Or How a Thief Came in the Night but Left My Chick Tracts Behind
I remember the exact moment when I learned that not all Christians believe in the rapture.
I had grown up being taught that the rapture was as straightforward a “biblical” truth as the virgin birth and Christ’s resurrection. Then, well into adulthood, a Presbyterian friend told me, first, it’s not universally accepted that believers still living on earth will be “caught up” into the sky to meet Christ at some future point, and, second, it’s not even a historical teaching within the church.
This rocked my world.
(Imagine when I learned about the creeds!)
At the time, I was a PhD student studying English literature —which is all about interpretation—so it’s a little embarrassing to look back and realize not only what I didn’t know but also that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.
It’s an overstatement, but not much of one, to say everything’s an interpretation. The problem isn’t so much that a great deal of human experience and understanding depends on interpretation but that we don’t always recognize that it does.
Left Behind on the Late Great Planet Earth after the Thief in the Night
I was five years old in 1970 when Hal Lindsey published The Late Great Planet Earth. I can still picture the paperback copy that lay on the coffee table of my family’s living room. For the longest time, I thought it was a book about an impending environmental disaster. I suppose, in some ways, it was.
One of the bestselling books of the twentieth century, The Late Great Planet Earth popularized “end-times” prophecies from the perspective of a school of biblical interpretation known as “dispensational premillennialism.”
A number of different schools of thought exist around the meaning of the thousand-year reign of Christ (the millennium) mentioned in Revelation 20. Premillennialists believe that Christ’s second coming will occur at the start of this period; postmillennialists believe Christ will physically return afterward. The rapture is associated with premillennialist views based on what are considered to be more literal interpretations of Scripture.1 The history of these interpretations and positions is long and complicated. Entire industries have been built around them. A great deal of discussion revolves around what the Bible means by the word translated into English as “rapture.”
Some seventeenth-century Puritans taught that a rapture of some sort would take place in the future. But in the nineteenth century, John Nelson Darby, a leader within a nonconformist movement called the Plymouth Brethren (the same denomination Edmund Gosse grew up in), heavily promoted the rapture along with a novel interpretive approach to biblical hermeneutics that divided biblical history into different periods, each calling for different interpretations, a view known as dispensationalism. In some ways, Darby’s ideas were a refashioning of existing premillennialist views that had already been circulating as defenses against the skepticism arising first out of the French Revolution and later from the claims of higher criticism.2 But Darby’s dispensational premillennialism drew new connections between biblical history, eschatology, and secular politics.3 His teachings became much more popular when they formed the basis for the study notes used in the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909.4 A revised edition of the Scofield Reference Bible published in 1967 made fertile ground for the reception of The Late Great Planet Earth, which sold 7.5 million copies in its first decade, over 28 million in two decades,5 and in 1977 was adapted into a film.
The rapture had taken flight. Modern American evangelicalism would never be the same.
A couple of years later, a low-budget movie about the rapture, A Thief in the Night, was released. Its story centers on a group of groovy young people who variously share, receive, or reject the gospel—just before (you guessed it) the rapture takes place. In the aftermath of the sudden disappearance of millions of people around the globe, a new worldwide government is established (another ingredient of Darby’s eschatology) that requires all citizens to receive a stamp—the Bible’s “mark of the beast” described in Revelation 13—on their forehead or hand. In addition to introducing Darby’s ideas to a new generation of Christians, the film made famous its opening song, Larry Norman’s haunting ballad, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready,” which quickly became a favorite in my church’s living room sing-alongs. (I still have nearly every word memorized all these years later.)
