6
Couch-Skiing
You probably don’t remember the story of how any of your friends met their spouses, but I bet you’ll never forget how I met mine.
It was a cold, wintery night, thanks to a rare-for-Nashville blanket of snow. I was smack dab in the middle of my college campus, getting ready to be dragged behind my friend’s Jeep on a couch—naked.
See? I told you my memory would be seared into your imagination. Sorry about that.
Anyway, earlier that day my friend Mike had gotten together with a couple of other guys from our dorm, and through what can only be described as a stroke of divine inspiration, got the brilliant idea to take an old couch out of their dorm room, nail a set of skis to the bottom of it, and tie the newly created “ski couch” to the back of his Jeep Grand Cherokee with a ski rope.
They had spent the afternoon taking turns couch-skiing across campus when my opportunity to join in the wintery hijinks finally arrived. I, too, had what can only be described as a stroke of divine inspiration and got the brilliant idea to ride on the couch naked. Okay, maybe that wasn’t divine inspiration so much as the stupidity of youth combined with a need for attention. But there I was—ski goggles on, shirt off, and almost fully disrobed—when my friend Nathan showed up to join us. He wasn’t alone. He had brought a friend with him. Her name was Kim, and they were both eager to go couch-skiing too. Of course, they were less eager to go when they learned of my plan to ski in the buff. So being the gentleman that I was, I agreed to keep my boxers on for the ride.
It was love at first sight.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite love at first sight. Although, to be fair, it never could have been, because I couldn’t see her through my fogged-up ski goggles. The only thing I could see was the vague form of my friend Nathan sitting in the middle of the couch between Kim and me—clearly to keep her as far away as possible from the moron whose company she had to endure if she wanted to go couch-skiing. My dignity tossed to the side, Mike started up the Jeep and off we went.
Across campus.
On a couch.
On skis.
Being dragged behind a Jeep.
It was more fun than one person should be allowed in this life—so much so that I didn’t even notice the cold, at least not until Mike took a sharp turn. The couch swung too wide behind him, flipped over, and tossed the three of us into a snow bank.
Thankfully for me, couch-skiing wasn’t the last time Kim and I saw each other. It was a while before we hung out again, but from time to time we would run into each other on campus and say hello. Then one day about a year later, while I was typing a paper on Mike’s computer, an instant message popped up on his computer screen.
You remember AOL Instant Messenger, right? If not, then thanks for making me feel old. Instant Messenger was like texting before texting was a thing. You could only do it on your computer; phones weren’t that fancy yet. But when I was in college, it was a great way to do some high-tech flirting. And flirt I did. Kim was looking for Mike that day, not me. But I was looking for a date. So as any young Christian man at a Christian college would do, I took the coincidence for what it obviously was: a sign from God.
So I asked her out.
Via Instant Messenger.
Which sounds really cheesy, but it was actually way cheesier than that. Being a young Christian man at a Christian college, I couldn’t ask her out for drinks. So I asked her out for milkshakes. And before you make fun of me for asking her out for milkshakes, allow me to remind you how wonderful milkshakes are. Fine. So it was cheesy. But for some inexplicable reason she said yes. Later that week I picked her up to take her out for milkshakes at a local watering hole called Jackson’s, which was filled with the kind of people who are way too cool to ask other people out for milkshakes. But I thought maybe Jackson’s could balance out my complete inability to be suave and sophisticated.
I’m not sure it did, but Kim and I did hit it off. She was easy to talk to, and more importantly, she was really smart. I loved talking to someone who could challenge me intellectually. Most of our first dates were spent just talking and getting to know each other. On one date in particular we talked so long we lost track of time, missed curfew, and she got locked out of her dorm. So we ended up sitting on a swing in the middle of campus, talking, until the sun came up and the resident director unlocked the door. It was and still is one of our favorite dates.
But Kim was much more than a good date. She was more, even, than my future wife and the mother of our children. She was my Aladdin, showing me a whole new way of looking at the world.
They love Jesus too?
I met Kim after my faith had begun to be unraptured. For all intents and purposes, though, I was still a dyed-in-the-wool conservative Christian fundamentalist who thought that the only true Christians were conservative Christians who always voted Republican. Also, real Christians were mostly from the South, where everyone still went to church on Sunday. There were probably a few Christians in exile elsewhere, but not many. They were all definitely conservative, Protestant, and probably Nazarene too.
