There was rapture hysteria this week? Should I be worried I missed it?
I’ve never gotten the whole rapture thing.
Of all the stories meriting coverage in relation to conservative religion in the USA, the cyclical eruptions of Rapture-mania seem to me a pretty low priority. The last big one was Harold Camping's predictions in 2011, where a few people lost their life savings and all their possessions and got laughed at by the more sophisticated(*), but nothing much changed for the wider society.
I'm tempted to say that William Miller's prophecies during the 1830s(which technically did not involve a Rapture) are worth more intense historical scrutiny, but even then, his Adventist descendants constitute a very small faction of the Christian faithful anywhere in the world. Former HUD Secretary Ben Carson is probably the most prominent political Adventist today, but his views and policies are pretty much indistinguishable from social conservatives generally.
(That said, I absolutely LOVE discussing the minutiae of the more out-there sections of Christian belief. But that's more of a hobbyist thing, and I don't think there's much to be gleaned about the sociopolitical scene from doing so.)
(*) I believe there was at least one Shipmate at the time who started a Hell thread lambasting some friends or relatives who had fallen for Camping's schtick and lost everything.
For those who are interested, Jason Kirk has put together a brief history of the idea of The Rapture. It's not that long, but then the idea of The Rapture is less than two centuries old.
The Rapture seems to be a popular subject for films - I think there's one (or maybe more than one?) starring Nicholas Cage.
I used to wonder why those Raptured went to Heaven in the nude, but I realised that leaving their clothes behind would at least explain (IYSWIM) what had happened to them...
Rapturing the pilot(s) of a jumbo jet, so that it crashes, and kills everyone else, is an odd way for a God of Love to behave, but what do I know?
The Rapture seems to be a popular subject for films - I think there's one (or maybe more than one?) starring Nicholas Cage.
I believe that one was made by true-believers trying to convince everyone to get ready. There's a pretty good early-90s film called simply The Rapture, which takes for reasons of plot device that pre-mil theology is real,
but portrays God as a sadist, whose "love" is best rejected.
Rapturing the pilot(s) of a jumbo jet, so that it crashes, and kills everyone else, is an odd way for a God of Love to behave, but what do I know?
I think it's pretty strongly implied by pre-mil theology that people endangered by the Rapture deserve it because they hadn't accepted Christ. You can really tell that it's pandered toward people who secretly resent being told that they have to love their enemies(*).
(*) "God's love on the cross was for his enemies. Now it's for his friends!" as a 1970s pre-mil comic put it.
There’s also an “In Our Time” podcast on it available on BBC Sounds - a good summary of the history.
I grew up in an independent Baptist chapel that had periods of obsession with the Rapture, so still know where to find every Scriptural passage that can possibly refer to it, though it’s not something I normally think much about. Or want to, actually. One of my major childhood fears was being left behind at the Rapture and having nobody to take me into their home.
Here in the UK at least, I get the impression that the whole Rapture thing gained some traction in the '70s with the popularity of Hal Lindsay's end-times books but pretty much fizzled out thereafter apart from among some independent fundamentalist groups.
Heck, the Rapture thing even percolated into the CofE. My late wife returned home to find her parents out and assumed they'd been Raptured and she'd been left behind.
Her mother was an early-adopter charismatic Anglican who used to visit 'the Penties' now and again for a 'top-up.'
There she imbibed all manner of crack-pot beliefs about Israel and the end-times.
The Plymouth Brethren assembly I attended briefly in the early '80s was big on The Rapture but the restorationist 'new churches' weren't and reacted strongly against pre-millenialist dispensationalism.
The Christian Unions I knew weren't at all into ideas about the Rapture and neither were the more Reformed or small 'r' reformed evangelicals.
As a general rule of thumb, I felt that a fixation with the Rapture and pre-millenialism wasn't something that more Calvinistically inclined evangelicals countenanced in any way, shape or form.
Theirs was a more positive and sometimes triumphalist eschatology exemplified by Iain Murray's The Puritan Hope which many restorationists also endorsed.
I'm surprised to hear of Baptists being interested in this stuff on this side of the Pond, but then independent Baptists may have been. I've never met any Baptist Union Baptists who were into that sort of thing.
I'm told that many Brethren assemblies have moved away from dispensationslism these days but I've not had any recent contact with them so can't comment on that.
I've tended to see it as more of a Southern and Mid-West US thing and prevalent among independent or 'Bible-churches' rather than the mainline US denominations.
That still leaves Pentecostals and Charismatics of various stripes (I think it's also far more prevalent in the pews in Baptist and Restorationist circles -- the Calvinism on offer there is often 5 points deep).
I would assume it means limited to focusing on so-called Five-Point Calvinism, aka T.U.L.I.P. (which arguably isn’t a Calvinism that Calvin would recognize).
I would assume it means limited to focusing on so-called Five-Point Calvinism, aka T.U.L.I.P. (which arguably isn’t a Calvinism that Calvin would recognize).
Yeah pretty much, Restorationist churches aren't going to spend much time in the historic confessions, regardless of their claims to be 'Reformed'.
IMHO the problem with the Rapture as a teaching (well, one of the many, MANY problems!) is that it's based on the idea that God is somehow going to spare his believers from suffering. Like, when did he ever? If he didn't spare his own Son, what makes us think we're getting out of it? And Jesus very clearly told us on multiple occasions that we would suffer, and never suggested we'd get to nope out of the nastier bits of the end of the world. So I think it's all wishful thinking, just on the face of it.
IMHO the problem with the Rapture as a teaching (well, one of the many, MANY problems!) is that it's based on the idea that God is somehow going to spare his believers from suffering. Like, when did he ever? If he didn't spare his own Son, what makes us think we're getting out of it? And Jesus very clearly told us on multiple occasions that we would suffer, and never suggested we'd get to nope out of the nastier bits of the end of the world. So I think it's all wishful thinking, just on the face of it.
This relates to what I wrote earlier about pre-mil eschatology being sorta compensation for the previous indignity of being required to love your enemies. "Of course, God's not going to let us suffer like all the unsaved scumbags during the end times! He LOVES us!!!"
(My usual hat-tip to Harold Bloom and his theory that American religion as distinct from European religion is characterized by worship of the self. Ralph Waldo Emerson, This little light o' mine etc.)
If he didn't spare his own Son, what makes us think we're getting out of it?
The angelic demon in the film version of The Last Temptation Of Christ uses the reverse example in order to convince Jesus to forego death on the cross. "If he wouldn't let Abraham kill Isaac, why would he not spare his own son?"
I'm not at all sure that theorizing about WHY people accept a particular doctrine (psychologically speaking) is helpful--especially when it means being super uncharitable about their motives. Why not just take it that they are like the rest of the human race, and would prefer to get out of suffering if at all possible?
I'm not at all sure that theorizing about WHY people accept a particular doctrine (psychologically speaking) is helpful--especially when it means being super uncharitable about their motives. Why not just take it that they are like the rest of the human race, and would prefer to get out of suffering if at all possible?
I honestly don't see the problem in discussing why one group of people adopts a particular conceptual route out of personal suffering(in this case, self-exceptionalism), as opposed to another available route(eg. universalism). I think it's pretty customary for scholars and interested laypeople to do that sorta thing on a variety of religious topics(*).
(*) eg. "Why do Catholics venerate Mary more intensely than Presbyterians do? Well, aesthetically matriarchal agrarian cultures of the Mediterranean region blah blah blah."
This relates to what I wrote earlier about pre-mil eschatology being sorta compensation for the previous indignity of being required to love your enemies. "Of course, God's not going to let us suffer like all the unsaved scumbags during the end times! He LOVES us!!!"
You have these folks who are allegedly followers of Jesus, and yet you describe them as calling other people "scumbags" and finding it an "indignity" to be require to love their enemies. That means that, at the very best, you consider them to be hypocrites (since Jesus wouldn't stand for any such attitudes); it also means (given the "he LOVES us!" remark you put in their mouths) that you consider them to have no insight into their own hypocrisy--they are in fact guilty of the worst possible sin, the sin of spiritual pride.
Now this may be true of individuals, or even of some groups; but do you really want to tar the entire group of Christians who believe in this particular form of eschatology with the same brush? Are they all of them spiritually proud hypocrites? Because I think you've got a few million people in that net. And that's a lot of people to attribute the worst possible motives to. It's not only uncharitable, it's unlikely.
I am suggesting rather that, if you must go hunting for motives for why people hold certain beliefs, that you look to human weakness rather than downright human villainy. See if you can think of motives for such beliefs that DON'T demonize the people who hold them. That is why I suggested the possibility of people hoping to get out of suffering. Because who among us would not prefer to avoid suffering, if possible? It is a very human thing to wish to avoid suffering, and I can continue to treat those who hold such beliefs as fellow human beings rather than as objects of my enmity.
(To be sure, the best would probably be to stop speculating altogether on their motives, and simply deal with the sources of the doctrine--is it in line with Scripture or not? So I'm not a pure unspotted lamb here either.)
I'm told that many Brethren assemblies have moved away from dispensationslism these days but I've not had any recent contact with them so can't comment on that.
I grew up in the Open or Christian Brethren in the 50s and 60s.
I don't remember rapture being a concern, and re the second coming, it was emphasised that no-one knows the day or the hour ( nor was that modified so that someone might know the month or year.)
I have been having a very long conversation with an Evangelical leader in the area who is a very strong proponent of the Rapture. Basically, the rapture idea developed in the early 1800s by a 14 year old Scottish girl who wrote about a dream where Jesus would gather all believers in the sky. John Darby picked up on it and started promoting it around 1840. In the 1860s it crossed over to the Americas during the US Civil War--a time when a lot of Americans were thinking the end of the World was upon them. Kind of took root in American Religion at the time. On top of this, Cyrus Scofield published his Reference Bible in 1909, shortly before the War to End All Wars aka WWI. It seems every 20 years or so, the Rapture movement seems to come forward, often during a national crisis (at least in America) In my life time, I can remember it during the 60s when there was the Civil Rights Movement, then VietNam. In the 1980s there was the collapse of the Savings and Loans in the United States. Then too, it looked like we might go to war with the Iranians The early 2000s saw another economic recession and 9/11--guess what? It appears again. Recently it seems cycle through more often. Obama becoming President. Trump winning then losing the presidency. etc. A book I often refer people to is Barbara Rossing's The Rapture Exposed: A Message of Hope in Revelation.
Fair enough. My original language was not that of a neutral scholar. To re-phrase...
I think it's obvious that people who believe in the Rapture regard themselves as having a special right to avoid the sufferings of the end-times that everyone else will have to endure.
I have there avoided any speculation as to the reasons those people might hold that particular belief, and how they regard those who are forced to endure the tribulations.
I do continue to take a certain view of the psychology behind a teaching like "God's love on the cross was for his enemies, now it's for his friends", a line straight from the typewriter of Hal Lindsey, hardly a minor figure among pre-mils. Everyone else can draw whatever conclusions they want.
I have been having a very long conversation with an Evangelical leader in the area who is a very strong proponent of the Rapture. Basically, the rapture idea developed in the early 1800s by a 14 year old Scottish girl who wrote about a dream where Jesus would gather all believers in the sky. John Darby picked up on it and started promoting it around 1840. In the 1860s it crossed over to the Americas during the US Civil War--a time when a lot of Americans were thinking the end of the World was upon them. Kind of took root in American Religion at the time. On top of this, Cyrus Scofield published his Reference Bible in 1909, shortly before the War to End All Wars aka WWI. It seems every 20 years or so, the Rapture movement seems to come forward, often during a national crisis (at least in America) In my life time, I can remember it during the 60s when there was the Civil Rights Movement, then VietNam. In the 1980s there was the collapse of the Savings and Loans in the United States. Then too, it looked like we might go to war with the Iranians The early 2000s saw another economic recession and 9/11--guess what? It appears again. Recently it seems cycle through more often. Obama becoming President. Trump winning then losing the presidency. etc. A book I often refer people to is Barbara Rossing's The Rapture Exposed: A Message of Hope in Revelation.
Thanks. I wasn't aware of the Scottish girl who influenced Darby. I believe the official proof-text for the Rapture is from Matthew 24, two men in the field etc, but that's probably just an attempt at shoehorning some vague poetry into a separate belief.
I will say I find it a little hard to chart with precision the ebbing and flowing of pre-mil theology. The Late, Great Planet Earth was 1969, and I think of the entirety of the 1970s as the high point of the belief, with A Thief In The Night and its sequels, and then the "documentary" of Lindsey's original book in 1978.
LaHaye, of course, came along in the 1990s, but as far as I can tell, he was just rehashing the same basic themes as Lindsey and A Thief In The Night. Not sure if that represented an actual upswing in the number of people believing the theory.
Regards, the Matthew 24 verse. Two men working in the field, suddenly one is taken away. Happened a lot when Israel was under an occupying army. The one person was likely a rebel. It's happening a lot in the US right now, only they are not always in a field. They could likely have been working at a Hyundai factory. Point is in the Matthew text it is not a good guy necessarily that was being taken away.
Do you mean that Jesus was predicting that literal abductions by the Romans would be a feature of the end-times? Or he was just using those abductions as an easily-understood metaphor to tell his audience what would be taking place?
Personally, I always thought the lines just meant that a lot of people would be dropping dead all over the place.
These days, I see the Rapture as an evangelistic tool that intentionally exploits people's fear of being abandoned.
What first came to mind is Larry Norman's song...
Life was filled with guns and war
And everyone got trampled on the floor
I wish we'd all been ready
...
There's no time to change your mind
The Son has come and you've been left behind
Which was used in A Thief in the Night, which additionally addresses the suffering of the Tribulation. (Thus there are at least two psychological aspects, abandonment and suffering.)
I would assume it means limited to focusing on so-called Five-Point Calvinism, aka T.U.L.I.P. (which arguably isn’t a Calvinism that Calvin would recognize).
Yeah pretty much, Restorationist churches aren't going to spend much time in the historic confessions, regardless of their claims to be 'Reformed'.
Ok. Where to start ... ?
I recognise that my experience of restorationism in the UK extended from 1981 to 2000 and so is out of date but I really don't think it's as simple as that.
I would agree that the more Calvinistic restorationists rarely budged beyond TULIP and neo-Calvinist tropes.
And yes, they didn't spend much time considering the historic confessions (anymore than they showed any interest in Patristics come to that).
But that doesn't mean they imbibed dispensationalism or espoused the Rapture.
Far from it.
They were almost all a-millenialists with post-millenialist overtones.
Like their more Armininian counterparts they believed in the triumph of a 'restored' Church. So the idea of a Rapture flew in the face of that.
They had a very over-realised eschatology and whatever else may be laid to their charge, a belief in a pre-Tribulation Rapture wasn't part of the package.
Also, at a ministerial level and among some keenies on the plastic seats, there was at least some broader awareness of the wider tradition as it were.
A feature of evangelicalism as a whole, I would suggest, in both its conservative and charismatic forms, is a degree of selectivity. They are selective in their approach to scripture and selective in terms of what they take or reject from the older or wider Christian traditions.
The whole thing is driven by pragmatism. What seems to 'work'.
In the case of The Rapture and its associated tropes, that didn't fit into the restorationist agenda and frame of reference at all. So out it went.
Were you ever in a restorationist church?
I was.
I know whereof I speak.
I was interested to read @LatchKeyKid's comments about not coming across pre-millenial dispensationalism in the Brethren Assemblies he encountered in the '50s and '60s.
I don't doubt his testimony but across the Open Brethren assemblies I knew in South Wales it was almost on a par with belief in the Trinity and the Deity of Christ.
As for the Baptists, I can honestly say I've never met a single British Baptist that I'm aware of who entertained a belief in a pre-Tribulation Rapture and the whole Schofield dispensationalist schema.
In Matthew 24 Jesus is talking about the signs of the end times. Wars and rumors of wars. People suddenly being taken, etc. This was already happening. It is as if Jesus was saying as sure as these world events happen, the end times will come. I do not think Jesus was inciting fear, but he was using these examples to cultivate watchfulness, endurance, and hope.
They were almost all a-millenialists with post-millenialist overtones.
Were you ever in a restorationist church?
Yes I was - multiple churches across a number of years which have all been in different movements, have close friends who ended up in leadership positions across the piece and so on.
That describes the position of the majority - but not all - the movement leaders, but at the local level it devolved into 'this is a subject that's very difficult and on which a lot of people disagree .. even among our elders we hold different views' [*]. In actual practice and in the pews - as opposed to the leadership - dispensationalist views were far more common - simply because they were growing so fast, a lot of their growth via transfers and people in other groups tend to hold to dispensationalist views (and consume a lot of dispensationalist literature).
[*] Oh .. and when they did the odd teaching session setting out the different views, it was fairly obvious that non-dispensationalist views were completely novel to a large section of the congregation, and I wonder if they would have even given them a hearing but for the implicit imprimatur from leadership.
In fact, I'd link this to your mention of pragmatism, simply because they grew so fast and became a kind of defacto hub for many charismatic people moving into a particular area (maybe as a result of going to university) it would have been hard to police the views of people as they came in.
In the case of The Rapture and its associated tropes, that didn't fit into the restorationist agenda and frame of reference at all.
It can be made to fit -- there are plenty of people in those circles, and others, who posit a revival prior to the rapture.
I have been having a very long conversation with an Evangelical leader in the area who is a very strong proponent of the Rapture. Basically, the rapture idea developed in the early 1800s by a 14 year old Scottish girl who wrote about a dream where Jesus would gather all believers in the sky. John Darby picked up on it and started promoting it around 1840. In the 1860s it crossed over to the Americas during the US Civil War--a time when a lot of Americans were thinking the end of the World was upon them. Kind of took root in American Religion at the time. On top of this, Cyrus Scofield published his Reference Bible in 1909, shortly before the War to End All Wars aka WWI. It seems every 20 years or so, the Rapture movement seems to come forward, often during a national crisis (at least in America) In my life time, I can remember it during the 60s when there was the Civil Rights Movement, then VietNam. In the 1980s there was the collapse of the Savings and Loans in the United States. Then too, it looked like we might go to war with the Iranians The early 2000s saw another economic recession and 9/11--guess what? It appears again. Recently it seems cycle through more often. Obama becoming President. Trump winning then losing the presidency. etc. A book I often refer people to is Barbara Rossing's The Rapture Exposed: A Message of Hope in Revelation.
Thanks. I wasn't aware of the Scottish girl who influenced Darby.
The Scottish girl who some say influenced Darby would be more accurate. The Wikipedia article on the girl—Margaret MacDonald—explains why “scholars think there are major obstacles that render these accusations [of MacDonsld’s influence on Darby”] untenable.” Among the reasons to discount the claim is that Darby first committed his thoughts about the rapture to writing before MacDonald’s “utterances.”
I have been having a very long conversation with an Evangelical leader in the area who is a very strong proponent of the Rapture. Basically, the rapture idea developed in the early 1800s by a 14 year old Scottish girl who wrote about a dream where Jesus would gather all believers in the sky. John Darby picked up on it and started promoting it around 1840. In the 1860s it crossed over to the Americas during the US Civil War--a time when a lot of Americans were thinking the end of the World was upon them. Kind of took root in American Religion at the time. On top of this, Cyrus Scofield published his Reference Bible in 1909, shortly before the War to End All Wars aka WWI. It seems every 20 years or so, the Rapture movement seems to come forward, often during a national crisis (at least in America) In my life time, I can remember it during the 60s when there was the Civil Rights Movement, then VietNam. In the 1980s there was the collapse of the Savings and Loans in the United States. Then too, it looked like we might go to war with the Iranians The early 2000s saw another economic recession and 9/11--guess what? It appears again. Recently it seems cycle through more often. Obama becoming President. Trump winning then losing the presidency. etc. A book I often refer people to is Barbara Rossing's The Rapture Exposed: A Message of Hope in Revelation.
Thanks. I wasn't aware of the Scottish girl who influenced Darby.
The Scottish girl who some say influenced Darby would be more accurate. The Wikipedia article on the girl—Margaret MacDonald—explains why “scholars think there are major obstacles that render these accusations [of MacDonsld’s influence on Darby”] untenable.” Among the reasons to discount the claim is that Darby first committed his thoughts about the rapture to writing before MacDonald’s “utterances.”
The point is, no matter who thought of it first, it was dreamt up. It was not taught in the first 1800 (give or take) years of the church.
I have been having a very long conversation with an Evangelical leader in the area who is a very strong proponent of the Rapture. Basically, the rapture idea developed in the early 1800s by a 14 year old Scottish girl who wrote about a dream where Jesus would gather all believers in the sky. John Darby picked up on it and started promoting it around 1840. In the 1860s it crossed over to the Americas during the US Civil War--a time when a lot of Americans were thinking the end of the World was upon them. Kind of took root in American Religion at the time. On top of this, Cyrus Scofield published his Reference Bible in 1909, shortly before the War to End All Wars aka WWI. It seems every 20 years or so, the Rapture movement seems to come forward, often during a national crisis (at least in America) In my life time, I can remember it during the 60s when there was the Civil Rights Movement, then VietNam. In the 1980s there was the collapse of the Savings and Loans in the United States. Then too, it looked like we might go to war with the Iranians The early 2000s saw another economic recession and 9/11--guess what? It appears again. Recently it seems cycle through more often. Obama becoming President. Trump winning then losing the presidency. etc. A book I often refer people to is Barbara Rossing's The Rapture Exposed: A Message of Hope in Revelation.