Although it had been decades since I’d seen the film, in rewatching it recently, I felt afresh the visceral fear the film roused in me of waking up one day to a world in which millions had suddenly disappeared and I had been left behind. This is a common experience for many evangelicals who grew up post–Hal Lindsey. Because I was fairly confident in my salvation, the worst fears were what would happen to the rest of the world if all the Christians were suddenly taken out of it. A particularly traumatic memory I have is of sitting on the steps outside church one summer day after VBS, crying to my mother and asking her what would happen to my horses, my cats, and rabbits if the rapture took place. Try as she did to comfort me, I was inconsolable. I couldn’t imagine what would happen to my beloved pets if we were raptured and they were left behind.6
Speaking of left behind, the famous franchise of that name (composed of sixteen volumes of novels, youth editions, graphic novels, film adaptations, and related merchandise) debuted in 1995, unseating Hal Lindsey as “the most widely read expositor of biblical prophecy.”7 One title in the series, published in 2001, right after 9/11, sold almost one million copies in a week, putting it immediately onto the New York Times bestseller list, a groundbreaking feat for evangelical fiction,8 and topping the bestseller list for fiction that year.9 Nothing else within the genre has come close to the sales and influence of this series. But perhaps the more significant feat of the Left Behind phenomenon was in replacing nonfiction with fiction as “the most successful cultural conduit of dispensational faith,” which was “a paradigm shift in popular prophetic consciousness.”10
The Left Behind series was the creation of Tim LaHaye—who provided the rapture theology—and Jerry Jenkins—who provided the writing talent. Of this partnership an editor at Publishers Weekly observed, “Between [LaHaye’s] theology and his co-writer Jerry Jenkins’ writing ability, the two of them really managed to capture the popular imagination.”11 The effect of this collaboration was as much political and cultural as it was aesthetic.
A Political Imagination
In Reading Evangelicals, Daniel Silliman says that LaHaye had hoped that imagining the rapture, “picturing it, and thinking how it could happen at any moment,” would motivate evangelicals toward both evangelism and political action.12 Even before the sales success of the series, LaHaye had good reason for this hope. For example, Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru), had been inspired to found his wide-reaching ministry through his study of end-times prophecies in seminary.13 Billy Graham, despite embodying and modeling a more urbane, nonfundamentalist, postwar evangelicalism, also embraced apocalypticism.14 And LaHaye himself had earlier succeeded in persuading Jerry Falwell Sr. to mix politics with religion,15 which resulted in the two of them eventually cofounding the Moral Majority, a cornerstone in the foundation of the religious right.
One might think that belief in an impending rapture of the church—a giant escape hatch for Jesus’s faithful followers—would serve as a disincentive for political activism. But the opposite has been largely true. Premillennialists like LaHaye care about political issues—such as religious liberty—because they directly impinge on evangelistic efforts that would result in fewer people being left behind.16 The “apocalyptic sensibilities” that modern evangelicals inherited from early-twentieth-century fundamentalists cultivated “a sense of determinism that demanded constant action” as well as a sense of responsibility to “occupy” this world until Christ’s return.17 For example, some who worked with Jerry Falwell reported explicitly that those apocalyptic views motivated them toward political activism, instead of those views being “a pretext for this-worldly despair.”18 In his later work, Hal Lindsey likewise “seamlessly blended apocalypticism with potent conservative activism.”19 In fact, end-times prophecy became so popular and so interwoven with evangelical politics that even George W. Bush in 1998 was surprised by the hostility among evangelicals against the United Nations.20
Furthermore, because some end-times interpretations hold that certain political events must take place before Christ’s return, it is believed that human actions can help facilitate God’s divinely ordered timeline. “Preparing for Jesus’s return fostered intense, relentless engagement with the world,” explains Matthew Avery Sutton.21 As Daniel Silliman puts it,
For these Christians, political activism wasn’t a choice. It was a divine mandate. They had to be involved. And since the end could come any day, it was urgent. The theology, just like the fiction LaHaye was imagining, also had a second audience. The rapture, the tribulation, and the antichrist were compelling, LaHaye argued, to non-Christians. Getting people to imagine the apocalypse was an important tool for evangelism. Just provoking the imagination was a powerful first step.22
The establishment of the state of Israel and wars over the control of Jerusalem, particularly the Six-Day War of 1967, are among the events many believe need to be fulfilled before the Lord’s return. When those events took place, popular interest in the fulfillment of biblical prophecies only increased. Even Ronald Reagan caught end-times fever, casting the Cold War in terms inspired by apocalyptic prophecy novels.23 This connection between American politics and biblical prophecy demonstrates the role of the evangelical imagination in a broader, more partisan, and worldly “Spirit of Neo-Imperialism.”24
Apocalypse Now
Before there was Left Behind, there was Frank Peretti’s novel This Present Darkness, which was published in 1986 and followed in 1988 by Piercing the Darkness. While not “end-times” books strictly speaking, these works fit squarely within the larger apocalyptic genre because their plots center on revealing what had been unseen—in this case, spiritual warfare. Peretti’s novels emerged at a time when evangelical fiction (in particular, the burgeoning genre of Christian romance) had begun to make its mark in the publishing market. Peretti’s novels, which sold millions of copies,25 expanded that market even further, both in terms of dollars and in stretching the category of Christian fiction, thereby paving the way for the success of Left Behind.
I was introduced to This Present Darkness a few years after its publication by someone who assumed that because I love literature I would love this work of “Christian literature.” This Present Darkness was my first foray into “Christian fiction.” I regret to inform you that I put it down after reading just a few pages. Charles Dickens it was not.26 I would never have guessed the impact Peretti’s work would have on the church in years to come.
It’s noteworthy in this cultural moment—one in the midst of a continuing sexual abuse crisis in the church—that one of the plot points of This Present Darkness involves a pastor being falsely accused of rape. The influence of this particular narrative—that false accusations of sexual assault stem from evil spirits behind the New Age movement—on the contemporary evangelical imagination cannot be measured, of course. But given the failures of too many evangelical institutions to effectively address sexual abuse and cover-up of abuse in churches, it’s reasonable to wonder what role stories like this have played in developing our social imaginary around accusations of abuse. Is such a work a mirror of evangelical culture—or a lamp? Most likely, it is both.
More clearly, and more generally, Peretti’s use of genre fiction as a weapon in evangelicalism’s ongoing culture war made a significant imprint within the evangelical social imaginary. Indeed, its publishers aimed This Present Darkness “for the Moral Majority.”27 The spiritual battles in the stories swirl around nearly all major human arenas: political, governmental, educational, ecclesiastical. As one scholar notes, “Such narratives remap the world, rendering its once-familiar landscapes in the blood-red tones of spiritual warfare.”28 They are works of evangelism and apologetics before they are works of art. Conversion narratives feature centrally in them. This Present Darkness has been described as a “thinly veiled allegory for the social concerns of the Religious Right,” a reflection of conservative Christian concerns “translated into a fantasy of cosmic struggle.”29
These apocalyptic and end-times novels were never intended primarily as either literary works or mere entertainment, of course. While literary fiction uses language in ways that cause readers to imagine the world differently, these apocalyptic works are intended to help readers think imaginatively about things they already believe—or that their authors want them to believe. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (as Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza would say)—as long as one understands the nature of the work, which is a good principle to apply to all things.
Is This Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy?
Christian apocalyptic fiction began to appear in the early twentieth century, following the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible. Prophecy fiction, as it is also called, depicted what evangelicals saw as a decline of culture and their marginalization from it in the form of “a comprehensive mythology for modern American life” expressed in theological terms.30 It is not coincidental that it was also during these years, the first half of the twentieth century, that myth, symbol, and archetype became intense objects of study in various disciplines—in psychology through Carl Jung, in literary criticism through Northrop Frye, and in literature and language through J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Joseph Campbell. The works of these writers are part of the mythopoeic literary genre, a category that includes prophecy fiction and fantasy.
Writing on this genre’s writers, critics, and theorists—particularly Lewis and Tolkien—one scholar explains that these creators of the mythopoeic believe
that the imaginative and spiritual impoverishment characteristic of much of contemporary life may be countered by soul-nourishing stories composed in the “poetics of myth”—that is with conscious use of re-imagined mythic materials such as archetypes, plot structures, characters, events, motifs, and so on, derived from both ancient mythologies and from myths cherished by contemporary culture.
Such beliefs have clearly tapped into a hunger both within evangelicalism and beyond:
How perceptive Tolkien and Lewis were in their assessment of the liberating potential of mythopoeia can be glimpsed from the proliferation of fantasy literature and movies, from the growing popularity of Role Playing Games, and from the plethora of scholarly publications of the last four decades, many of which expand certain claims made by Tolkien and Lewis.31
I have often asked myself why fantasy is so popular today, particularly among evangelicals. Certainly, Lewis and Tolkien have a leg up among evangelical readers by virtue of being respected Christian thinkers known for other works too. Then along came the Harry Potter series—whose timing coincided with the internet technology that made the spread of fan culture possible—and suddenly the mythopoeic was everywhere.32 Scads of grown men these days discuss superheroes and medieval fantasy series the way my grandfather once talked about milking the cows, planting string beans, and keeping the aphids off the tomato plants, and the way my father talks about makes and models of cars (all of which actually exist and affect our everyday lives). It’s a little disorienting, in some respects.
