Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

I have to go with Blondie on this one. I grew up Methodist in Montana and frankly, we weren't too obsessed with rapture. The focus in our sermons was more on doing good works in this life and understanding the methodology of religion. Even after marrying my Catholic husband, I hadn't heard much of rapture.

"The Rapture" wasn't something I heard about (outside of movies poking fun at religion) until I became friends with Four Square, Jehovah's Witness, and Assembly of God church members. And then when I moved to the Deep South and befriended Soutern Baptists, well, I've heard a great deal about the rapture.
 

Jennifer:

Welcome! I think most fundamentalists would say, and I myself would have once said, that "doing good works" is not the way of faith. However, I have come to see that my Methodist brethren and sistren have a surer foundation in Grace in the first place, and don't worry to death over the details, which I like and now admire.

Summed up: We're saved. Now what? "Go about doing good."


All y'all: The Secret Rapture thing, I've seen before. Very weird. Beyond weird.
Secre
 

Where's that picture from? It looks familiar...
 

It's a fairly common piece of art in some circles, Dan. I just Googled images for rapture and found it.
 

I never heard of the rapture until I was in high school, and I find it all rather silly. More than silly, it is irrelevant, dangerous, and gives us kooks like this Secret Rapture guy. He's come to my blog, too, ER, and my wife actually went to his site and tried to deal rationally with it all. I kept insisting she was trying to understand a madman, and in the end, she agreed.

All I can say about it is this - people should read the whole paragraph in 1 Thessalonians where it is mentioned to understand what Paul is saying here. I assume that Paul might actually have believed in some kind of physical rapture, but there is nothing in that section that necessitates that conclusion.
 

Well, Paul clearly was a mystic, and prone to metaphorical hyperbole, probably.

And Secret Rapture Guy is a total wack.
 

This is it, the sole basis for the concept of the Rapture. Ecstatic hyperbole or not, I'm cool with it. It's the pre-trib, post-trib, pre-mill, post- whatever stuff that really bakes my cake -- none of which is in the following.


13Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. 14We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. 15According to the Lord's own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. 18Therefore encourage each other with these words.
 

7: a proposition put forth by a decidedly bonkers man who, through his association to someone else, found an audience for his dementia-fueled ravings.

seriously, the inclussion of revelations completely ruins the nt. john was a senile hermit living in exile and subsisting on bugs and bark when he scrawled that book.

btw, when the rapture comes, can i have your blog?

KEvron
 

Pie in the Sky was almost a weekly Sunday desert in my Southern Baptist upbringing. I once heard R.G. Lee give his famous eschatological sermon "Pay Day Someday" in front of 10,000 S.B. types in the Will Roger's Collisium in Fort Worth.
I was a Pre-mellinialist my ownself till I actually studied Jesus's words and discovered the actual concept of the Kingdom of Heaven was not tied to the end of time for there is no time.

Sadly this current Rapture fad is a revival of the early 19th Century and can be traced back to one or two individuals who were building on the fervor of the great revival of the previous decades in America.

I mean consider if you will just which earthy body will be resurrected and/or raptured. Each and every one of us are barrowed materials. All that we are composed of has been recycled millions upon millions of times since the material universe was formed. We are infact composed of each other as well. At ER's work every day he breaths in skin from others. Being an open mouth breather he probably ingests more of his collegues than he would care to know.
According to the "Secret Life of Dust" each of us probably breaths in one of Jesus's skin cells each minute we are alive. So in fact we are partaking of his body without the vodoo of transudstanciation.
Crazy, no, just math-life-and probabilities.
Of course the resurectionist PC is we will have a perfect earthy body.
If every body of everybody is perfect then they will have to be just like God's body and we will all look the same. Name tags in heaven?
(See the official Morman web site about God's body.)
Silly, yes.
Rapture, no.
End of times, no.
Has anyone ever heard of the concept of metaphor?
Eschatology is total Bullshit.
 

KEvron. Martin Luther is among those who thought The Revelation shoulda been left out of the Canon. But he said he changed his mind. Probably 'cause he was in enough hot water as it was.

But it's that Thessalonians Chapter 4 thing that is the seed of the Rapture stuff. But to get the whole Rapture Tree, you have to creatively tie those verses into certain interpretations of the Revelation, and season it liberally with, like, scraps of Daniel and some other stuff.

As I said, it's a very complicated doctrinal construct, to be based, in essence, on a couple of verses of ecstatic hyperbole written by the mystic Paul.
 

And when the trumpet sounds, if I'm gone, sure, you can have my blog. :-) You'd have to change the name, tho, wouldn't ya? Unless yer a closet redneck. :-) ... Hmmm. ya got some Okie in yer line, I seem to recall ... yer in California ... if ya got any Dust Bowl or World War II migration in yer family tree, you got some redneck in ya.

Ha. As if there was any doubt. Yer as redneck as I am -- more so, in yer own way. :-)
 

When thinking about all of the Pauline books, it's probably wise to keep in mind that he and his contemporaries expected the parousia during their lifetimes. This is not to discount the message, but may account for the tone and urgency of the Pauline epistles.
 

That *is* the holy gorilla in the living room of (most of) the church: Not just that Jesus hasn't come again, but that the first Christians didn't just think the second coming was imminent, the same way many do now, but that they thought it was going to be, like, tonight.

Which is why the idea that the second coming has already occurred has traction among some: either at Pentecost, or in the the hearts and lives of Christians in general. "The kingdom is at hand."
 

The Kingdom is here. Those that obscure that with visions of the future kingdom, with promises of tomarrow that conceal the Kingdom that's here today maybe standing in the way of God's Grace that he offers now. Whoa unto them that keep the children from his presence. From his own lips that was said.
 

I am for sure a very far out Space Cadet.
 

Heard about the rapture as soon as I came to know Jesus (1983) - it was big then, and I know that there are churches that obsess about it (I used to hear of a sect in Saskatchewan - don't know if they still exist - that always wore helmets inside of church and other buildings, just in case...)

This is what I tell my kids:
the verses exist, and are fairly explicit, though very few, and make you think about the subject, but no one thought they were important until the 19th century.

It would be nice (for believers) if it did happen the way many think it might (you know, avoid the messiness of all the bad stuff to come, not have to have a martyr's death), but I don't think we should count on it. To me it's more important that Jesus says He will be with us until the end of the age (or race), and really, none of the prophecies were ever easily recognized until after the fact.

Funny stories, and true: years ago, a friend of mine had a grandmother who never stopped talking about the rapture, and was forever warning everyone, so one day her grandkids pinned their pyjamas up to the ceiling, which caused her to almost lose her mind, when she discovered she had been "left behind".
Another friend, while hiking in the Alps with daughter and husband, went behind a bush to pee, and coming back only to discover that hubby and daughter had disappeared! Of course as a rapture-believing Christian who always felt she wasn't good enough, her first thought was that she had been left behind, until her family showed up from just having wandered away to look at the view.
 

Those are great stories, Karen!

My first job out of high school was at a small Southern Gospel radio station. I wrote and recorded a time-change promo once that had people getting to church late, finding all the cars in the parking lot, but no one in the sanctuary -- and freaking out, thinking they'd missed the Rapture! -- not realizing they were all actually in the fellowship hall, a separate building from the church.

I eventually was fired, for playing "rock Gospel" -- The Imperials! Petra! Stuff like that. :-)
 

The pastor of the first church I went to (at 20) always said that when the Rapture happened, no one would really notice because the churches would still all be full.
 

Number 3... bad theology.
 

What's wrong 'mouse? Afraid to tell anyone who you are?

For myself....

#2
 

El,
Yes, I am afraid... b/c of the hatred found here...
 

Hatred? Not on this thread. This thread has been remarkably civil! What're you talkin' about, Anon?
 

But if you feel hatred here -- ever. I'd go somewhere else. Myself, I tend to stay away from places that seriously upset me.