Thanks. I wasn't aware of the Scottish girl who influenced Darby.
The Scottish girl who some say influenced Darby would be more accurate. The Wikipedia article on the girl—Margaret MacDonald—explains why “scholars think there are major obstacles that render these accusations [of MacDonsld’s influence on Darby”] untenable.” Among the reasons to discount the claim is that Darby first committed his thoughts about the rapture to writing before MacDonald’s “utterances.”
The point is, no matter who thought of it first, it was dreamt up. It was not taught in the first 1800 (give or take) years of the church.
Yes. But the point is also that if you want to convince someone who believes in the rapture that it was dreamt up in the 1800s, and you try to do so with “facts” that are easily cast into doubt or disproven, you’re undercutting your own argument. Once it’s clear that one piece of your argument isn’t trustworthy, then why should the person you’re trying to convince trust anything else you say?
In fact, I'd link this to your mention of pragmatism, simply because they grew so fast and became a kind of defacto hub for many charismatic people moving into a particular area (maybe as a result of going to university) it would have been hard to police the views of people as they came in.
In the case of The Rapture and its associated tropes, that didn't fit into the restorationist agenda and frame of reference at all.
It can be made to fit -- there are plenty of people in those circles, and others, who posit a revival prior to the rapture.
Ok, I can see what you are getting at now and I hope my tone earlier wasn't too confrontational.
I think you do have a point and in typical Gamaliel fashion will posit that it's a both/and thing 😉 and that both what you are saying and my own experience ring true.
I think you are right that many of those coming into the restorationist ambit from other settings - such as Pentecostalism, the Brethren (although not those @LatchKeyKid encountered) and other independent evangelical and charismatic groups would have accepted dispensationalism as some kind of default option.
For my part - and I am speaking personally here - one of the reasons I was initially drawn into the restorationist ambit was precisely because they didn't appear to espouse the highly literal dispensationalist schema I'd encountered in the Brethren.
There were a lot of former Brethren within the restorationist orbit.
I would certainly accept that many adherents wanted their cake and eat it and so combined ideas of an end-times revival with that of the Rapture.
In practice, I suspect there were a range of views and gradations as you say, depending on what people had been exposed to previously. Much of the rapid growth was 'transfer growth' of course but we did have a lot of unchurched converts it has to be said.
As an aside, I'm no longer sure it's possible to speak of a UK 'restorationist' movement as such, other than in the case of New Frontiers (or whatever name they go by these days).
All the other streams and splinter-groups seem to have become less 'restorationist' in tone and more broadly revivalist.
A few years ago I carried out something of a research project on behalf of a friend in one of these networks and found that most of the people I spoke to weren't at all bothered about apparent 'restorationist' distinctives but harboured a strong nostalgia for the glory days of the movement in terms of the closeness of the fellowship they experienced and how they'd felt free to clap and dance and speak in tongues in ways they wouldn't have been able to in their previous affiliations.
I'm not saying that is good, bad or indifferent but concurring that what binds people together in fellowships of that kind isn't a particular theology as such but a sense of shared experience.
I 'get' that of course and still feel am immediate sense of 'connection' with people I knew from those days even though I'm in a different place theologically.
Anyway, that's an aside.
I s'pose what I'm now saying is that dispensationalism is simply one of several revivalist strands that make up the spiritual DNA of people in these churches even if it's not actively promoted from the pulpit as it were.
The whole thing was a hodge-podge and that was both a strength and a weakness.
My own experience of this whole subject is problematic.
I was brought up in the Open Brethren in UK, and unlike Latchkey Kid's experience, the Rapture and dispensationalism in general was very much portrayed as a given, to the extent that I was surprised as an undergraduate to come across other Christian students who did not hold to these beliefs. We were issued with complicated diagrams in Bible Class that has the whole of history mapped out according to the Darby view of eschatology.
My own teenage 'conversion' was after watching 'Thief in the Night' at an evangelistic rally in 1975 - like many other kids of similar backgrounds I had sometimes experienced a feeling of panic when my parents were late showing up somewhere, thinking the Rapture must have happened. But it took something like this film (very dodgy theologically, in retrospect) to bring me to a crisis point where I was finally willing to make a Christian commitment. So it worked for 'good' in that it brought me to faith. A faith that I am still living out, although my theology is very different these days! ... but what does that say about me as a Christian, bearing in mind where my faith came from? See what I mean about it being problematic?
... but what does that say about me as a Christian, bearing in mind where my faith came from? See what I mean about it being problematic?
I would have to think that there are a lotta Christians who have come to their current beliefs and/or denominations via initial engagement with beliefs and/or denominations they now consider erroneous. Luther would never have been able to return to a pure form of Christianity had he never been Catholic to begin with, for example.
Point of information: Luther, IMHO, never did return to a pure form of Christianity since the church is in itself a human institution. He did want it to get back as close to its roots as possible/
Point of information: Luther, IMHO, never did return to a pure form of Christianity since the church is in itself a human institution. He did want it to get back as close to its roots as possible/
Okay. Luther would never have started with his goal of getting Christianity back to its roots had he not been Catholic in the first place.
@Gracious Rebel - your experience mirrors that of many people I knew from Brethren backgrounds.
I have a friend who was terrified one evening hearing a loud train hoot as he thought it was the 'Last Trumpet'.
As I've mentioned, this sort of thing even crept through the back door into evangelical Anglicanism. They showed films like that at my late wife's church youth group and she thought her Mum had been Raptured away on several occasions.
I don't think your experience 'says' anything about you or your faith but more about the particular environment you grew up in.
I've heard it posited that groups like the Brethren 'had' to promote a kind of edge-of-the-seat anxiety and virtual excitement about the End Times and so on as otherwise they would have realised that they were leading mundane suburban lives the same as everyone else.
It creates a certain frisson and sense of being 'special' if you see yourself at the centre of a cosmic struggle.
I think that's too simplistic and rather cynical but all religious groups tend to foster something or other that sets them apart from 'regular folks' or other forms or 'brands' of Christianity.
It can be the sense of the imminent Parousia - 'We've got the charts to prove it' - or, as in the case of some in my own Tradition, 'We have the One True Faith and that entitles us to be arsey towards everyone else ...'
Although I do take on board @Lamb Chopped's point that it isn't always necessary to assign some kind of ulterior motive.
I think that's too simplistic and rather cynical but all religious groups tend to foster something or other that sets them apart from 'regular folks' or other forms or 'brands' of Christianity.
In the mid-2000s movie Son Of Rambow, told from the POV of a Plymouth Brethren teenager in early 80s UK, there's a scene where th boy's mother has a heartfelt conversation in which she acknowledges that hearing music can be one of the most beautiful experiences in the world, but if they start listening to it, they'll lose what makes them distinct from everyone else.
I'm sure the mileage varied, as @LatchKeyKid reminds us from his own experience.
I was introduced to punk rock by a Brethren friend. Not that his parents approved.