As someone who is not a fan of fantasy, I want to say, on the one hand, that fantasy is kind of like training wheels for a people who have labored too long under an impoverished social imaginary. As Flannery O’Connor puts it, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling pictures.”33
I think, for example, of the first time I read Pride and Prejudice. I was in tenth grade and had been a voracious reader since I was five years old, but this novel was the most boring thing I’d ever read. Now that I’ve grown up, I adore Austen. I understand that the drama in Pride and Prejudice, as in all great literature, isn’t in what happens but in how it’s told. It isn’t in soap-opera-worthy plot points but in the ordinary details of everyday life. When Elizabeth Bennet is scorned by her social superiors because her petticoats have been stained by mud from walking miles to come to her sister’s aid, a macrocosm of human nature and human drama is revealed in this minuscule event. It may be harder to see the transcendence in the mundane, but believe me, eternity is in Lizzie’s scandalously dirty ankles. Her stained petticoat isn’t a symbol for anything, of course. Rather, it functions in the story simply as a sign, a sign of the ways in which people value different things, disdain others far too easily, or care little about what others think. If only we were more attuned to seeing and reading the world of the real in this way. But centuries of immersion in literalism, as opposed to literariness, makes such layered and nuanced readings of the world more elusive.
The works we read today and understand to be epic or myth—The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, for example—were not understood by their contemporary audiences to be “fantasy.” These works expressed what their first readers saw as the reality of the enchanted world they lived in.34 Today’s fantasy (not only literature but films, games, cosplay, and even the growing popularity of Halloween celebrations) reflects an awareness that we live in a disenchanted world, as well as our desire to return to that sense of transcendence in the imminent.35
A lion, a ring, and Sauron are symbols writ large. They are billboards on the highway of a disenchanted world, pointing us, with bold letters and bright lights, to the forgotten places on the side roads of the modern soul. It is always tempting, and sometimes helpful, to see the world and to interpret stories (whether the true ones of history or the Bible or the fictional ones of novels and films) along broad sweeps and grand archetypes: good versus evil, cowboy with the white hat versus cowboy with the black hat, angel versus demon. Myth, symbol, and archetypes—along with dreams and visions—are universal signs of the timeless and eternal aspects of reality. They point to a divine order of creation and remind us that we are made in the image of the Creator. The mythopoeic externalizes the transcendent truths of the inner, spiritual life, making them manifest. Such stories meet a hunger caused by the general absence of myth and mystery in the modern world—that much-discussed disenchantment—and that modern world includes evangelicals, whether we realize it or not. This hunger helps explain why a Jungian psychologist like Jordan Peterson—whose ideas are rooted in symbols and archetypes—is so popular, even among evangelicals.
Samuel Coleridge explains in his 1816 commentary on the Bible how the nature of the symbol is connected to the eternal, writing,
A symbol is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual, or of the General in the Special, or of the Universal in the general: above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity of which it is the representative.36
We are a symbol-starved people. We need enchanted worlds to help us see the enchantment in our own. This famine results from our modern inattention to aesthetic experience generally. In exploring Coleridge’s ideas about the relationship between symbols and the imagination, Peter Cheyne explains that symbols are inherently aesthetic because they are first perceived by the bodily senses and then connected through both reason and imagination to some idea or meaning, to an “enlightened understanding.”37 To be moved by something, to have an aesthetic experience, is to “intuit, however dimly,” that thing’s “ultimate” purpose.38 Imagination is an expression of the human desire for meaning beyond the literal surface of our lives.