Kim was a Yankee, born and bred in New England. Worse, she was a liberal. Worse still, she didn’t like Chick-fil-A. (Although she has come around on that last point.) To make matters even more bewildering, her mom’s side of the family was liberal, and her dad, who had a longer Nazarene lineage than I had, had converted to Catholicism after her parents’ divorce and started attending mass at a local monastery—and was now training to become a Benedictine monk.
Worse still, they all loved Jesus.
I couldn’t make heads or tails out of any of it.
On my list of people who definitely weren’t Christian were Yankees (both the people and the team), liberals, and Catholics. In that order. Yet here were these people who not only said they loved Jesus and went to church as much as or more than I did—one of them had even taken Jesus seriously when he said sell everything you have and give it to the poor, then come follow me (see Matthew 19:21). Here I was, thinking I was the perfect Christian only to find out my girlfriend’s dad was literally a monk. (He did drink beer and listen to secular music, though, so I called us even.)
In all seriousness, getting to know Kim had as profound an effect on my faith as did that embarrassing conversation in my professor’s office years before. She and her family forced me to confront the reality of the conservative Christian bubble that I had grown up in and was largely still living inside. They forced me to face the truth that there are people out there who look different from me, talk differently from me, think differently from me, believe differently from me, don’t like sweet tea and Chick-fil-A like me, and yet still love Jesus as much as or maybe even more than I do.
When I finally realized that what I thought was a heavenly choir shouting amen to all my beliefs was actually just a sanctified echo chamber, I began to see that a lot of the people I once considered my enemies were actually just my neighbors. Many of them were quite nice, decent people. It turned out that atheists weren’t agents of the devil, that Muslims weren’t all secret terrorists trying to force me to live under sharia law, that LGBT folks weren’t godless degenerates trying to turn me gay, that poor people weren’t a bunch of lazy moochers, and that people having a glass of wine with dinner weren’t all raging alcoholics.
The further I stepped beyond my ideological bubble, the more my mind was blown. But more than anything else, as I left the echo chamber behind, I was finally forced to confront the truth about the rapture and why end-times theology wasn’t just bad theology but a type of Christianity that had serious, real-world problems; problems I had helped spread not just through my words but also through my actions.
Missing from the Bible
The most fundamental problem with the rapture is that it never actually appears in the Bible.
This is true in two ways. In the most literal sense, the word rapture doesn’t appear in any English translation of the Bible—and there are dozens of English translations. But it never did. There’s no verse saying, “And then Jesus will rapture some folks,” no offhand shout-out, not even a mention of the disciples feeling “enraptured.”
“But the Bible wasn’t written in English!” you say. That’s a fair point, and one we don’t take into consideration often enough when reading the Bible. We’re more open to pulling out our own toenails than to thinking about the fact that some things from ancient languages are bound to be lost in translation, especially if you only speak one of the two languages being translated. (And if the language you do speak is largely confined to emojis and GIFs, things get even trickier.)
But here’s the thing: even the concept of the rapture doesn’t appear in the original Greek or Hebrew or in the smatterings of Aramaic found in the Bible. As we’ll see shortly, the original Greek used in the New Testament passages cited as proof texts for the rapture make it clear that a rapture-like event is not what is being described by the biblical writers.
So if it’s not in our English translations, or even in the original biblical languages, then where did the word rapture come from? Like so many things in Christian history, we can blame the Roman Empire for this one. At least indirectly. Long before the Bible was translated into English, it was translated into Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, and eventually the official language of the church. In Revelation 4:1, John is told to “come up here.” In the Latin translation of that passage, the word rapio is used. Translated literally, rapio means “to snatch, grab, or take away.”
Before the dawn of dispensationalism in the nineteenth century, no one gave much thought to that word. The idea of being taken away into the heavens was widely used in the context of an apocalyptic vision and was well established in the apocalyptic tradition. The person having the vision was often snatched up or taken away to the heavens to see whatever it was God (or the gods) wanted them to see. But then John Darby came along, bringing his dispensationalism along with him. Darby loved him some secret biblical codes and timetables. Soon, what was once a standard part of an apocalyptic vision (rapio, or being taken away to heaven) suddenly became a secret code for an event the Bible never mentions: the rapture.
That’s not to say that the Bible doesn’t mention anyone being taken up to heaven at the end of all things. It does, a couple of times. But dispensationalists have cut and pasted those passages together with Revelation 4:1 to create the rapture. The problem is, those passages aren’t describing the rapture. As we already learned from 1 Corinthians 15:52, Paul was very specifically talking about the second coming. The second coming and the rapture are not the same thing at all—even rapture devotees would agree with that (well, most of them).
The other passage used as a proof text for the rapture appears in 1 Thessalonians, in which Paul writes, “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever” (1 Thessalonians 4:17). Now, if that were the only passage you were shown, and if you were told before reading it that it describes the rapture, and if you already believed that the rapture was a biblical idea: well, it’s not hard to see how you would believe that this offered a definitive biblical basis for the rapture. I know I sure did. I also bought into the Latin translation argument, ignoring the fact that to get to the word rapture, I was using the translation of a translation that translators who are experts on translation had opted to not translate that way for very legitimate reasons, like the fact that the church had never believed in the rapture before John Darby’s invention of it in the nineteenth century.
Dispensationalism’s reliance on proof-texting reveals a fundamental flaw with how our modern Bibles are constructed with chapters and verses. That might sound like a strange complaint to you, but chapters and verses are a rather late addition to the Bible, not appearing as we know them today until the middle of the sixteenth century. Something like our modern chapter divisions were created a few centuries earlier, but to put all of that in context: the church went two-thirds of its life without the sort of Bible we have today.
Sure, chapters and verses can be helpful when trying to quickly look up or cite a particular passage, as I just did. But they often obscure how the books of the Bible were originally written. Most of what we call books in the New Testament weren’t even books at all. They were real letters to real churches in Rome, Ephesus, Corinth, and other places around the ancient world, and just like a letter you would write today, they didn’t come with chapters and verses. Just to make things even more confusing to modern readers: those letters, and the rest of the Bible, didn’t even have modern sentences with punctuation and capitalization like we’re accustomed to today. If you were to look at an ancient copy of, say, Paul’s first letter to the church in Thessalonica, it would look like one continuous flow of words. That wouldn’t have been a major issue to his original audience, because they were native speakers of the Greek language Paul was writing in.
But that sort of formatting isn’t the real issue anyway. The important thing to remember when reading a letter like 1 Thessalonians is that it was originally intended to be read all at once, as one coherent thought. When we chop it up into chapters and verses and then read only a verse or two at a time, and then when we present that verse or two as definitive evidence of a claim, it’s like taking one or two text messages out of a thread, or one sentence out of an entire email, and saying “This is what they meant!” But the hundreds or even thousands of words before and after that sentence could change the meaning dramatically.
The context of 1 Thessalonians 4:17 erases the possibility of this verse being a description of the rapture. We should have been tipped off by the verse itself, which begins “Then” in the NRSV and other translations—or “After that” in the NIV. If a verse begins with a transition like that, or a word like thus or therefore, it’s important to ask “After what?” or “What was said before that makes this verse therefore?” If we zoom out a bit from 1 Thessalonians 4:17—not even to the entire letter but just to the surrounding verses—it becomes apparent fairly quickly that the “After that” matters quite a bit for understanding 1 Thessalonians 4:17. In this case, “After that” is referring to a sequence in Paul’s understanding of the “coming of the Lord,” or the second coming. Those who have died, or “fallen asleep” (NIV), will go first (verse 16). Then, “after that,” those who are still alive will join them and Jesus and be with him forever.
But isn’t that the rapture?
No.
The rapture is a moment when believers who are walking around on earth are zapped away to heaven to join Jesus there and to avoid the tribulation until Jesus returns to clean up the mess down below and start things over. What Paul is describing in 1 Thessalonians is the second coming itself. How do we know? Because Paul said Jesus is “coming down from heaven.” In the rapture, Jesus stays up in heaven and we go up to meet him. Unfortunately, the key word here—meet—originates in Greek, not English. The word apantesis means “meet,” but it means “meet” in a very specific way. Apantesis describes a visit from a dignitary. In antiquity—that is to say, in Paul’s day—if a dignitary came to visit a town, some of the citizens of that town would go out to meet him as he approached. What makes this practice so important to our understanding is that the dignitary always continued on into the town. Dignitaries never just met the people they were visiting outside of town and then turned around to leave.1 In the rapture, Jesus, the visiting dignitary, comes just above the earth, where the faithful meet him in the air before he turns around and returns to heaven with them. What Paul is describing in 1 Thessalonians is the completely opposite type of encounter. In Paul’s twinkling of an eye, Jesus returns for good. He never turns around and goes back to heaven.
If we keep reading, in chapter 5 we see Paul clarify again that he is talking about “the day of the Lord”—that is, the return, or second coming, of Jesus. After his famous description of the “twinkling of an eye” in 1 Corinthians 15:52, Paul goes on to borrow from Jesus himself. Like Jesus, Paul talks about a thief in the night as he encourages the church, in the closing of his letter to the Thessalonians, to stay faithful to Jesus until he returns because Jesus will do so when they least expect it, like a thief in the night. It’s a phrase Jesus used to describe his return, not the rapture.
This leads us to yet another passage that needs a bit of unrapturing: the so-called Little Apocalypse in the Gospels. In Matthew 24 we get the well-known caution from Jesus telling us that “about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matthew 24:36). Of course, even though it came from the lips of Jesus himself, that passage has never stopped dispensationalists from predicting either the rapture or the second coming. Matthew 24 is also where we get a list of the signs of the times, imagery for movies like Thief in the Night and lyrical inspiration for songs like the Larry Norman classic “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” Both derive from Jesus’ descriptions of his return: like a thief who comes unexpectedly in the night to take everything you have, or like people working in a field or women working a hand mill, with one being taken and the other being left behind.
Two interesting things are going on here, though—things that throw a wet blanket on this passage’s use as a proof text for the rapture. The first we’ve already talked about. Despite the beautiful harmonies of Larry Norman, it’s actually not entirely clear that being left behind is a bad thing in this passage. The Greek words the writer of Matthew uses for “taken” and “left” can be used in both positive and negative ways.2 If, for example, a hostile alien force invaded Earth, kidnapping random people and taking them away to become slaves in the spice mines of Kessel, you wouldn’t want to be taken by the aliens. You would want to be left behind. In other words, being left behind might actually be a good thing! In fact, as we’ll see later on, being left behind might even be a calling.
The subsequent chapter of Matthew’s Little Apocalypse also makes it clear that Jesus is talking about his return, not a temporary visit. We know that because, in Matthew 25, Jesus continues describing both his return and how to be prepared for it, but then goes on to explain why there is such urgency to being prepared. It’s not for fear of being left behind to suffer through seven years of tribulation, but because “when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his throne of glory” and begin the final judgment when he will divide the sheep from the goats (Matthew 25:31-33). So, while the Little Apocalypse of Matthew does make for classic rapture music, it is clear that nearly every verse is describing just one return of Jesus, not a two-stage process beginning with the rapture.
What is in the Bible
But the biblical problems with the rapture go much deeper than a lack of the word itself or misinterpreting proof texts. The very concept of the rapture goes against the entire narrative of the Bible—in particular, how the people of God confront trials and tribulation.
Just take a look at some of the major characters in Scripture. Very few, if any, had anything resembling what we would call an easy or good life. Sure, there were good times here and there. Eden was literally paradise, the Promised Land flowed with milk and honey, and after his epic trial, Job was blessed with riches far greater than he had before. But if it is nothing else, the story of the Bible is a sustained narrative of how God sees God’s people through trials and tribulations, not how God whisks them away to safety before the trials and tribulations begin.
God warned Noah that a flood is coming and told him to build a boat to protect his family, but the ark was no pleasure cruise. Noah and his family were trapped inside a dark, dirty, stinky ark with a menagerie of animals for months on end, after listening to their neighbors beat against the walls of the ark until they all drowned and everything and everyone Noah and his family had ever known had been utterly destroyed. The story of Noah’s ark isn’t a fairy tale of God whisking God’s people away from trials and tribulations. It’s a horror story of the most unimaginable kind.
God called Abraham and promised to bless him and make of him a great nation, but Abraham’s journey was anything but easy. He had to leave his friends and homeland behind. He almost lost his wife in Egypt. He did lose his nephew and his family. He almost lost his son. There was family drama with ripple effects that carry on all the way to the present day. Abraham may have been blessed, but God didn’t whisk him away from trials and tribulations. The same was true for Abraham’s descendants.
Abraham’s great-grandson Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers. The great nation that Abraham’s faithfulness gave birth to spent four hundred years in slavery. Israel’s liberator, Moses, was constantly berated by the people of Israel and riddled with doubt while wandering in the wilderness with them for four decades. Life in the Promised Land saw a never-ending succession of evil and corrupt kings. Despite a life of faithful devotion, Job lost his entire family and everything he had. The people of Israel were eventually conquered and shipped off in bondage to Babylon.
Even Jesus didn’t escape brutal trials and tribulation. Pursued by Herod as a baby, he and his family became refugees. When he grew up, he was an outcast in his own hometown. His ministry culminated in being betrayed by one of his best friends and then being arrested, tried, publicly humiliated, beaten, flogged, spit on, stripped naked, and nailed to a cross. Yes, Jesus rose triumphantly from the grave, defeated death, and changed the course of history through the power of his resurrection. But that wasn’t the end of trials and tribulations for his disciples. Jesus’ followers constantly faced persecution and even infighting within the church. Very few of them were not martyred. Tradition says Peter was crucified upside down and Paul was executed by the very Roman government to which he appealed for mercy.
So the idea of a rapture, in which God whisks God’s people away to safety and away from people who need our help, isn’t just nonbiblical; it’s anti-biblical. And when we consider the incarnation itself—that God didn’t stay up in heaven but came down to earth to dwell among us and all the problems we create—the rapture becomes more than just not biblical. It becomes antichrist.
No, not the guy from the Left Behind series. I mean antichrist in the sense of being antithetical to the way of Christ, the way of Jesus.
The way of Jesus
Lack of biblical support not withstanding, this is the fundamental problem with the rapture and the end-times theology that goes with it: it creates a way of life that stands in stark juxtaposition to the way of Jesus. The way of Jesus is incarnation, but the way of the rapture is escape. Jesus came to bring the kingdom of God down to earth as it is in heaven, but end-times theology seeks to leave earth and its problems behind. Jesus was born in human flesh because God cares about the here and now. Jesus went out across Galilee because God cares about the here and now. Jesus called disciples and taught them how to live because God cares about the here and now. Jesus healed and fed people because God cares about the here and now. Jesus laid down his life because God cares about the here and now. Jesus rose from the dead, leaving behind the gift of the Spirit and promising to come back here to earth, because God cares about the here and now. The way of Jesus is incarnation in the here and now—not escape to some far-off safe place.
The rapture promises we can leave the world behind, creating a radically self-centered faith that is all about me and how I get to heaven and avoid going to hell. The rapture makes discipleship irrelevant because all it takes to escape hell on earth and hell down below is belief in the right things. Jesus calls us to be his hands and feet in the here and now, but end-times theology, with the rapture at its center, tells us to sit around and wait for God to act.
This problematic foundation leads us to a long list of very specific here-and-now problems that the rapture and end-times theology create beyond just bad exegesis and poor discipleship. It all starts with a nation that seems so very biblical: Israel.
Israel’s role in end-times theology
Whether it’s Jack Van Impe, the Left Behind series, Hal Lindsey, or any other self-proclaimed expert, end-times theology begins, ends, and is driven along the way by Israel. Israel- related news usually manages to get spun by dispensationalists into some sort of prophecy fulfillment or precursor to prophecy fulfillment. The establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948? Prophecy. The Six-Day War? Prophecy. The Oslo Accords? Prophecy. Donald Trump moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem? Prophecy.3
If dispensationalists were just spinning old news to fit their end-times chronologies, that would be one thing. But they’re also driving foreign policy in the United States and giving cover to the nation of Israel for anything it does. For example, Jack Van Impe claimed to have been consulted by the national security advisor during the George W. Bush administration to see how then-current events in the Middle East lined up with biblical prophecy.4 For years, in a move the international community has denounced as illegal, the state of Israel has stolen land from Palestinians under the euphemism of “settlements.” In the process, Israel has committed all sorts of atrocities against Palestinian civilians, even turning Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, into a de facto prison through the construction of a wall that restricts access for outsiders and limits travel for residents. All of this is defended in the United States by people on both sides of the aisle and for a variety of reasons. But arguably Israel’s most staunch defender in the United States is the Republican Party, which is driven by an evangelical base that excuses all of Israel’s actions as part of reclaiming the land promised to them by God in the Bible. In other words, in the world of dispensationalism, what we are witnessing is not the political defense of another nation-state. It’s the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
President Trump, in an action clearly meant to appeal to the 81 percent of white evangelicals who voted for him, moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This action was met not just with international condemnation but with violent protests that resulted in the deaths of nearly sixty people.5 But again, dispensationalists saw Trump’s decision as a fulfillment of Scripture—even though there is no such prophecy in the Bible or anywhere else in the Christian tradition. As for the dozens of people who died? They were just collateral damage, unavoidable sacrifices to the cause of biblical prophecy.
Beyond the issue of occupation, there are at least three other significant problems with this Israel-driven prophetic agenda. The first is that the modern nation-state of Israel is not the same Israel as in the Bible. This is one of the most basic mistakes that dispensationalists make. They conflate the people of God in the Bible with a modern political state. They are not the same. One was established by God when he called Abraham to leave his homeland—a promise fulfilled generations later when Moses led the people of Israel (the name of Abraham’s grandson) out of Egypt and eventually to the Promised Land. The modern state of Israel was declared after the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states by the United Nations after World War II.
Secondly, the biblical prophecies that Jack Van Impe and others breathlessly claim are being fulfilled in the Middle East are a lot like the rapture: that is, they’re not actually biblical. There is no passage in Revelation, Daniel, Matthew, or anywhere else in the Bible that says X, Y, or Z must happen in Israel in order for Jesus to return. What we see are dispensationalists taking real events as they unfold, contorting them to fit their predetermined maps and timelines, and then finding proof texts in the Bible to back up their claims.
Finally, and most importantly, is the aforementioned problem of sanctified violence. Yes, both Palestine and Israel are committing violent actions in the battle for control of what they both view as their homeland. But conspicuously, the only side ever condemned by dispensationalists, conservative evangelicals, and even the U.S. government is the Palestinians. They are perpetually cast as the bad guys standing in the way of Israel’s divine right to the land and therefore, somehow, preventing the return of Jesus. Yes, there is violence and guilt on the Palestinian side as well, but dispensationalism never holds Israel accountable for indefensible acts of violence against innocent men, women, and children, or for the theft and destruction of Palestinian homes and land. It is all sanctified in the name of fulfilling biblical prophecy. Dispensationalists who have decided that all Palestinians are their enemies rarely if ever stop to consider the fact that many Palestinians are Christians too.
This leads us to yet another core problem with end-times theology: its Machiavellian ethics.
Ethics suspended
The basic idea behind dispensationalism is that there are different time periods, or dispensations, throughout history. According to dispensationalists, we are living right before the final dispensation when Jesus will return and establish his kingdom on earth. This sounds nice and good until you flip the coin over and see the other side. The underbelly of dispensationalism is its Machiavellian “ends justify the means” theology. Because we are supposedly living before the final dispensation, and because we must do everything we can to make sure biblical prophecy is fulfilled so Jesus can return, normal ethics are suspended for the sake of the cause. With a moratorium on morality, dispensationalist Christians free themselves to turn a blind eye toward a whole host of atrocities not just in Israel but also here at home because, tragic as those atrocities might be, they can always be justified in the name of biblical prophecy.
Ironically, this is the very thing that conservative Christianity warned me about when I was growing up. Whether it was in church, at a big youth event, or on Jack Van Impe Presents, I was constantly warned about the dangers of moral relativism—how the godless liberals were taking over and forcing moral relativism onto everyone to make way for the Antichrist. Christians, I was told, must stand firm in their convictions and values no matter what. But that edict was suddenly, if subtly, suspended whenever biblical prophecy was at stake. Whenever biblical prophecy was at stake, moral relativism suddenly stopped being the evil boogeyman and became the movement of the Holy Spirit.
A prime example of this is the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Trump is a known adulterer, liar, cheat, and gambler, a thrice-divorced, unapologetically crass, immoral, racist business mogul who uses fearmongering to rile up the worst in people while refusing to apologize for anything he’s done. On paper, he’s the kind of person who should make evangelical Christians reel back in horror. But 81 percent of white evangelical voters supported him, and despite a never-ending wave of scandals, racism, and bigotry since the election, that number has barely budged.6
White evangelical support for Trump is rooted in many realities, including radical partisanship, economic anxiety, racism, and a desire to overturn Roe v. Wade. But end-times theology can’t be overlooked as an important force in their embrace of him as a presidential candidate. If you tuned in to any pro-Trump Christian media outlet during the election or since, you would hear his Christian supporters describe him in the terms of a biblical king—even a pagan biblical king like the Babylonian king Cyrus, placed or chosen by God and anointed as God’s chosen leader for “such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). Ironically, it was Esther, not Cyrus, whom God anointed for “such a time as this,” to use her position to bring justice to those being oppressed and marginalized by their government, but awkward details are easily and often ignored in the world of biblical prophecy.7
From his promise to overturn Roe v. Wade to his over-the-top support for Israel to his guarantee that clerks at Target will say “Merry Christmas,” Trump is viewed by many of his Christian supporters as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. It’s why they can not only look past but even justify his countless sins. We are on the brink of the final dispensation, they believe, and to make it over that brink, we must do whatever is necessary. Otherwise Jesus won’t be able to return, because prophecy will not have been fulfilled. The suspension of ethics is necessary to ensure the fulfillment of those prophecies, because that fulfillment can sometimes be nasty business, like chasing Palestinians off their land or waging war on the Muslim world to take back the Temple Mount. The end, which is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and the second coming of Jesus, justifies the means, which is electing someone like Donald Trump. If his election means the fulfillment of key prophecies on the dispensationalist timeline, then we should overlook the unsavory details.
Trump also embodies another underlying problem that is, ironically, also incredibly appealing to many who believe in the rapture and the tribulation that follows: vengeance against one’s enemies.
Donald Trump is notorious for holding a grudge, for punching down and attacking anyone for even the most minuscule slight. He trashes his enemies, both real and perceived, on a daily basis and promises to wipe them off the face of the earth with fire and fury. In some ways, he is the incarnation of a dispensationalist Savior. For dispensationalism, the Savior we see in Revelation fixes the “mistakes” Jesus made in the Gospels: his soft stance on sin and crime, all that mushy stuff about loving our enemies, and most importantly, his humiliating defeat on the cross. A dispensational Savior returns to crush his enemies and wipe them off the face of the earth once and for all. But first, faithful Christians get to be zapped up to heaven, where they’ll have a front row seat to revenge as they witness their enemies tortured and killed during the seven years of the tribulation.
Vengeance might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the rapture or the end times, but consider what dispensationalism is really promising, with its talk of things like the rapture, the tribulation, and Armageddon. When the rapture happens, their smug enemies will be left behind and ashamed, forever having to face the truth that they were wrong and the Christians were right. But that’s just the beginning of their apocalyptic nightmare. The tribulation isn’t just a period of time without the benefit of nice Christians around to say “Have a blessed day” when you pull away from Chick-fil-A. The tribulation is a time when all the unbelievers left behind—all the enemies of the Christians that were raptured—are tortured for seven years through a series of plagues, wars, and all sorts of Antichrist-directed violence.
After the tribulation ends, there’s still more violence. After the tribulation comes Armageddon, the actual “war to end all wars.” It’s a massacre of unprecedented proportions, in which the enemies of God (or more accurately, enemies of dispensationalist Christians) will finally get their comeuppance. But even Armageddon is still not the end of dispensational vengeance. Once the hell of the tribulation and Armageddon is over, there’s still actual hell to deal with. In the timeline of dispensationalism, everyone, whether they’ve been raptured or left behind, will be dragged before the judgment seat to face the music. Their entire lifetime’s worth of sins will be read in excruciating detail for all of humanity to hear, and then Jesus will send all the unrepentant people to hell, where they will be tortured for eternity.
So when dispensationalists sanctify violence in the Middle East, atrocities by the state of Israel, or hatred, violence, and vitriol from Donald Trump, they can spin it as living out biblical prophecy, as a prophetic act of affirming the truth of what is to come by living it out in the here and now. It’s like a perverse eucharist. It’s living out the promise of the future here in the present, but in an objectively un-Christlike way. Yet violence is not seen as antichrist in end-times theology. It is the way of dispensationalist Jesus. It’s how dispensationalist Jesus is going to make the world right again. And because Jesus is coming back, enemies aren’t the only ones who suffer the wrath of end-times theology.
The earth does too.
New heaven, new earth
At the heart of the incarnation-versus-escape dynamic is the issue of climate change. In the beginning, God commanded Adam and Eve to care for the creation God had given them—care for, not exploit. The word dominion often appears in our English Bibles, but the Hebrew word being translated as “dominion” (radah) isn’t about exploitation. Radah is the sort of responsibility Old Testament kings were called to have. The kings of Israel weren’t anointed by God to exploit their subjects however they saw fit. They were called to care for the people of Israel by ensuring justice for the poor and defending the weak. In the same way, the call of Genesis to have “dominion” over the earth is a call to care for the earth, not exploit it for our own selfish ends. We’ve obviously not done a great job of that task to steward the earth, and as a result, the climate is changing rapidly. Temperatures are rising, and sea levels with them. Glaciers are disappearing and so are animal species and entire ways of life for people in coastal communities.8
As caretakers of the garden—people with a divine calling to care for creation—we should be at the forefront of caring for creation. But we’re not. In fact, the very idea of climate change is anathema to many American Christians, particularly dispensationalists. Part of the refusal to accept the truth about climate change is the result of a never-ending stream of propaganda from right-wing media. The years-long effort to brainwash people on behalf of the oil and gas industries can’t be overstated. But when we talk about the church and climate change, we cannot overlook the role that dispensationalism plays in neglecting creation.
When most of us read the last two chapters of Revelation and hear about a new heaven and new earth, where there will be no more sickness or death or sorrow or mourning, for the old things will have passed away and all things will be made new—when we read that, our hearts are warmed and our souls are filled with hope. That’s true for dispensationalists as well. But end-times theology also gives them a pass—a “get out of jail free” card—for caring about the environment. After all, why do we need to make sure our oceans are clean and the air is breathable if Jesus is just going to set it all on fire and start over again?
While climate change denial might be new, escapism and ambivalence are not. They’ve been around as long as Revelation itself. In the sixteenth century, long before fossil fuels were invented or factories were chugging out smoke, the famous reformer Martin Luther is said to have confronted this attitude directly. What was his apocryphal response to a laissez- faire attitude about caring about the here and now if Jesus is just going to start everything over again? “Even if I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree.” It’s a defiant statement, one that speaks to our call to incarnate faith in the here and how. But it also hints at the fact that a new heaven and a new earth is about renewal of what we have here. God isn’t starting over from scratch. This is why Paul said the form of this world is passing away, not the world itself (1 Corinthians 7:31). Think of it in terms of the resurrection. When Jesus was raised from the dead, he was raised in a glorified body, but it was still the same body that had hung on the cross. His hands still had holes from the nails, his forehead scars from the crown of thorns, and his side gashes from the spears.
We have to take care of the earth because this is the only one we have, because God has called us to do so, and because this is the one God will be renewing, not re-creating. Our job as God’s hands and feet in the world is to begin that renewal in the here and now, not to wait for God to do it at some unknown point in the future. Creation care is an act of resurrection, the firstfruits of the final restoration that is to come. It restores to life what we’ve destroyed, and in doing so, lays the groundwork for Christ’s return, when God will bring to completion the work begun in the garden of Eden.
This brings us back to the fundamental problem with the rapture: it calls us to escape, while Jesus calls us to incarnation. The rapture calls us to look only at ourselves, while Jesus calls us to die to self and live our lives for others. For all the rapture’s focus on going off to heaven to live with Jesus forever, the life it calls us to lead in the here and now is, at its very core, antichrist.