ENDING THE COSMIC WAR

THE VELOCIRAPTURE!!

I simply have to call it the Velocirapture after hearing the word from Dan McLellan and Dan Beecher, in their super fun podcast “Data Over Dogma”, available from Spotify or anywhere you get your podcasts. The Dans put to rights misinformation about the Bible. Sometimes this involves the niceties of Hebrew grammar; sometimes it involves whole new cool words.

Kia Ora Tatou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War with me, Karen Effie.

Actually, the rapture is not so fun when you believe in it. When I did my history honours degree, I interviewed an older woman who had been raised Plymouth Brethren. She was taught as a child that the rapture could come any minute. She would wake in the middle of the night, and her parents would have vanished. Freeing herself from the Plymouth Brethren was one of the main themes in her life. It is not a happy way to bring up a child.

We will return to the Plymouth Brethren later on.

Now, have fun guessing these two facts about history:

What was the best-selling non-fiction book in the US in the 1970s?

No, silly, it was not “The Joy of Sex”, which gently nudged a generation of straight white westerners in the direction of sex positivity. It was Hal Lindsay’s “The Late Great Planet Earth”. This book is an awful read, but it is worth it when you know how influential it was. The ideas we have about the rapture today come mostly from this book. Lindsay writes about how true Christians are raptured up into heaven suddenly, leaving behind even their clothes. This causes major chaos on earth. Many who thought they were truly Christian discover they can’t be, because they are still here. The rapture signifies the beginning of the end times; it is followed by seven years of tribulation and the rise of Antichrist. Lindsay also popularized the idea that current political events can be read into the Bible: that we are watching Bible prophecy unfold.

Next question: Who is the most well-known and well-read Christian thinker of the twentieth century?

No, silly, it is not Rudolf Bultmann, Professor of Theology at Marburg University, who criticized liberal theology in favour of an existential interpretation of the New Testament. It is Jack Chick. Jack Chick was the maker of Chick Tracts, tiny, cheaply produced comic pamphlets on the theme of hell and salvation. Chick Tracts were often left lying around or given out in the street. I have not seen one in the wild, because they never got much traction here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Jack Chick was firmly against evolution, homosexuality, Roman Catholicism, paganism and witchcraft, Bible Translations after the King James Version, and Islam. He espoused many conspiracy theories, including the belief that the Illuminati is running everything. He was a staunch climate change denialist. Chick died in 2016, but his tracts are still being produced. The end times was a common topic for the tracts. They take their cue directly from Hal Lindsay. Several of the tracts address the rapture directly. I won’t link directly to them here, but you can read them online from their website by their titles. “What Next?”, “The Only Hope”, “The Beast”, “The Last Generation”, “Where did they Go?” “Things to Come”. All of the dislike of difference, and the conspiracism, feature in these tracts. They are gory as a death metal album cover, and less sophisticated.

Honourable mention must go to the “Left Behind” series, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins. LaHaye was a megapastor in his day. There are twelve books in the series, and I read volumes 1, 3 and 12 in the interests of research. The books begin with Rayford Steele (seriously), an airline pilot. He is flying his plane and having lustful thoughts about a female cabin crew member. Then the crisis happens; a large proportion of the passengers have vanished. All over the world, people have vanished. Then the seven years of tribulation begin. Rayford Steele becomes a born again Christian and helps to found the Tribulation Force, a paramilitary group which infiltrates the ranks of the Antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia (seriously!), and plays a part in the final battle. These folks are properly a small band of virtuous rebels, that Cosmic War trope I described earlier. The books read like airport bookshop thrillers. There are real blokey blokes doing a fair bit of fighting and driving around in big vehicles. The characters are cartoonish. There is mass violence all the way through; the violence is justified because it is of course the Cosmic War, and it often acts as a background to the spiritual message. But if you foreground the violence as you read, it is very violent. Each book is updated at the end, to show how prescient it was when it was first published in the 1990s in terms of political events that show the truth of Bible prophecy, as interpreted by dispensationalists like LaHaye and Jenkins. There have been movies, a young adult version of the books, and a video game. The books have been described as Manichean, with an exaggerated and totalized sense of good and evil. That is the point! It’s not subtle. It is a great example of the kind of parallel world that evangelical Christians live in, with pop music, movies, books and videos that look like mainstream versions, but are all for Christians.

How Biblical is the velocirapture? Well, velociraptors were so loved by their creator that the creator raptured them up into heaven so they weren’t wiped out by the comet, like all the other dinosaurs. Velociraptors are that cool. So, not at all, really.

The rapture is not at all, really. It comes from two passages in the New Testament. 1Thessalonians was written by Paul in order to comfort the Christians who were concerned that Christ had not returned, and yet some of them had already died. Here is 1 Thessalonians 4:15-18:

For we tell you this by a word of the Lord: we who are living, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not go before those who sleep For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God – and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are living, who remain, will be taken up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord

Bart D. Ehrman, in “Armageddon, What the Bible Really Says about the End” (11-13) explains this clearly, in concert with all other scholars I have read. Meeting “in the air” expressed an image that would have been well understood by the Thessalonians. When a ruler or high-ranking official arrived for a visit to a city, the citizens would send out their leaders to meet and greet the official and escort them back to the city. Jesus is described as coming with his angels from heaven, and his believers are taken up to meet him in the air, before accompanying him down to earth where he will vanquish his enemies. This is not the rapture.

