No one taught a pre-trib rapture until John Darby, and Anglican preacher, in the mid 1800s. So the teaching is relatively new. Now, being new does not necessarily mean a teaching is defunct: while God never changes, He reveals knowledge and understanding in a progressive manner. Things that we have not contemplated before, suddenly come alive to us in the scriptures. So, while the ideas are new to us, they were always established in the mind of God.
But the manner is which things are "revealed" should be examined. So let's look at the manner in which the doctrine of the pre-trib rapture came to be a Baptist staple.
Dwight Young, professor emeritus at Brandeis University of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, personally corresponded with a friend of mine several years ago. My friend was a young lawyer ( as an aside, had George Bush Senior been elected for a second term, there is a good possibility that my friend would have been chosen as a state supreme court judge.) Dwight was a student at Dallas Theological Seminary at the same time Hal Lindsey studied there, so this is more than 50 years ago or so. They were graduate students.
Dwight said the professors were discussing Darbyism, and whether or not it was a valid theology. This graduate student, Hal Lindsey, wrote a master’s thesis on the subject of this form of dispensationalism and the rapture. He later turned that thesis into a book called The Late Great Planet Earth. Now some of you may not know about this book, but it was a runaway bestseller. It made a lot of money. According to Dwight, that is where the Baptists made the switch. They saw that there was a market for this doctrine, and they ran with it. Dwight later moved up to and was a professor of biblical studies, biblical languages at Brandeis University, from which he retired, and he was in a state of retirement when my friend met him. So, 50 years from the writing of a master's thesis, the teaching is so entrenched in the Baptist circles you would think it was the gospel.
Historically, nobody ever thought of this doctrine before Darby. But once he popularized it in the context of dispensationalism, meaning things wrap up within blocks of time, people began to embrace it because they did not have to trust the Holy Spirit. If you are going to have any measure of understanding of prophetic Scripture, the end from the beginning and where we are at this point in time, you are going to have to walk in the Spirit. He is the One who wrote the Book; He is the One who is perfectly capable of interpreting it. And the folly of logic and reason and man-made constructs, such as dispensationalism, will lead you to increasing folly, such as the rapture.
God knows the end from the beginning, and the greatest moment of the Body of Christ is in the midst of the darkness in Revelation. That darkness has no potential to blunt our display of the glory of God, the radiance of God’s glory, or to represent Him exactly. It has no ability to influence that at all. This is the time for the glory of what God has been doing, when He established the heavens and the earth for the purpose of establishing a corporate man in creation so that He might be seen in creation as who He is. He is on a path wherein not only will He show who He is in all of His glory through the corporate body, but He will bring the enemy to judgment as well.
Grace and Peace,
Aaron56
