Unwrapping The Rapture: November 8,2007

With Advent impending, the church’s attention turns to somber thoughts of the End-Time, of Death and Judgment, and of the “Second Coming.” With Commercial Christmas upon us, no one else is thinking about such grim matters, but who cares? The church observes Advent anyway.

Well, maybe not “no one else,” as the vast popularity of the Left Behind novels attest. These books, written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, claim the Book of Revelation as their authority for their version of an Apocalypse in which, according to New Testament Scholar Barbara Rossing, “the heroes are an elite band of born-again Christians called the ‘tribulation force’ who drive gas-guzzling Hummers and carry Uzis.’

I have not read these books, but I did read an enlightening article in the Fall, 2007 Anglican Theological Review by the afore-mentioned Barbara Rossing, a Professor at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. “The so-called Rapture that forms the basis for the Left Behind novels is not traditional bible teaching,” she writes, “but was rather a nineteenth-century invention of the British pastor John Nelson Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren.” (p.555)

Yet The Book of Revelation can speak just as powerfully for Christians today as it did to the early church, claims Professor Rossing, “as a diagnosis of the illness of the imperial world, and as an urgent wake-up call about the future.” “What may be ending”, she continues, “is our unsustainable view of life [and]…our task must be to help people envision a way of life beyond empire, articulating God’s joyful and compelling vision for the future.” (p.553)

Rossing agrees that Revelation unveils the “end of the world,” but not in the sense of a destruction of the physical world (kosmos or ge in Greek), but the world as oikoumene, or “world order.” This Greek term is the one used in the New Testament in passages such as Luke 2:1, “…a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled.” It is that “imperial” world order that will be destroyed, not because God is a blood-thirsty avenger, but “through the logic of natural consequences,” (p.559). The heedless exploitation of people and environments has tragic consequences. “It is axiomatic (axios estin).” (Revelation 16:5) But “God wills not to destroy our world but to heal it.” (p.561)

According to Rossing, the Roman Empire represented a “toxic political economy” that “was built on deforestation, mining, slavery, [and] unjust globalized trade…” as colorfully described in Revelation 18:11-19. In contrast, Revelation “leads up to the wondrous vision of New Jerusalem…a vision… not of people being ‘raptured’ away to heaven, but rather, if anything, of God being ‘raptured’ down to earth (Rev. 21) to dwell with us… .” (p.560) “How can we reclaim our vision for planet earth?” asks Rossing. For her, it is “a vision of Jerusalem and all cities as places of justice and beauty, with a river of life flowing through the middle, welcoming all.” (p.561)