The Newest Thing in the Room

Words to Know

Rapture — the belief that Christians will be removed from the earth before a period of catastrophe.

Dispensationalism — Darby’s system dividing history into separate ages with different rules.

Tribulation — in this scheme, a period of disaster before the end.

Reference Bible — a Bible printed with an editor’s notes and cross-references alongside the text.

Ask an honest question about something you were taught as ancient.

You have heard about the rapture. The believers disappear. Cars crash with nobody in them. The rest are left behind.

You may have been taught that this is what Christians have always believed.

Here is the date.

It happened in the 1830s.

A man named John Nelson Darby, born in 1800, worked out the scheme: a removal of the church before a period of tribulation, with history divided into distinct ages. His system is called dispensationalism.

Here is who he was, because the whole point is that he was nobody.

Darby was Anglo-Irish. He trained as a lawyer, then was ordained in the Church of Ireland, the established Protestant church there. He quit it. In the early 1830s he joined, and then led, a small separatist movement that met without clergy and without a denomination, the Plymouth Brethren. ¹

Go deeperHow the Brethren got their name

They also met without a liturgy of their own. The name itself came from one of their English congregations, in Plymouth. Darby spent much of his life arguing with other members of the movement, and in 1848 those arguments split it in two.

So he was one ex-clergyman in a small British sect, writing for a small readership. That is where the rapture comes from.

He was not the only person ever to suggest something like it. A Baptist minister named Morgan Edwards sketched something in that direction in the 1700s, and there are a few other scattered hints. But there is no sign of it as a settled teaching in the first eighteen centuries of Christianity. It is not in the creeds, and it is not in the great old theologians. ²

Go deeperWhen Morgan Edwards really wrote his sketch

Morgan Edwards said he wrote his sketch of the idea around 1744, though he did not publish it until 1788. How close it really comes to the modern scheme is disputed, mostly by people who have a stake in the answer.

Now the question nobody asks, which is the only one that matters.

How does an idea invented by a separatist preacher in Britain end up in a church in Texas?

It did not float across the ocean. It was carried, by named men, through institutions you can look up. Here is the route.

• 1862–1877: Darby tours the United States and Canada, preaching to pastors already interested in prophecy. ³
• 1875: Yearly prophecy conferences begin, later called the Niagara Bible Conference, led by James H. Brookes, a Presbyterian pastor in St. Louis. ^{4 5}
• 1886: D. L. Moody, the best-known evangelist in America and a friend of these men, founds the school now called Moody Bible Institute. In 1924, Dallas Theological Seminary begins granting degrees in the scheme. ^{6 7}
• 1909: Oxford University Press publishes Cyrus Scofield’s reference Bible, the King James text with the scheme printed in notes on the same page. ^{8 9}
• 1910–1915: Two oilmen, Lyman and Milton Stewart, pay to mail around three million free copies of The Fundamentals to pastors, missionaries and students. ¹⁰
• 1970–2007: Hal Lindsey, a Dallas graduate, writes The Late Great Planet Earth, and the Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins sell tens of millions of copies. ^{11 12}

Go deeperNames and dates the timeline left out

Alongside the Niagara meetings, larger prophecy conferences met in New York in 1878 and in Chicago in 1886, and that is where pastors compared notes and learned the system from each other. Moody did more than call these men friends: he hosted them, and his patronage made the teaching respectable.

Moody's school in Chicago was not the only one. The Bible Institute of Los Angeles opened in 1908, and Dallas Theological Seminary was founded in 1924 by a friend of Scofield's, Lewis Sperry Chafer.

The Fundamentals ran to twelve volumes, reaching pastors, missionaries and students across the whole English-speaking world.

Read the 1910 line twice. Oil money paid the postage on the theology.

The Scofield Bible is where the air of authority came from.

Scofield did not invent his notes. He was converted in St. Louis in 1879 and taught the whole system by Brookes, the Niagara man. The notes in the Scofield Bible are Darby’s scheme, handed down through Brookes. Darby to Brookes to Scofield makes three men and one chart.

Scofield had been a lawyer and politician in Kansas who left the office of United States Attorney within months, amid accusations about money, and he never spent a day training in a seminary. ¹³ I do not raise that to sneer. I raise it because you were taught to read those footnotes as something close to scripture.

Go deeperScofield's path from Confederacy to the pulpit

Scofield fought for the Confederacy as a teenager, then became a lawyer in Kansas and sat in its legislature. He was appointed United States Attorney for Kansas in 1873. Afterward he was converted and became a pastor.

He also revised his reference Bible in 1917, keeping the King James text because readers already trusted it.

A man's past is not an argument against his ideas, and I am the last person who should be making that kind of argument.

Oxford University Press, the oldest and most respectable name in English-language publishing, put the King James Bible and Scofield’s notes inside one binding. Scripture was at the top of the page, a Kansas lawyer was at the bottom, and Oxford was on the outside. For millions of people across the twentieth century, that Bible was the Bible, and the notes came with it.

Then it became entertainment.

Lindsey’s book matched the news to prophecy. Notice that the seminary in the 1924 line produced the author in the 1970 line. The system had started making its own writers. The Left Behind novels were sold first through Christian bookstores and Christian radio, bought in bulk by churches and taught in youth groups, and only after that did they reach supermarkets and airports. ¹⁴

An idea with no history at all had a distribution system.

Go deeperWhy 1970, and the novels' full run

Lindsey wrote The Late Great Planet Earth with a co-author, Carole C. Carlson, and it is widely reported as the best-selling work of nonfiction in the United States for the whole of the 1970s.

The Cold War had put genuinely world-ending weapons on actual airfields, so a book about the end of the world no longer sounded strange. And in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel took the whole of Jerusalem, which readers of Scofield's notes had been taught to expect, and which they read as the prophetic clock starting to run.¹⁵

The Left Behind novels themselves ran from 1995 to 2007, sixteen books in all, and beyond the novels came films and a spin-off series written for teenagers.

That is how a doctrine about the end of the world gets into a church in under two hundred years, in a religion that is two thousand years old. It did not come by revelation. It came by tours, conferences, schools, a publisher and a mailing list.

“But it is in the Bible.” Let us go and look, because that is the first thing anybody says.

There is one passage that carries the whole weight, and it is not mine. It is Paul, writing to a congregation in Thessalonica around the year 50, about twenty years after I died, answering people who were upset that some of their members had died before the end came.

He writes that the Lord will come down from heaven with a shout, with the archangel’s voice and with a trumpet of God, that the Christian dead will rise first, and that those still alive will be caught up in the clouds to meet him (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17). The word rapture comes from the Latin translation of “caught up.” ¹⁶

What is there is one arrival, at the end, and it is loud. Everybody rises to meet somebody who is arriving. In Paul’s world the word for that meeting described a city’s people going out through the gates to welcome an arriving ruler and walk back in with him.

What is not there is a secret, a separate earlier removal, a seven-year gap, or a world that carries on afterwards.

Darby’s contribution was to take one loud public arrival and split it into two events with a gap between them. That splitting is the whole rapture. It is not in Paul. It is in Darby.

And here is the one they will quote at me, in red letters.

Somebody will point out that I said it myself: two men in a field, one is taken and one is left; two women grinding, one taken, one left (Matthew 24:40–41).

That is fair. Read the three lines directly above it.

I had just compared that day to the days of Noah, when people ate and drank and married and knew nothing until the flood came and swept them away (Matthew 24:37–39).

So in my own comparison, being taken is what happened to the people the flood took. The one left is the one still standing.

And in Luke’s version of the same saying, my friends ask me where these people are taken, and my answer is grim: where the body is, the vultures gather (Luke 17:34–37).

That is not an evacuation. It is a warning that ordinary life gets interrupted without notice, which is exactly what I said next: stay awake, because you do not know the day. ¹⁷

If you have built an escape plan on that verse, you have built it on the flood.

Now here is why I care, and it is not about prophecy charts.

I mind what this particular idea does to how a person lives in the meantime.

Plenty of churches that teach the rapture run the best food pantry in their county. If that is your church, I am not calling your pantry fake. What I am describing is what this idea does to an argument, when somebody needs a reason not to act.

If the world is ending soon, and you get removed before the worst of it, it becomes easy to say that repairing things matters less, that poverty is permanent, that politics is a waste of effort, that damage to the earth does not finally matter, and that the only urgent task left is getting individuals to say a prayer before the deadline.

Go deeperWhat the idea excuses, and who said it aloud

I do not much mind people being curious about the future. People always have been.

One piece of fairness first.

I am not describing every person who believes it. I said in Lesson 33 that a good food pantry is not fake, and I meant it.

What this idea is very good at supplying is a reason not to act, because each excuse comes with its own logic. Repairing things matters less, in this account, because the world is scheduled for demolition. Poverty is called permanent because there will always be poor people, so why try. Politics becomes a waste of effort, except where it hurries the ending along. And damage to the earth does not finally matter, because the earth was never meant to last.

And that last one has been said out loud, in public, by a man with the power to act on it.

In 1981 the United States Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, the official in charge of federal land, water and minerals, was asked by a House committee about saving resources for future generations. He answered: “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”¹⁸

That is not a preacher on television. That is the office that manages the land.

It shows up in the numbers, too. American surveys find, over and over, that evangelical Protestants are the religious group least likely to say the earth is warming because of what people are doing, and researchers who have looked directly at end-times belief find that such belief lines up with opposition to doing anything about warming.¹⁹

I will not claim more than that. A survey is not a verdict on your neighbor, and belief is not the only cause. But it is checkable, and it points the same direction as Mr. Watt.

Do you see what has happened there?

Every single thing I actually asked for has been reclassified as a waste of time.

Feed people, forgive debts, visit prisoners, make peace, sell what you have, welcome strangers — all of it becomes optional decoration on the one thing that counts, which is your own personal evacuation.

And here is what I said about the timing.

I said nobody knows the day or the hour, not the angels and not even me (Mark 13:32).

And when my own friends stood there after everything and asked me about the schedule, I told them it was not theirs to know (Acts 1:7).

If I did not know, and I said so out loud, and your Bible printed it, then a man with a chart is not being faithful. He is being something else.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Mark 13:32.

You will find: that I say plainly I do not know when.

Then look at your own Bible. Are there notes at the bottom of the page or in the margins? Who wrote them? Is his name on the spine?

The Short Version

• The rapture scheme was assembled in the 1830s by John Nelson Darby of the small Plymouth Brethren.
• It reached America through tours, conferences, Bible schools, Dallas Seminary and free books paid for by oil money.
• Oxford University Press printed Scofield’s notes in 1909, and that is where the authority came from.
• 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17 describes one loud arrival, and the two-stage scheme with a gap is Darby’s addition.
• Its practical effect is to make everything I actually asked for look like a waste of time.

Think About It

1. If you knew for certain the world had another thousand years, what would your church do differently tomorrow?
2. Why is a doctrine that requires nothing of you so much easier to preach than one that does?