I suspect few people expected a Christian novel like Left Behind to launch a series of books that sold millions of copies and captured the attention of the general public, yet that is exactly what happened. When the series began, I was aware of evangelical scholars, even those calling themselves dispensationalists, distancing themselves from the idea of a two-part second coming of Christ with its pretribulation rapture. Therefore I assumed that the series would be a short-lived phenomenon. I now add that to the list of my mistakes in judgment. Much of the evangelical public appear to be firmly attached to the concept of the rapture, but I would like to suggest a sober second thought.
Some may wonder why I would want to create controversy over the details of the return of Christ. I sympathize with this concern, and I do not want to divide believers over this issue. That is precisely why it seems appropriate to raise questions about the premise of Left Behind. Many Christians are like one of my former pastors, who assured me that there is no more doubt about the pretribulation rapture than there is about the Trinity. Such Christians find it easy to divide the body of Christ over the layout of the prophecy chart. If there is significant doubt about the biblical support for the doctrine, then it would be unwise to write it into confessions of faith or make it some sort of litmus test.
One of my seminary professors was fond of saying that literal interpretation of the Bible leads inevitably to pretribulationism. However, I will argue that this is simply not true. I will present posttribulationism, i.e., the affirmation that the rapture is simply one part of the coming of Christ in glory after the final tribulation, as the most natural way to read the New Testament texts. Following that, I will respond briefly to the most widely held arguments for pretribulationism.
EVIDENCE FOR A UNIFIED SECOND COMING
The Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21). Each of the synoptic Gospels records our Lord’s answer to the apostles’ question about his prediction of the fall of Jerusalem and his subsequent return. Assuming Christ’s allusion to the “abomination of desolation” (Matthew 24:15) refers to activities of the Antichrist at the end of the age, he speaks to the apostles (the foundation of the Church) as if they might personally see the manifestation of Antichrist. In the entire discourse only one coming of Christ is described, and explicitly said to occur “after the tribulation of those days” (Matthew 24:29). There is no description here of two stages in the Lord’s return, and the passage reads naturally along the lines of a posttribulation coming of Christ for the Church.
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11.
After describing the coming of Christ for both dead and living believers (4:13-18), Paul exhorts his readers at Thessalonica to live in such a way as to be prepared for the “day of the Lord” (vss. 4, 6, 8). This coming of the Lord will surprise the unbelieving world “like a thief’ and will bring destruction on the ungodly (vs. 3), which indicates that this coming occurs after the final tribulation. If this coming of Christ, for which the church is waiting, were a coming prior to the final tribulation, then the event would signal the rise to power of Antichrist and the apparent victory of evil. Therefore, the coming of the Lord here must denote his coming to dethrone Antichrist, but it is this very coming that the church is to anticipate. That could hardly be the case if Christ is going to come for the church several years prior to that event.
2 Thessalonians 1:3-8.
Here Paul writes to a church suffering persecution and trials generated by God’s enemies. He comforts them with the hope of deliverance from such trials. The promised relief is said to arrive at the coming of the Lord in glory when he destroys the ungodly persecutors of the church (vss. 7-9). This must be the coming of Christ after Antichrist, because a pretribulation coming would not terminate the activity of the ungodly. If relief for the church is located on the far side of the tribulation, then surely there can be no earlier coming of the Lord.
2 Thessalonians 2:1-12.
This biblical text created my first doubts about the pretribulation eschatology I had been taught so confidently. What seems implicit in the previous chapter seems to be virtually explicit here. In response to false teaching that the time for the day of the Lord had already arrived, Paul seems to say rather explicitly that the Lord will not come for the church until after the final apostasy and the appearance of the “man of lawlessness” or Antichrist (vss. 3-4). If Paul believed that Christ would come for the church before Antichrist, this would be the perfect place to affirm it. Instead, a natural reading of the text implies that Antichrist will appear first.
Revelation 19:1-9.
John employs the image of the church as the bride of Christ here to describe the time when Christ will come to be joined to the church eternally. This “wedding” of Christ and his people is located after the tribulation of chapters 6-18, at the time when evil is overthrown and God’s kingdom comes to earth (vs. 6) in its fullness.
The Revelation as a whole.
The book of Revelation as a whole is addressed to the churches (Revelation 1:4; Revelation 22:16), and the focus of the book at both the beginning and the end is the hope of the Lord’s return (Revelation 1:7; Revelation 22:20). The drama of the book culminates in the glorious coming of Christ and the manifestation of his kingly rule, all of which is located after the description of the tribulation period. No other coming of Christ is pictured in the visions of the book, which seems inexplicable if the church’s hope lies in an earlier coming.
In summary, the assumption of a unified second coming after the final tribulation as the hope of the church allows us to read the biblical references to the return of Christ in a very natural way.
A RESPONSE TO PRETRIBULATION ARGUMENTS
The arguments for a pretribulation rapture are generally more inferential than directly exegetical, arguing that various facts about the nature of God and his purposes demand that Christ must come for the church prior to the final tribulation. Here I will assess what I take to be the most cogent of those arguments.
The imminence of the Lord’s return.
Jesus instructed his followers to be constantly prepared for his return, emphasizing that no one knows the day or hour of that event (Matthew 24:36, 42, 44), and the apostle Paul said he will come “like a thief in the night” and catch humans off guard (1 Thessalonians 5:1-2). How could his return be this unexpected if it follows the predicted events of the tribulation? If the church is exhorted to look for Christ’s return as an any-moment hope, then it would seem to be the next event on the prophetic horizon, i.e., it will be prior to the tribulation period.