Here is the other verse, the one that scared the woman I interviewed back in my uni days. It is Matthew 24:39-40.

So, too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day the Lord is coming.

This sounds pretty clear. Except it is taken out of context. This is Jesus talking. Just before this verse, Jesus is talking about how the coming of the Lord is like the days of Noah, when everyone was taken by the flood, and only Noah and his family were left behind. It is the opposite of the rapture. Note that Paul and his group of proto-Christians really believed the Christ would return any day. They were already trying to explain why it hadn’t happened yet.

So, who interpreted the Bible in this way? Who read the Bible like this?

The early modern period was the time of science. Academics and experimenters were measuring and weighing things and crunching numbers and making observations using technology. Laws were being discovered. These laws explained a lot. There were laws of nature, and laws that made hierarchies and taxonomies. Christian thinkers were as beguiled by this as they were disturbed. So, they did the same. They crunched numbers. Sometimes they even did it to disprove science. They used scientific ideas along with the Bible. This is how we get such quaint oddities as Bishop Ussher’s 1650 dating of the beginning of the universe as 4004 BC (BCE). Ussher was a serious scholar and a serious Christian. He used Biblical chronologies to come to his conclusion. It would never have occurred to our medieval ancestors to think about the Bible in this way. There were some chronologies, for sure, like that of the Venerable Bede, but those were more for mythical purposes; wanting to show historicity or legitimate ancestors or historical figures.

This kind of study of the Bible was also a Protestant preoccupation. Protestantism rejected the way in Roman Catholicism, Biblical exegesis was for the priestly class. For Protestants, everyone could read the Bible. The Bible itself was the source of Christian truth. Protestantism also emphasized sola fide, by faith alone. Good works and obeying the priests did not get you to heaven. Faith got you to heaven. You needed to be saved.

The Bible is not a book to be read from cover to cover, like a novel. It is not in chronological order. It was written by many different people, some of them pretending to be other people. We have fragments of text in different languages. The Bible as we know it developed over time and after fierce debate. Throughout the history of theology, the best Christian thinkers of their time did not have the issue of taking the Bible literally. Extracting theology from the text in the way evangelicals have done since the nineteenth century, using a mix of number crunching and ideology and sometimes visions from divine figures, is a modern preoccupation. Taking small amounts of text from disparate places in order to put together a story only works if you see the Bible as a single thing that is inerrant. But this is what began to happen, because people began to seek proof of the truth of the Bible, and truth within the Bible, in a way that made no account of myth or culture, but looked at the Bible in the way a scientist might look at a flower.

The nineteenth century saw rising secularism, outright atheism, and on the other hand, millennialism. It was as if the devoutly religious were beginning to pull away from the mainstream. This was nowhere so apparent as with the development of end times thought, and its most enduring product, dispensational premillennialism. And we are back with the Plymouth Brethren.

John Nelson Darby, a former Anglican priest, established a new religious community in Plymouth, England. Darby put forward a new idea, that Christ would return twice, once before the catastrophes of Revelation, and once again to set up his new kingdom on earth. The pre- bit means that Christ comes before the millennium. Darby also developed a chronology of all of history, with distinct periods related to times talked about in the Bible. There were seven of these periods, called dispensations. The last dispensation, Kingdom, is when God cleanses the earth in judgment, removing all evil, and condemning all those who do not obey him. If the end is at hand, and of course it always is, this is not an optimistic view. Even those obedient Christians will witness the onslaught described in Revelation. That is hardly fair. So, Darby came up with another new idea. The velocirapture! In order to save the obedient Christians from suffering during the end times, there would be a rapture before the coming tribulation. After the true believers had vanished, there would be chaos, and Antichrist would begin his evil reign. For Darby this was a secret rapture, because no one knew the date or time, but that did not stop subsequent Christian prophets and pastors a-calculatin’ and a-speculatin’. As you do.

Nowadays, there are variations on this theme, and probably only historians and Bible scholars have heard about Darby and the Plymouth Brethren. But the idea of dispensational premillennialism took hold among conservative Christians, it spoke to the increasing pessimism about human progress as the twentieth century kicked in, and now it is a central tenet among many (not all) of today’s evangelical Christians, especially in the USA. It is a great example of what seems to many like a natural born idea, that has a specific and recent origin, tailored for the times. No previous Christian thinker interpreted those bits in the Bible in that way. It was the confluence of science, Protestantism, thwarted millennialism and pessimism that gave us the rapture we have today.

If you got this far, with the bad dino joke, and the forbidding business of nineteenth century conservative theology, thank you for sticking with me. Let’s do it again. Ma te wa!

Further exploration:

Bart Ehrman “Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End” is a very recent and readable book.

If you read some of the Chick Tracts mentioned above, you will get an idea about why some of the people around you believe what they do. You can read them in full on the Chick.com website.

If you like podcasts, Data Over Dogma have a great episode on the Velocirapture