You have no doubt heard of the best-selling Left Behind series of Christian novels. These tell the story of people who were left on earth after the Rapture, when Jesus is supposed to come and take all of the Christians off of the earth in the “twinkling of an eye.” This sparks the Apocalypse, the seven-year “Great Tribulation,” in which The Antichrist takes over the world. There is much suffering and death before Jesus returns again to conquer the Antichrist and rule the world.
This story is based on the beliefs of fundamentalist Christianity; these doctrines were explained to me in high school, reinforced in church, and repeated at Bob Jones University where I attended college.
But the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. The “proof texts” for these prophecies are scattered all over the Bible; there isn’t a chapter of the Bible that clearly explains this chronology of first Rapture, then tribulation, then Second Coming. It’s a framework imposed on the Bible; if you read the Bible with no preconceptions, you would probably not come away with this outline of events.
It doesn’t seem to flow naturally from the text of the Bible. If you read the book of Revelation, you’ll find the first three chapters are letters written to exhort various early churches. Then, the rest of the book abruptly shifts into telling the events of the far future, according to the fundamentalist interpretation. This has always struck me as odd; why should such disparate kinds of teaching be in the same book?
Many of the key phrases in fundamentalist eschatology are not found in the Bible–phrases like “the rapture” and “the Antichrist.” (The word antichrist does appear, but it never refers to a supervillian who takes over the world in the last days; it only appears in the books of I and II John and refers to those who believed that Christ never came to earth in the flesh.) If such things are not found explicitly in Scripture, then where do they come from?
On the recommendation of Fred Clark, I started reading The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation by Barbara Rossing, looking for an alternative explanation. I recommend reading it if you have any interest in the book of Revelation or in Christian prophecy.
The first three chapters point out the problems with the fundamentalist prophetic framework–both the mistaken interpretations and the social and political consequences of these beliefs. It also explains where this framework came from: It was invented by a preacher named John Darby and propagated by footnotes and headings in the Scofield Reference Bible.
The rest of the book offers an alternative explanation of what The Book of Revelation means. According to Rossing, apocalypses were common at the time Revelations was written–the word apocalypse meaning a story about a visionary journey. A more modern example of an apocalypse would be A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge sees his past, present, and future, and then changes his life based on the warnings he has seen.
Broadly, the book of Revelation is a criticism of Rome and its worship of Victory. John urges his readers to follow Christ’s example of peace, nonviolence, and sacrifice rather than to embrace the seductive but violent and unjust conquest of the Romans.
The judgments–death, famine, earthquakes, pestilence, and the like, the key events of the Left Behind series–are not guaranteed to happen; they are conditional prophecies. Rossing reminds us of the story of Jonah: He prophesied that God would destroy the city of Ninevah in forty days. The people of Ninevah repented, and God relented and had mercy on the city. If we raise the sword against our enemies, then death and violence and all the rest await us; but if we do not, then those judgments will be held back.
Rossing still believes that Jesus will return, but she does not believe that he will return twice–once to evacuate the believers and once to clean up after disaster has ruined the earth. He will not violently conquer the earth in the climactic battle of Armageddon; he has already won the victory through his sacrifice on the cross.
It’s a fascinating book, especially if you’ve never heard any explanation for the Book of Revelation other than the modern fundamentalist prophetic framework. I still have questions; I’d like to find a more in-depth commentary that approaches Revelations from this perspective.
