Thread by @crazypastor

A thread on the Rapture in the Bible:

It’s not there. At all.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Although I will give two shoutouts, the unique verses that evangelicals love to twist to their liking on this subject:

Daniel 12:11-12, and I Thessalonians 4:16-17.

The Daniel one is classic evangelical ignorance RE: the Bible. As opposed to the first 6 chapters of Daniel (which tell stories), the last 6 go full tilt on the Visions Train –– so wildly apocalyptic that most biblical scholars maintain it’s describing PAST events as FUTURE ones.

And it’s tucked into the 12th chapter of imagery that we get this li’l nugget of when the world would end:

1,290 days and 1,335 days. Both of these numbers are higher than the quote of 1,150 days already given in Daniel 8:15, but no matter.

Evangelicals were ready.

But not just any evangelical. A British convert named John Nelson Darby.

And it wasn’t just any bible, but the Scofield Reference Bible.

Tl;dr — the bullshit rapture theology is barely 150 years old and it’s because of two dudes who twisted TF out of the Bible.

The Scofield Reference Bible is a trip, y’all. It was so stunningly adored in early 20th-century evangelicalism that its margin notes were often taken as nothing less than the Bible itself.

And Scofield looooooved Darby’s “beautiful system” (Scofield’s words).

Anyways there’s a ton of shit around the system of theology from which the Rapture gets primary billing — it’s called dispensationalism — but suffice to say: the timing didn’t work out for the evangelicals.

The other main Daniel vision is in chapter nine, where there’s a promise that the End of Days would be in 70 “weeks” where a day oddly equals a year. But those 490 years ended a long time ago (and Daniel was critiquing his own time, which is what the apocalypse genre does).

But evangelicals just believe apocalypse “experts” like Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye (the latter is the genius behind the theologically-barren series “Left Behind,” whose existence is proof that we can’t have nice things).

They say that the there was a ‘divine stopwatch’ that stopped time at the 69th “week of years,” and we’re waiting for certain things to happen in the world that will spark the End of Days.

Get that? GOD ISN’T CAPABLE OF DOING THIS HERSELF, SO WE ALL NEED TO WAIT FOR THE WORLD TO PRODUCE ENOUGH SHIT THAT THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST WILL TAKE PLACE.

It’s the shittiest of theologies. What a sad, limited view of the Divine.

Anyways, that brings us to I Thessalonians, one of the oldest pieces of extant New Testament scripture, a letter from Paul.

4:16-17 — “for the Lord…will descend from heaven…then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air."

The Greek word for this act is ‘parousia,’ which is ancient imagery of the entry of a victorious king into a city.

The thing is, that entry leads to the king GOING INTO THE CITY. The king meets his subjects, and they all go back to the city.

But Rapture worshipers couldn’t handle that. They needed to be caught in the air and “raptured” out of the world…to watch its destruction from the air.

A fucked-up front-row seat.

But no such word exists — “rapture” never once appears in the Bible — and the imagery of ‘parousia’ is perfectly in line with Revelation’s powerful imagery of a new earth coming down from heaven.

God doesn’t snatch us away; God leads us deeper into this broken/beautiful world.

But evangelical apocalyptic thought foams at the mouth when it comes to predicting the end of the world.

They’ll identify the four horsemen of the apocalypse as Syria, then Iraq, then Russia. They’ll say the antichrist is Jimmy Carter, then Barack Obama.

They have zero shame.

Evangelicals have convinced everyone that progressives twist the Bible for our own means.

It’s theological gaslighting — they’re the ones who pick and choose and abuse the Bible for their own bullshit political purposes.

There’s so much more to say, but it’s such a long, insane deep dive that I won’t go into now. 😂

If you’re interested in further reading, check Rossing’s ‘The Rapture Exposed’ and Boyer’s ‘When Time Shall Be No More.'

Tl;dr — as is usual in the fundamentalist Christian world, they act like they’re getting the Church back to its ancient tradition, when they’re really just cherrypicking new-age theologies invented in the 19th and 20th-centuries.