The Rapture is a Racket?

Oh, say it ain't so...I was counting on getting my neighbor's new car when he goes floating skyward (yes, I'm coveting again, how damned American of me)... Jage

Below are excerpts from an interview by 'The Wittenburg Door' with Dr. Barbara Rossing who teaches New Testament at the esteemed Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. An ordained Lutheran minister, Rossing holds a doctorate from Harvard University Divinity School and a Master of Divinity from Yale University Divinity School. The interview focuses on the subject of her new book. The Rapture Exposed:The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation.

Rossing: The first sentence of my book is, "The rapture is a racket," and I think it's important for your readers to know that the whole rapture is a fiction. It was invented by British preacher John Nelson Darby in the 1830s as part of his system of biblical interpretation called dispensationalism. The system of dispensationalism divides world history into periods of time, the second to the last of which will be, according to Darby, the so-called "seven-year period of tribulation," followed by the return of Christ and then the 1,000-year millennium. This is the basic system of premillenialism, but what proponents can't agree on is when the so-called rapture will happen, sucking naked born-again Christians out of their beds, cars, airplanes...

Door: Um, did you say naked??

Rossing: The main way you'll know the rapture has happened, according to Left Behind, is that people's clothes, glasses, false teeth, replacement knees, will all be left behind on their chairs and in their beds. One day, my students left all their clothes carefully arranged on their chairs to make me think they'd been raptured, but lo and behold, I found the students down in the cafeteria!

Door: Those rascally scamps! But aren't there indeed passages in the Bible about people getting sucked up into the air and stuff?

Rossing: That's I Thessalonians 4:13-18, but the word rapture does not occur here or anywhere in the Bible. This is a passage about Jesus descending to earth from heaven and how Christians go out to meet him as part of that descent. The dispensationalists have to piece together numerous Bible verses, in what I call a "pick-and-choose" method of interpretation, in order to fabricate their notion of the rapture.

Door: On 60 Minutes in April 2004, LaHaye and Jenkins claim to be totally biblical. Jenkins says, "I didn't make this stuff up. This comes straight out of the prophecy."

Rossing: Anyone who wants to take a Bible verse here and a Bible verse there and string them together can make the Bible say anything they want. Tim LaHaye uses the image of a prophetic clothesline, and he hangs Bible verses on it.
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Door: What precisely are you trying to expose about the Book of Revelation?

Rossing: The word revelation is the word apocalypse, which means unveiling or exposing. The Book of Revelation exposes the oppression and domination of the Roman Empire for first century Christians. The question for today is, "What needs exposing in our culture?" In my view, it is the violent and dangerous "gospel" of books like Left Behind that leads to war and an eagerness for Armageddon.

Door: In your book, you speak of Left Behind proponents who support Israel at the expense of the Palestinians. Do they want the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians to get worse?

Rossing: It's a peculiar kind of support for Israel. They want Israel to take over all the land but in the end only Jews who convert to Christianity will be saved. Two prominent Israeli rabbis recently warned against accepting financial support from Christian fundamentalists. I read that one American fundamentalist Christian group raised $100 million for settlements in the occupied West Bank, so I'm delighted that finally some rabbis are speaking out against this. Peace is bad, according to these Christians, because only the Antichrist signs peace treaties in the Middle East. They want the Jewish temple to be rebuilt and animal sacrifice to resume on the Temple Mount—only so that the Antichrist can desecrate it three and one-half years into their seven-year period of tribulation. Of course, to rebuild the temple would mean destroying the Dome of the Rock, Islam's third holiest site, which would undoubtedly precipitate a war. Christian Zionism is a theology that could be characterized the way Israeli peace activist Yehezkel Landau ironically says: "God so loved the world that He sent World War III."
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Door: You also suggest that rapture theology leaves ecology far behind.

Rossing: It presents an escapist rapture off planet earth as God's plan for Christians. It's no coincidence that Christians in Left Behind first drive Range Rovers and then Hummers, the most gas-guzzling vehicles on earth. Gas mileage doesn't matter if you think the world has only seven more years. It's a use it or lose it theology—the very opposite of early Christian ethics, which taught that the urgency of Jesus' return means caring for the world as good stewards until He comes again. It's surprising to people, but I find the Book of Revelation one of the most down to earth books of Scripture. If anything, it's about a "rapture in reverse," because God and the Lamb come down from heaven to earth in the final vision, to which the whole book leads.