Loosely Literal
Prophecy novels embody an approach to interpretation that is more literal than literary. The long history of seeing signs that turn out not to be signs, of interpreting biblical prophecies (then reinterpreting them as history unfolds), of predicting dates for Christ’s return (then making new predictions when those dates come and go), surely has played no small part in the popularity of conspiracy theories. These novels embed a certain hermeneutical approach into the evangelical social imaginary.39 They reinforce among those who ascribe to these interpretive practices “a confidence that they alone understand the world in which they are living, and a hope for a future in which they will reign supreme.”40 Apocalypticism has been so ingrained within the evangelical imagination over the past century or more (as numerous polls and surveys show) that the premillennial teaching that Jesus’s imminent second coming to earth “has become such a standard part of evangelical rhetoric that few believers ever question it.”41
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, largely in response to Darwinism, higher criticism, and theological liberalism, dispensationalists and fundamentalists argued for more literal interpretations of Scripture. However, language being what it is (subject to translation from one to another and composed of words that often have multiple meanings that change over time), literalism is tricky business—as anyone who has read the delightful Amelia Bedelia children’s books knows.
The problem with taking the Bible literally absent literary understanding isn’t as much a theological problem as it is an interpretive one. It’s also a problem of imagination.
Serious theologians know that there is room, to varying degrees, for differing interpretations and applications of scriptural texts. An understanding of language that fails to recognize that words have different, layered, sometimes changing meanings cannot by its very nature account for the meaning of “literal” itself. For to speak of the “literal” meaning of a word, phrase, or passage is to acknowledge implicitly that there are nonliteral meanings (or at least possibilities of such meanings). This is why, for example, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy rightly explains that “the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices, and that Scripture is to interpret Scripture.”42 In other words, even to read “literally” requires interpretation. Interpretation is a theological commitment. Rightly interpreting God’s Word is how we rightly know him.
Furthermore, the insistence on literalism is a particularly modern problem, one that arose, as already mentioned, in reaction against nineteenth-century liberalism. Recall from an earlier chapter how even the division between fiction and nonfiction is also a modern categorization. But the literalist fetish goes back even further, really. It is the outgrowth of a Cartesian dualism that separates things that cannot be separated: mind and body, spiritual and physical, rational and emotional, immaterial and material. One might as well try to sever the Word from flesh as to separate these. It can’t be done.
In his 1907 memoir, Father and Son, Edmund Gosse (whom we met in an earlier chapter as a friend of Thomas Hardy and one of many notable second-generation Victorians who rejected the evangelical faith of their parents) describes the ultra-literal approach to Scripture taken by his parents, who were members, like John Nelson Darby, of the Plymouth Brethren sect:
For [my Mother], and for my Father, nothing was symbolic, nothing allegorical or allusive in any part of Scripture, except what was, in so many words, proffered as a parable or a picture. . . . Hence, although their faith was so strenuous that many persons might have called it fanatical, there was no mysticism about them. They went rather to the opposite extreme, to the cultivation of a rigid and iconoclastic literalness.43
As Gosse goes on to describe it, this extreme literalness led to misreading the highly symbolic book of Revelation:
When they read of seals broken and of vials poured forth, of the star which was called Wormwood that fell from Heaven, and of men whose hair was as the hair of women and their teeth as the teeth of lions, they did not admit for a moment that these vivid mental pictures were of a poetic character, but they regarded them as positive statements, in guarded language, describing events which were to happen, and could be recognized when they did happen.44
Now, it is clear that Gosse’s portrayal is at times tongue-in-cheek and perhaps favors colorfulness more than objective reporting. Even so, Gosse’s felt sense of his parents’ discouraging him from pursuing the imaginative life, whether through reading novels or creating stories of his own, shaped the course of his life. He yearned to delight in the Scriptures but could not do so with the same enthusiasm he had for imaginative literature. His father continued to hound the son about reading the Scriptures as he, the father, saw fit.45 Here he describes his rejection of his father’s appeals and his father’s evangelical Christianity (using the third person to describe himself):
No compromise, it is seen, was offered; no proposal of a truce would have been acceptable. It was a case of “Everything or Nothing”; and thus desperately challenged, the young man’s conscience threw off once for all the yoke of his “dedication,” and, as respectfully as he could, without parade or remonstrance, he took a human being’s privilege to fashion his inner life for himself.46