The Brethren assembly he attended was pretty 'Open' and later evolved into what might be considered a more 'general' independent evangelical church rather than one more specifically 'Brethren' in tone.
He eventually became disillusioned with evangelicalism in any form and now doesn't engage with church or organised religion in any way.
Perhaps it was punk that was to blame ... 😉
I remember him listening to The Saints and earnestly praying for Joe Strummer to be 'saved'.
'The Sound of the Suburbs' by The Members was the soundtrack to all of this.
I often think of people in nondescript 1930s or 1950s houses acting like everyone else during the week, watching the same TV programmes and going on holiday to the same locations, then poring over lurid charts about end-times prophecy replete with multi-headed beasts and a deluge of stars, sulphur and fire.
I often think of people in nondescript 1930s or 1950s houses acting like everyone else during the week, watching the same TV programmes and going on holiday to the same locations, then poring over lurid charts about end-times prophecy replete with multi-headed beasts and a deluge of stars, sulphur and fire.
Likely with a cup of tea and a digestive.
Meanwhile their apparently identical counterparts in other houses were writing Kirk/Spock slash fic. Everyone needs a hobby.
My own teenage 'conversion' was after watching 'Thief in the Night' at an evangelistic rally in 1975 - like many other kids of similar backgrounds I had sometimes experienced a feeling of panic when my parents were late showing up somewhere, thinking the Rapture must have happened. But it took something like this film (very dodgy theologically, in retrospect) to bring me to a crisis point where I was finally willing to make a Christian commitment. So it worked for 'good' in that it brought me to faith. A faith that I am still living out, although my theology is very different these days! ... but what does that say about me as a Christian, bearing in mind where my faith came from? See what I mean about it being problematic?
Gracious Rebel - your experience mirrors that of many people I knew from Brethren backgrounds.
...
As I've mentioned, this sort of thing even crept through the back door into evangelical Anglicanism. They showed films like that at my late wife's church youth group and she thought her Mum had been Raptured away on several occasions.
Indeed this did feature in evangelical Anglicanism. (The dispensationalist diagrams less so.)
I don't think your experience 'says' anything about you or your faith but more about the particular environment you grew up in.
I'm in two minds about this.
Considering the effect on individuals, treating children in this way now seems abusive, and in this sense I think you can only see it as "good" if you think the end justifies the means.
Considering the effect on communities, what matters is getting people to believe the same thing, which isn't dissimilar to Gamma Gamaliel's earlier point:
I'm not saying that is good, bad or indifferent but concurring that what binds people together in fellowships of that kind isn't a particular theology as such but a sense of shared experience.
In other words, it doesn't matter so much what the details of the theology are, but that you all experience a shared belief in it.
Culver Grove Gospel Hall (Stanmore in the Borough of Harrow) was the assembly I was brought up in. I was 16 when I moved to Stanmore Baptist. They were anti-evolution, but not concerned that I accepted evolution. We did have occasional contact with other assemblies, but I don't remember their names. Since I left, they became Culver Evangelical Church (the assembly would never have used the word "church" in their title), and they are now called simply "Culver Church", and are no longer an assembly. The last contact I had with any of them was after my mother died in 1993, when I visited an elder and his wife, who both greeted me warmly. My father was an elder until my sister married an Anglican and the other elders would not let the marriage be held in the assembly hall. When that happened the rest of my family joined me at the Baptist Church.
In my 16 years I never heard of the rapture, and my father and mother never spoke of it. My father did some preaching there and at other assemblies, and for a couple of years I conducted the rest of the service when he preached. His sermons never mentioned the rapture.
I hasten to add @Pease that my own view is that it does matter what a particular group practices and believes.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
I didn't interpret @Gracious Rebel's comments as suggesting that the evangelistic techniques of the 'Thief in the Night' kind were acceptable - in a 'but I came to faith through it so it must be OK' way.
I can understand though why she feels conflicted about the whole thing.
What I was trying to say, albeit clumsily, was that it wasn't Gracious Rebel's fault that she was exposed to this sort of thing at a young and impressionable age.
One could argue that it says more about her that she has retained and developed her faith in spite of all that.
I'm sure if you were to survey people in my parish about what they believe and why they attend I doubt you'd get an every 'i' dotted and 't' crossed exposition on the Nicene Creed.
You'd get people there because they've not known anything else or because they are 'ethnically' Orthodox or because they think it's magic.
In the same way, the people I interviewed in my friend's restorationist church weren't at all bothered about 'restoring' the church to its apparent pristine purity and splendour through the operation of the Ephesians 4 'ministry gifts' in the way these are understood in 'classic' restorationism.
Rather they were more interested in the depth and quality of the relationships they had with other people in their churches and the opportunity to worship in a more expressive way than they'd been able to do in their previous settings.
The theology was secondary to the experience.
I suspect that often applies albeit in different ways in other traditions, be they stratospherically sacramental or snake-belly low or all stations in between.
There are also settings where theological concerns barely arise.
I once met an atheist Quaker who told me he attended the meetings because he 'liked the quiet.'
That might make sense in that context but not, officially at least, in a charismatic evangelical one, say. 'I don't believe a word of it but I like the lively worship ...'
As has been indicated upthread, a lot of this has to do with 'branding' and 'marketing.'
Some groups differentiated themselves from others with a similar ethos by saying, 'Look, we've got the measure of the End-Times and we've got the charts to prove it ...'
My lot say, 'Look, we're older than everyone else. We've been around longest.'
I think you are right that many of those coming into the restorationist ambit from other settings - such as Pentecostalism, the Brethren (although not those @LatchKeyKid encountered) and other independent evangelical and charismatic groups would have accepted dispensationalism as some kind of default option.
It's worth considering what happens when - as is often the norm - there's no teaching on the end times at all. Insofar as people think about it at all, they are likely to end up looking at popular Christian works (and of these the bulk are going to be premil dispensationalist of some kind, off hand I can only think of maybe 2/3 books that took a different view and were popular among non-confessional evangelicals).
I would certainly accept that many adherents wanted their cake and eat it and so combined ideas of an end-times revival with that of the Rapture.
I think this dates back at least as far as Larkin ('Dispensational Truth') - it was coterminous with the idea that there'd be a mass conversion of Jews ..
As an aside, I'm no longer sure it's possible to speak of a UK 'restorationist' movement as such, other than in the case of New Frontiers (or whatever name they go by these days).
All the other streams and splinter-groups seem to have become less 'restorationist' in tone and more broadly revivalist.
Well there's the age profile of these groups, at this point we are on to second/third generation of leaders and while the founders may have got to amillenialism/post-millenialism via reading the puritans directly, in the absence of actual foundational teaching these doctrines were likely to prove unstable and liable to decay.
I didn't interpret @Gracious Rebel's comments as suggesting that the evangelistic techniques of the 'Thief in the Night' kind were acceptable - in a 'but I came to faith through it so it must be OK' way.
I can understand though why she feels conflicted about the whole thing.
What I was trying to say, albeit clumsily, was that it wasn't Gracious Rebel's fault that she was exposed to this sort of thing at a young and impressionable age.
One could argue that it says more about her that she has retained and developed her faith in spite of all that.
Thanks GG. That expresses exactly what I was trying to say -)
It's worth considering what happens when - as is often the norm - there's no teaching on the end times at all. Insofar as people think about it at all, they are likely to end up looking at popular Christian works (and of these the bulk are going to be premil dispensationalist of some kind, off hand I can only think of maybe 2/3 books that took a different view and were popular among non-confessional evangelicals).
It's become a bit of a commonplace in discussions like this to point out that the RCC doesn't teach pre-mil eschatology, or really anything along those lines, and pretty much just leaves it at "Like it says in the creeds, Christ will come again, we can't give you much more detail than that."
Which is true, but then you've got the marian cults, which have gone absolutely nuts for darbyite-equivalent prophetic schemata. Going by your observation, I suppose the lacuna of such teaching on a church-wide level allows those at the unofficial levels to fill the gap with whatever they pick up from popular religion and adapt to their own purposes(*).
(*) In my experience, the Mary cults tend to less panicked about the EU and the position of Israel and more focused on straightforward anti-Communism. Not sure what adjustments they made following the end of the Cold War, maybe just morphed into "anti-globalism" like other anti-Communists did.
Comments
I’ve never gotten the whole rapture thing.
Of all the stories meriting coverage in relation to conservative religion in the USA, the cyclical eruptions of Rapture-mania seem to me a pretty low priority. The last big one was Harold Camping's predictions in 2011, where a few people lost their life savings and all their possessions and got laughed at by the more sophisticated(*), but nothing much changed for the wider society.
I'm tempted to say that William Miller's prophecies during the 1830s(which technically did not involve a Rapture) are worth more intense historical scrutiny, but even then, his Adventist descendants constitute a very small faction of the Christian faithful anywhere in the world. Former HUD Secretary Ben Carson is probably the most prominent political Adventist today, but his views and policies are pretty much indistinguishable from social conservatives generally.
(That said, I absolutely LOVE discussing the minutiae of the more out-there sections of Christian belief. But that's more of a hobbyist thing, and I don't think there's much to be gleaned about the sociopolitical scene from doing so.)
(*) I believe there was at least one Shipmate at the time who started a Hell thread lambasting some friends or relatives who had fallen for Camping's schtick and lost everything.
I used to wonder why those Raptured went to Heaven in the nude, but I realised that leaving their clothes behind would at least explain (IYSWIM) what had happened to them...
Rapturing the pilot(s) of a jumbo jet, so that it crashes, and kills everyone else, is an odd way for a God of Love to behave, but what do I know?
I believe that one was made by true-believers trying to convince everyone to get ready. There's a pretty good early-90s film called simply The Rapture, which takes for reasons of plot device that pre-mil theology is real,
I think it's pretty strongly implied by pre-mil theology that people endangered by the Rapture deserve it because they hadn't accepted Christ. You can really tell that it's pandered toward people who secretly resent being told that they have to love their enemies(*).
(*) "God's love on the cross was for his enemies. Now it's for his friends!" as a 1970s pre-mil comic put it.
I grew up in an independent Baptist chapel that had periods of obsession with the Rapture, so still know where to find every Scriptural passage that can possibly refer to it, though it’s not something I normally think much about. Or want to, actually. One of my major childhood fears was being left behind at the Rapture and having nobody to take me into their home.
It's the foundation for one of those urban legends that used to frequently get trotted out in evangelical sermons as true.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/skyway-to-heaven/
Heck, the Rapture thing even percolated into the CofE. My late wife returned home to find her parents out and assumed they'd been Raptured and she'd been left behind.
Her mother was an early-adopter charismatic Anglican who used to visit 'the Penties' now and again for a 'top-up.'
There she imbibed all manner of crack-pot beliefs about Israel and the end-times.
The Plymouth Brethren assembly I attended briefly in the early '80s was big on The Rapture but the restorationist 'new churches' weren't and reacted strongly against pre-millenialist dispensationalism.
The Christian Unions I knew weren't at all into ideas about the Rapture and neither were the more Reformed or small 'r' reformed evangelicals.
As a general rule of thumb, I felt that a fixation with the Rapture and pre-millenialism wasn't something that more Calvinistically inclined evangelicals countenanced in any way, shape or form.
Theirs was a more positive and sometimes triumphalist eschatology exemplified by Iain Murray's The Puritan Hope which many restorationists also endorsed.
I'm surprised to hear of Baptists being interested in this stuff on this side of the Pond, but then independent Baptists may have been. I've never met any Baptist Union Baptists who were into that sort of thing.
I'm told that many Brethren assemblies have moved away from dispensationslism these days but I've not had any recent contact with them so can't comment on that.
I've tended to see it as more of a Southern and Mid-West US thing and prevalent among independent or 'Bible-churches' rather than the mainline US denominations.
What does "five points deep" mean?
Yeah pretty much, Restorationist churches aren't going to spend much time in the historic confessions, regardless of their claims to be 'Reformed'.
This relates to what I wrote earlier about pre-mil eschatology being sorta compensation for the previous indignity of being required to love your enemies. "Of course, God's not going to let us suffer like all the unsaved scumbags during the end times! He LOVES us!!!"
(My usual hat-tip to Harold Bloom and his theory that American religion as distinct from European religion is characterized by worship of the self. Ralph Waldo Emerson, This little light o' mine etc.)
The angelic demon in the film version of The Last Temptation Of Christ uses the reverse example in order to convince Jesus to forego death on the cross. "If he wouldn't let Abraham kill Isaac, why would he not spare his own son?"
I honestly don't see the problem in discussing why one group of people adopts a particular conceptual route out of personal suffering(in this case, self-exceptionalism), as opposed to another available route(eg. universalism). I think it's pretty customary for scholars and interested laypeople to do that sorta thing on a variety of religious topics(*).
(*) eg. "Why do Catholics venerate Mary more intensely than Presbyterians do? Well, aesthetically matriarchal agrarian cultures of the Mediterranean region blah blah blah."
You said,
You have these folks who are allegedly followers of Jesus, and yet you describe them as calling other people "scumbags" and finding it an "indignity" to be require to love their enemies. That means that, at the very best, you consider them to be hypocrites (since Jesus wouldn't stand for any such attitudes); it also means (given the "he LOVES us!" remark you put in their mouths) that you consider them to have no insight into their own hypocrisy--they are in fact guilty of the worst possible sin, the sin of spiritual pride.
Now this may be true of individuals, or even of some groups; but do you really want to tar the entire group of Christians who believe in this particular form of eschatology with the same brush? Are they all of them spiritually proud hypocrites? Because I think you've got a few million people in that net. And that's a lot of people to attribute the worst possible motives to. It's not only uncharitable, it's unlikely.
I am suggesting rather that, if you must go hunting for motives for why people hold certain beliefs, that you look to human weakness rather than downright human villainy. See if you can think of motives for such beliefs that DON'T demonize the people who hold them. That is why I suggested the possibility of people hoping to get out of suffering. Because who among us would not prefer to avoid suffering, if possible? It is a very human thing to wish to avoid suffering, and I can continue to treat those who hold such beliefs as fellow human beings rather than as objects of my enmity.
(To be sure, the best would probably be to stop speculating altogether on their motives, and simply deal with the sources of the doctrine--is it in line with Scripture or not? So I'm not a pure unspotted lamb here either.)
