Matthew 24:39ff.

 

I tell you, in that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left. Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

 

-- Luke 17:34ff.

The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him and in an hour that he is not aware of, And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

 

-- Matthew 24: 50f.