Continuing our ‘Rethinking The Rapture’ series, I want to revisit N.T. Wright’s ‘Farewell to the Rapture” essay.
Here, Wright addresses the image of believers being suctioned up into the air and taken away to heaven at the return of Christ, as popularized in modern novels and movies:
“…Paul conjures up images of an emperor visiting a colony or province. The citizens go out to meet him in open country and then escort him into the city. Paul’s image of the people “meeting the Lord in the air” should be read with the assumption that the people will immediately turn around and lead the Lord back to the newly remade world.
Paul’s mixed metaphors of trumpets blowing and the living being snatched into heaven to meet the Lord are not to be understood as literal truth, as the Left Behind series suggests, but as a vivid and biblically allusive description of the great transformation of the present world of which he speaks elsewhere.”
Wright makes another very poignant observation about the current worldview of some Christians who believe, wrongly in my opinion, that scripture teaches that believers will be scooped up to avoid a ‘Great Tribulation’, then return seven years later with Jesus to dish out the final portion of God’s wrath on the world.
“Paul’s misunderstood metaphors present a challenge for us: How can we reuse biblical imagery, including Paul’s, so as to clarify the truth, not distort it? And how can we do so, as he did, in such a way as to subvert the political imagery of the dominant and dehumanizing empires of our world? We might begin by asking, What view of the world is sustained, even legitimized, by the Left Behind ideology? How might it be confronted and subverted by genuinely biblical thinking? For a start, is not the Left Behind mentality in thrall to a dualistic view of reality that allows people to pollute God’s world on the grounds that it’s all going to be destroyed soon? Wouldn’t this be overturned if we recaptured Paul’s wholistic vision of God’s whole creation?“
Let’s allow the whole Word of God to speak to us and teach us rather than magnifying pet verses out of context and being seduced by pop theology – like Left Behind.
Rethinking The Rapture: Introduction
Rethinking The Rapture: Questions
Rethinking The Rapture: More Questions
Rethinking The Rapture: N.T. Wright’s ‘Farewell to the Rapture’
Rethinking The Rapture: What 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 Doesn’t Say
Rethinking The Rapture: Millions Of Christians Were Not Delivered From Wrath
Rethinking The Rapture: What Does ‘Delivered From Wrath’ Mean?
Rethinking The Rapture: What Does ‘Delivered From Wrath’ Mean? Part 2
Rethinking The Rapture: In The Twinkling Of An Eye
Rethinking The Rapture: Matthew 24:40-42
Rethinking The Rapture: N.T. Wright’s ‘Farewell to the Rapture’ Redux