I don't remember rapture being a concern, and re the second coming, it was emphasised that no-one knows the day or the hour ( nor was that modified so that someone might know the month or year.)
Fair enough. My original language was not that of a neutral scholar. To re-phrase...
I have there avoided any speculation as to the reasons those people might hold that particular belief, and how they regard those who are forced to endure the tribulations.
I do continue to take a certain view of the psychology behind a teaching like "God's love on the cross was for his enemies, now it's for his friends", a line straight from the typewriter of Hal Lindsey, hardly a minor figure among pre-mils. Everyone else can draw whatever conclusions they want.
Thanks. I wasn't aware of the Scottish girl who influenced Darby. I believe the official proof-text for the Rapture is from Matthew 24, two men in the field etc, but that's probably just an attempt at shoehorning some vague poetry into a separate belief.
I will say I find it a little hard to chart with precision the ebbing and flowing of pre-mil theology. The Late, Great Planet Earth was 1969, and I think of the entirety of the 1970s as the high point of the belief, with A Thief In The Night and its sequels, and then the "documentary" of Lindsey's original book in 1978.
LaHaye, of course, came along in the 1990s, but as far as I can tell, he was just rehashing the same basic themes as Lindsey and A Thief In The Night. Not sure if that represented an actual upswing in the number of people believing the theory.
Do you mean that Jesus was predicting that literal abductions by the Romans would be a feature of the end-times? Or he was just using those abductions as an easily-understood metaphor to tell his audience what would be taking place?
Personally, I always thought the lines just meant that a lot of people would be dropping dead all over the place.
What first came to mind is Larry Norman's song... Which was used in A Thief in the Night, which additionally addresses the suffering of the Tribulation. (Thus there are at least two psychological aspects, abandonment and suffering.)
Ok. Where to start ... ?
I recognise that my experience of restorationism in the UK extended from 1981 to 2000 and so is out of date but I really don't think it's as simple as that.
I would agree that the more Calvinistic restorationists rarely budged beyond TULIP and neo-Calvinist tropes.
And yes, they didn't spend much time considering the historic confessions (anymore than they showed any interest in Patristics come to that).
But that doesn't mean they imbibed dispensationalism or espoused the Rapture.
Far from it.
They were almost all a-millenialists with post-millenialist overtones.
Like their more Armininian counterparts they believed in the triumph of a 'restored' Church. So the idea of a Rapture flew in the face of that.
They had a very over-realised eschatology and whatever else may be laid to their charge, a belief in a pre-Tribulation Rapture wasn't part of the package.
Also, at a ministerial level and among some keenies on the plastic seats, there was at least some broader awareness of the wider tradition as it were.
A feature of evangelicalism as a whole, I would suggest, in both its conservative and charismatic forms, is a degree of selectivity. They are selective in their approach to scripture and selective in terms of what they take or reject from the older or wider Christian traditions.
The whole thing is driven by pragmatism. What seems to 'work'.
In the case of The Rapture and its associated tropes, that didn't fit into the restorationist agenda and frame of reference at all. So out it went.
Were you ever in a restorationist church?
I was.
I know whereof I speak.
I was interested to read @LatchKeyKid's comments about not coming across pre-millenial dispensationalism in the Brethren Assemblies he encountered in the '50s and '60s.
I don't doubt his testimony but across the Open Brethren assemblies I knew in South Wales it was almost on a par with belief in the Trinity and the Deity of Christ.
As for the Baptists, I can honestly say I've never met a single British Baptist that I'm aware of who entertained a belief in a pre-Tribulation Rapture and the whole Schofield dispensationalist schema.
Yes I was - multiple churches across a number of years which have all been in different movements, have close friends who ended up in leadership positions across the piece and so on.
That describes the position of the majority - but not all - the movement leaders, but at the local level it devolved into 'this is a subject that's very difficult and on which a lot of people disagree .. even among our elders we hold different views' [*]. In actual practice and in the pews - as opposed to the leadership - dispensationalist views were far more common - simply because they were growing so fast, a lot of their growth via transfers and people in other groups tend to hold to dispensationalist views (and consume a lot of dispensationalist literature).
[*] Oh .. and when they did the odd teaching session setting out the different views, it was fairly obvious that non-dispensationalist views were completely novel to a large section of the congregation, and I wonder if they would have even given them a hearing but for the implicit imprimatur from leadership.
It can be made to fit -- there are plenty of people in those circles, and others, who posit a revival prior to the rapture.
If you failed to rapture
you may be suffering from ADD
(Ascension Deficit Disorder).
The point is, no matter who thought of it first, it was dreamt up. It was not taught in the first 1800 (give or take) years of the church.
Ok, I can see what you are getting at now and I hope my tone earlier wasn't too confrontational.
I think you do have a point and in typical Gamaliel fashion will posit that it's a both/and thing 😉 and that both what you are saying and my own experience ring true.
I think you are right that many of those coming into the restorationist ambit from other settings - such as Pentecostalism, the Brethren (although not those @LatchKeyKid encountered) and other independent evangelical and charismatic groups would have accepted dispensationalism as some kind of default option.
For my part - and I am speaking personally here - one of the reasons I was initially drawn into the restorationist ambit was precisely because they didn't appear to espouse the highly literal dispensationalist schema I'd encountered in the Brethren.
There were a lot of former Brethren within the restorationist orbit.
I would certainly accept that many adherents wanted their cake and eat it and so combined ideas of an end-times revival with that of the Rapture.
In practice, I suspect there were a range of views and gradations as you say, depending on what people had been exposed to previously. Much of the rapid growth was 'transfer growth' of course but we did have a lot of unchurched converts it has to be said.
As an aside, I'm no longer sure it's possible to speak of a UK 'restorationist' movement as such, other than in the case of New Frontiers (or whatever name they go by these days).
All the other streams and splinter-groups seem to have become less 'restorationist' in tone and more broadly revivalist.
A few years ago I carried out something of a research project on behalf of a friend in one of these networks and found that most of the people I spoke to weren't at all bothered about apparent 'restorationist' distinctives but harboured a strong nostalgia for the glory days of the movement in terms of the closeness of the fellowship they experienced and how they'd felt free to clap and dance and speak in tongues in ways they wouldn't have been able to in their previous affiliations.
I'm not saying that is good, bad or indifferent but concurring that what binds people together in fellowships of that kind isn't a particular theology as such but a sense of shared experience.
I 'get' that of course and still feel am immediate sense of 'connection' with people I knew from those days even though I'm in a different place theologically.
Anyway, that's an aside.
I s'pose what I'm now saying is that dispensationalism is simply one of several revivalist strands that make up the spiritual DNA of people in these churches even if it's not actively promoted from the pulpit as it were.
The whole thing was a hodge-podge and that was both a strength and a weakness.
I was brought up in the Open Brethren in UK, and unlike Latchkey Kid's experience, the Rapture and dispensationalism in general was very much portrayed as a given, to the extent that I was surprised as an undergraduate to come across other Christian students who did not hold to these beliefs. We were issued with complicated diagrams in Bible Class that has the whole of history mapped out according to the Darby view of eschatology.