If there was only one way to read the Bible, Gosse decided he would not read it at all.47
A Good Metaphor Is Hard to Find
All language is metaphorical. All words point to the thing; they are not the thing. But words can point in different directions. Some words point to a thing that points to the thing. Some employ indirection or have layers of metaphor. A word that points most directly is understood to be “literal” (such as when “cat” signifies a cat). A word that points to something that is understood to represent something else is a symbol (such as when, in a certain context, “a dark wood” symbolizes evil, fear, or confusion). A word that points to something that is like something else is a metaphor (such as “thy word is a lamp unto my feet”). The ability to see and draw true comparisons is so essential to critical thinking—to our sheer humanity—that in the novel 1984, George Orwell observes that the first step in creating a loyal Party member of Big Brother’s totalitarian rule is to impede that person’s instinctive human ability of “grasping analogies.”48
It’s easy to mix metaphors. (Ask any writer!) Sometimes the results are amusing, but they always reveal muddled thinking. One example that went viral on the internet revealed such confusion poignantly. The clip featured a woman being interviewed about why she wouldn’t receive a newly developed vaccination. Pointing to her trust in God over government agencies, the woman said that the vaccination was separating the sheep from the goats. (During the COVID pandemic, “sheep” became a derogatory term for those who adhered to government recommendations.) When the interviewer asked which one she was, sheep or goat, she hesitated, as if remembering that the Bible refers to Christians metaphorically as sheep and unbelievers as goats. But then, stepping into the trap her metaphors had set for her, she proudly replied, “I’m a goat.”49
Metaphors show likeness; symbols express sameness. Getting the difference is crucial to understanding reality. Consider the profound difference, for example, between the human beings in the Bible who try to be like God and the one human being who actually is God. As Peter Leithart explains, “Symbols are more than mere signs or indications of reality; they actually lead to other forms of reality.”50 Getting symbols right is more than a mere literary exercise, because symbols (as well as metaphors and all language, ultimately) shape our understanding—or misunderstanding—of reality. Getting it right can be a matter of life and death.
Conspiracy theories, for example, are misguided attempts to re-enchant the world through fantasy. Conspiracy theories employ symbols, see symbols everywhere, and encourage symbolic interpretations of reality. Isolated facts are put together in ways that click with the satisfaction of puzzle pieces that fit—while leaving out the vast majority of the pieces so that the picture created is distorted and incomplete.
When surveillance tape caught an election worker passing something under the table to another worker (the woman’s daughter) on election night in 2020, a narrative was constructed and repeated by the then-president that the item passed was a USB port that was being used to tamper with the ballots. The story spread like wildfire, bringing threats, harassment, and life-changing chaos to the innocent family before the truth came out—what the mother had passed to her daughter under the table while they volunteered to serve their community was a ginger mint.51 The fact that something was passed was indisputable. But what exactly was passed between the two women led to a very loose interpretation that ruined people’s lives.
So, what does all this have to do with the rapture?
The question of the rapture centers on whether the rapture mentioned in the Bible is to be understood literally (see fig. 16), or metaphorically, or even in both ways.
Ironically, some literalist interpretations of the Bible, although presented as conservative, were actually novel teachings, thus more modern than traditional.52 In fact, they can even be understood as a rejection of history and tradition,53 an attempt to be like God by positioning believers or the church outside of human history.
Wrong interpretation is dangerous, and we must strive to avoid it. But lack of awareness that one is interpreting and that one interprets in community, within a tradition, is more dangerous. It is a danger to which evangelicals—with all their innovations and individualism—are particularly prone.
For example, throughout the Bible we are told that we will be held to account some day for all we say and do (Rom. 14:10–12; Rev. 20:11–15). Because I grew up reading Chick tracts, I assumed such an accounting would take the form of my entire life being played back as a movie on a large screen in a heavenly theater before God. Such scenes recur throughout the series of tracts, but one notable interpretation portrayed in one depicts the main character standing in heaven next to an angel of the Lord, watching a scene from her infancy playing on the giant screen. The verse accompanying the illustration is Mark 4:22: “For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested” (KJV).54 The faithful from among the great cloud of witnesses who lived on earth before the twentieth century certainly didn’t imagine this verse being fulfilled in heaven via a big screen since such a thing hadn’t been invented.
