Rapture

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Rapture

The word rapture comes from the Latin root rapio, meaning "caught up," and is taken primarily from 1 Thessalonians 4:17. The rapture refers to the belief held by some Christians that, near the end of the world, they will be lifted from the Earth to meet Christ in the air.

Not all Christians use the rapture concept. To understand which Christians use the concept, it is necessary to understand two other Christian concepts: the Great Tribulation and the millennium.

Based on biblical texts, the Great Tribulation is a seven-year period of great suffering taking place at the world's end. It is headed by an evil ruler called the Antichrist, who will have power over all the Earth's peoples. The millennium is the thousand years of peace and righteousness predicted in various biblical texts. Premillennialists are those who believe that the Great Tribulation will occur before the millennium. It is only these Christians—primarily conservative Christians in the United States and Britain of the past century and a half—who espouse the rapture.

Within Christian groups espousing the rapture, debate rages as to when it will happen. The most popular position is that it can happen at any time, but once it does happen, the tribulation will begin. Smaller numbers believe that the rapture will occur midway through the tribulation or at the end of the tribulation.

Though there were certainly earlier formulations, the concept of the rapture was not fully developed until the mid-1800s. In the United States, its acceptance is attributed to John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) of Great Britain. He placed ideas such as the rapture, the tribulation, and the millennium into a tight, cohesive system called dispensationalism, and he espoused this system with great fervor on his six trips to the United States from 1859 to 1874. His view of the rapture quickly gained popularity in the United States and became an important theme in conservative Protestant theology.

As detailed in Paul Boyer's When Time Shall Be No More (1992), the rapture concept has had a significant impact on modern American culture—especially since 1970—with an explosion of rapture/end timesrelated publications. The best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s The Late Great Planet Earth was a modern translation of the rapture and the tribulation. It was first published in 1970, and by 1978, nine million copies were in print. More than thirty million copies are now in print. One of the best-selling fiction series of the 1990s—the Left Behind series—is about the rapture and the tribulation.

But the rapture is not just communicated through the thousands of books published about it. It is also the focus of numerous films, with titles such as A Thief in the Night and The Road to Armageddon; bumper stickers with messages such as "Beam Me Up, Lord" and "Warning: If the Rapture Occurs, This Car Will Be Driverless," as well as radio and television shows, magazine articles, seminary and Christian college classes, evangelistic tracts, Christian comic books, music, paintings, postcards, T-shirts, baseball caps, tattoos, and even rapture wristwatches.

The rapture concept has important implications. Conservative Protestants, believing that the rapture can occur at any time, are motivated to "keep right with God" and to evangelize others with fervor so others will not be left behind to face the horrible tribulation. Moreover, since their theology suggests that the world will get worse and worse as the rapture nears, motivation for social change is minimized. As some put it, to work for social change "is like polishing the brass fixtures on a sinking ocean liner" (Boyer 1992, p. 299).