My own teenage 'conversion' was after watching 'Thief in the Night' at an evangelistic rally in 1975 - like many other kids of similar backgrounds I had sometimes experienced a feeling of panic when my parents were late showing up somewhere, thinking the Rapture must have happened. But it took something like this film (very dodgy theologically, in retrospect) to bring me to a crisis point where I was finally willing to make a Christian commitment. So it worked for 'good' in that it brought me to faith. A faith that I am still living out, although my theology is very different these days! ... but what does that say about me as a Christian, bearing in mind where my faith came from? See what I mean about it being problematic?
I would have to think that there are a lotta Christians who have come to their current beliefs and/or denominations via initial engagement with beliefs and/or denominations they now consider erroneous. Luther would never have been able to return to a pure form of Christianity had he never been Catholic to begin with, for example.
Okay. Luther would never have started with his goal of getting Christianity back to its roots had he not been Catholic in the first place.
@Gracious Rebel - your experience mirrors that of many people I knew from Brethren backgrounds.
I have a friend who was terrified one evening hearing a loud train hoot as he thought it was the 'Last Trumpet'.
As I've mentioned, this sort of thing even crept through the back door into evangelical Anglicanism. They showed films like that at my late wife's church youth group and she thought her Mum had been Raptured away on several occasions.
I don't think your experience 'says' anything about you or your faith but more about the particular environment you grew up in.
I've heard it posited that groups like the Brethren 'had' to promote a kind of edge-of-the-seat anxiety and virtual excitement about the End Times and so on as otherwise they would have realised that they were leading mundane suburban lives the same as everyone else.
It creates a certain frisson and sense of being 'special' if you see yourself at the centre of a cosmic struggle.
I think that's too simplistic and rather cynical but all religious groups tend to foster something or other that sets them apart from 'regular folks' or other forms or 'brands' of Christianity.
It can be the sense of the imminent Parousia - 'We've got the charts to prove it' - or, as in the case of some in my own Tradition, 'We have the One True Faith and that entitles us to be arsey towards everyone else ...'
Although I do take on board @Lamb Chopped's point that it isn't always necessary to assign some kind of ulterior motive.
In the mid-2000s movie Son Of Rambow, told from the POV of a Plymouth Brethren teenager in early 80s UK, there's a scene where th boy's mother has a heartfelt conversation in which she acknowledges that hearing music can be one of the most beautiful experiences in the world, but if they start listening to it, they'll lose what makes them distinct from everyone else.
I'm sure the mileage varied, as @LatchKeyKid reminds us from his own experience.
I was introduced to punk rock by a Brethren friend. Not that his parents approved.
The Brethren assembly he attended was pretty 'Open' and later evolved into what might be considered a more 'general' independent evangelical church rather than one more specifically 'Brethren' in tone.
He eventually became disillusioned with evangelicalism in any form and now doesn't engage with church or organised religion in any way.
Perhaps it was punk that was to blame ... 😉
I remember him listening to The Saints and earnestly praying for Joe Strummer to be 'saved'.
'The Sound of the Suburbs' by The Members was the soundtrack to all of this.
I often think of people in nondescript 1930s or 1950s houses acting like everyone else during the week, watching the same TV programmes and going on holiday to the same locations, then poring over lurid charts about end-times prophecy replete with multi-headed beasts and a deluge of stars, sulphur and fire.
Likely with a cup of tea and a digestive.
Meanwhile their apparently identical counterparts in other houses were writing Kirk/Spock slash fic. Everyone needs a hobby.
Considering the effect on individuals, treating children in this way now seems abusive, and in this sense I think you can only see it as "good" if you think the end justifies the means.
Considering the effect on communities, what matters is getting people to believe the same thing, which isn't dissimilar to Gamma Gamaliel's earlier point: In other words, it doesn't matter so much what the details of the theology are, but that you all experience a shared belief in it.
In my 16 years I never heard of the rapture, and my father and mother never spoke of it. My father did some preaching there and at other assemblies, and for a couple of years I conducted the rest of the service when he preached. His sermons never mentioned the rapture.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
I didn't interpret @Gracious Rebel's comments as suggesting that the evangelistic techniques of the 'Thief in the Night' kind were acceptable - in a 'but I came to faith through it so it must be OK' way.
I can understand though why she feels conflicted about the whole thing.
What I was trying to say, albeit clumsily, was that it wasn't Gracious Rebel's fault that she was exposed to this sort of thing at a young and impressionable age.
One could argue that it says more about her that she has retained and developed her faith in spite of all that.
I'm sure if you were to survey people in my parish about what they believe and why they attend I doubt you'd get an every 'i' dotted and 't' crossed exposition on the Nicene Creed.
You'd get people there because they've not known anything else or because they are 'ethnically' Orthodox or because they think it's magic.
In the same way, the people I interviewed in my friend's restorationist church weren't at all bothered about 'restoring' the church to its apparent pristine purity and splendour through the operation of the Ephesians 4 'ministry gifts' in the way these are understood in 'classic' restorationism.
Rather they were more interested in the depth and quality of the relationships they had with other people in their churches and the opportunity to worship in a more expressive way than they'd been able to do in their previous settings.
The theology was secondary to the experience.
I suspect that often applies albeit in different ways in other traditions, be they stratospherically sacramental or snake-belly low or all stations in between.
There are also settings where theological concerns barely arise.
I once met an atheist Quaker who told me he attended the meetings because he 'liked the quiet.'
That might make sense in that context but not, officially at least, in a charismatic evangelical one, say. 'I don't believe a word of it but I like the lively worship ...'
As has been indicated upthread, a lot of this has to do with 'branding' and 'marketing.'
Some groups differentiated themselves from others with a similar ethos by saying, 'Look, we've got the measure of the End-Times and we've got the charts to prove it ...'
My lot say, 'Look, we're older than everyone else. We've been around longest.'
And so on and so forth.
It's worth considering what happens when - as is often the norm - there's no teaching on the end times at all. Insofar as people think about it at all, they are likely to end up looking at popular Christian works (and of these the bulk are going to be premil dispensationalist of some kind, off hand I can only think of maybe 2/3 books that took a different view and were popular among non-confessional evangelicals).
I think this dates back at least as far as Larkin ('Dispensational Truth') - it was coterminous with the idea that there'd be a mass conversion of Jews ..
Well there's the age profile of these groups, at this point we are on to second/third generation of leaders and while the founders may have got to amillenialism/post-millenialism via reading the puritans directly, in the absence of actual foundational teaching these doctrines were likely to prove unstable and liable to decay.
Thanks GG. That expresses exactly what I was trying to say
It's become a bit of a commonplace in discussions like this to point out that the RCC doesn't teach pre-mil eschatology, or really anything along those lines, and pretty much just leaves it at "Like it says in the creeds, Christ will come again, we can't give you much more detail than that."
Which is true, but then you've got the marian cults, which have gone absolutely nuts for darbyite-equivalent prophetic schemata. Going by your observation, I suppose the lacuna of such teaching on a church-wide level allows those at the unofficial levels to fill the gap with whatever they pick up from popular religion and adapt to their own purposes(*).
(*) In my experience, the Mary cults tend to less panicked about the EU and the position of Israel and more focused on straightforward anti-Communism. Not sure what adjustments they made following the end of the Cold War, maybe just morphed into "anti-globalism" like other anti-Communists did.