To be manifested means to be shown or revealed. While the hidden things that will be made known certainly include things about ourselves and our lives for which God will hold us to account (including our sin), the meaning of this verse in context is much wider and more profound. Earlier in this chapter of Mark, Jesus speaks to the disciples about the secrets or mysteries of the kingdom of God being given to them but that those mysteries will not be understood by all. Quoting from Isaiah, Jesus speaks of those who do not understand: “They may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!” (Mark 4:12). Then, using the metaphor of a lamp, Jesus suggests that the kingdom of God, which includes those who follow him, by its very nature reveals all things. Creation reveals the Creator. We shall be known by our fruit. Out of the heart, the mouth speaks. The world will know us by our love for one another. We who are called by him are becoming conformed to his image.
Caught Up in Christ
Belief in the rapture derives from, among other things, a literal (albeit selectively literal) reading of key Scriptures. N. T. Wright explains that it is based on a literal reading of 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17: “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.” Wright explains that the “rich metaphors” Paul uses in this passage allude to Moses’s descent from the mountain with the Torah and a passage in Daniel 7 that describes God’s people being lifted up to sit with him in glory. What Paul is saying here, according to Wright, is not that believers will be taken up into the sky but that those still living when Christ returns “will be ‘changed’ or ‘transformed’ so that their mortal bodies will become incorruptible, deathless.”55
Our House Is a Very, Very, Very Fine House56
Jesus tells us, “In my Father’s house are many rooms” (John 14:2 ESV). Jesus is preparing this house for us. This eternal home and its many rooms will be perfect. He is preparing it now. He is also preparing us now. We do not honor this work of Jesus when we are content to live in earthly edifices built on unexamined assumptions.
In these pages, I’ve examined just a few of the often-unseen foundational elements—the driving stories, images, and metaphors—of the evangelical house. There are, of course, many more. The work of looking, testing, and repairing these foundations must be ongoing until Jesus establishes our new home in the new heaven and the new earth—whenever that might be.
Truth be told, I’ve never really cared about end-times prophecies. That stuff makes my eyes glaze over the same way action scenes in movies do. (I usually take advantage of those parts to get a refill on snacks.) Just tell me who wins the fight or the chase, and let’s get back to the story—and the storytelling. There’s a reason Aristotle counted “spectacle” as the least important element of drama in his Poetics. And there’s a reason that the prophet Nahum declares that God will make a “spectacle” of those who continue in their wicked ways (Nahum 3:6).
The best stories aren’t about the ending. The best stories are about how we get there.
That’s why Jesus says he is “the Way.”
Indeed, the earliest Christians were called followers of the Way. This is what they are called throughout the book of Acts. This name indicates that believers in Christ are defined by “a manner of ongoing Christian living as part of a restoration journey.”57
Those who are in Christ are defined by our manner—or way—of going. (Just as those who are not in Christ are likewise revealed by their way of going.) The mystery, as short story writer Flannery O’Connor says, is revealed in the manners.58 Whatever form the rapture takes, it will simply—and surely—manifest the truth about those who are in Christ.
The Greek word translated into English as “rapture” means “caught up” or “carried away”—whether bodily or spiritually or both.59 The phrase “caught up” is interesting. We use it in a lot of ways. Sometimes the context for its use is negative. We might say someone is “caught up” in the drug trade or in an illicit affair. People get “caught up” in controversies. (Those of us on social media can easily identify certain ones who are constantly “caught up” in some controversy.) Using it in a different sense, we might say we “caught up” with an old friend.
The rapture is assuredly this: we who are in Christ will be caught up with him, caught up in him. To be caught up with Christ, in Christ, is to be filled with a love not only powerful enough to move the sun and stars (see fig. 17) but powerful enough to love that person we would otherwise despise. It is to love the kingdom of God more than the kingdoms of this world. It is to count all human empires as dirt, all our petty platforms and performances as dung.
To be caught up in Christ is to be enraptured by him, to be beholden to him, to be taken by him, to be—as seventeenth-century poet John Donne puts it—ravished by him.60
Not just in the sky and on some future day.
But here.
And now.
Just imagine it.