This idea of absolute, any-moment imminence is likely the most popularly cherished argument for the Left Behind scenario, but it does not seem to be the actual sense of imminence taught by Jesus and his apostles. The strongest language of expectancy is found in the Olivet Discourse (as in Matthew 24 above), but the only, coming of Christ described here is the one said to be “after the tribulation” (Matthew 24:29), In addition, Jesus clearly says in that discourse that the destruction of Jerusalem (A.D. 70) will precede his return. Whatever his language about “the day and hour” means, it can’t very well confirm his coming to be an any-moment possibility until after the fall of the holy city. Furthermore, Paul argues that the return of Christ should not be “like a thief” for believers (1 Thessalonians 5:4), thus indicating the surprise to be driven by the spiritual condition of unbelief, not by the absence of preceding signs. The biblical sense of imminence is more “any-generation” than “any-moment.”
The distinction between Israel and the church.
When I was a student at Dallas Seminary, this constituted the most significant argument for pretribulationist scholars. The church is a mystery, an entity not anticipated by the Old Testament prophets (Ephesians 3:4-6), a kind of parenthesis in redemptive history. The great tribulation, on the other hand, is a specific part of God’s program for Israel (Daniel 9:24-27). So if God has two distinct programs, one for Israel and one for the church, then one may infer that the church will be raptured to heaven prior to God’s resumption of his focus on Israel.
This may have been a favourite scholarly argument a generation ago, but for very good reasons, that is no longer true. Today “progressive dispensationalism” dominates the scene at Dallas Seminary, and that movement recognizes this rigid distinction between Israel and the church to be simply untenable. Even classic dispensationalists recognize that the pro-grams of Israel and the church overlap in the new covenant, the millennium, and the new heavens and new earth. If the church and Israel share these aspects of redemptive history, then why could they not share the tribulation as well?
The deliverance of the church from the wrath of God.
The apostle Paul teaches clearly that the church will be spared from the eschatological wrath of God (Romans 5:9; 1 Thessalonians 5:9). When the tribulation is described in Revelation 6-18, we find a reference to the coming of God’s wrath in the first chapter (Revelation 6:17). If the tribulation period, even at that early stage, is described as the wrath of God, and the church is promised exemption from God’s wrath, then one may infer that to live through the tribulation would be to experience what the church will not experience. That leads to the inference of an early exit via rapture.
This argument is still used, but it seems fatally flawed. First of all, it is doubtful that “wrath” is descriptive of the tribulation period prior to the very end. When the six seals of Revelation 6 are compared to the predictions of the Olivet Discourse, it appears that the sixth seal, with its cosmic disturbances, takes us all the way to the end of the tribulation. The reference to wrath in 6:17 likely refers to the time of the second advent. Apart from that exegetical detail, everyone on both sides of the rapture debate must admit that there will be redeemed humans on earth during the tribulation period — they are the saints who persevere (Revelation 13:10) and who refuse to submit to “the beast” (Revelation 20:4). There are, then, just two options: Either the saints on earth during the period will be the objects of divine wrath, even though they are redeemed by the blood of God’s Son, or it is possible to live during the tribulation period without being the object of God’s wrath. Since Paul bases our deliverance from the wrath of God on the fact that Christ bore that wrath vicariously in his death (1 Thessalonians 5:10), it is simply unthinkable that believers on earth during the final tribulation would be objects of his wrath. Thus I conclude that this pretribulationist argument simply does not work.
Revelation 3:10.
Here we come to the most directly exegetical argument. The promise given to the church at Philadelphia is grounded in their genuine, persevering faith, so while the word is addressed directly to this church, the basis of the promise extends it to all who share their genuine faith in Christ. They are promised to be spared from the “hour of trial” about to come on the whole world. This “hour of trial” appears to be the period of trouble described in the rest of the Revelation. True believers are assured that they will be kept “out of’ (Greek, ek) that hour. It should be noted that the promise concerns not just the “trial,” but indeed the very “hour” of that trial, leading to the conclusion that the church will not be on earth during that time period.
I accept the premise that this is a word for all true believers, and that the trial in view is the eschatological time of trouble at the end of this age, but the meaning of “keep from” is a different matter. This combination of verb and preposition occurs only one other time in the New Testament, in John 17:15. There Jesus prays to the Father for his disciples, asking that the Father “keep them from” the evil one even as they are still in the world doing battle with him. Many translations recognize that the verb here must be translated as “guard” or “protect.” However we translate it, it clearly refers to divine protection from Satan while in contact with him, not to deliverance from such contact. Applied to the final tribulation, the words would describe a divine protection from God’s wrath while still experiencing the tribulation. Within the Revelation itself there are allusions to this kind of discrimination when divine judgment is poured out (Revelation 7:3; Revelation 16:2).
AN APPEAL
I may be wrong about the rapture, and if the Lord does it as Tim LaHaye expects he will, then I won’t complain. I am not convinced, however, that there is any adequate basis for the pretribulationist hope. So I appeal to brothers and sisters in Christ to admit that the Left Behind series may be fiction in its premise as well as its details. If there is good reason to doubt that widely believed doctrine, then surely we should avoid dividing over it. You can buy the books without buying the thesis.
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Stan Fowler is professor of theology at Heritage Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Ontario and an elder at Grandview Baptist Church in Kitchener.
FEBCC — The Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada