The Christian “belief in the
‘rapture’ of believers at the time of Jesus’ return to Earth is rooted in a
particular form of biblical interpretation that emerged in the 19th
century. Known as dispensational pre-millennialism, it is especially popular
among American evangelicals.”[1]
This biblical interpretation is based on the following from one of Paul’s
letters to a church:
“For the Lord himself shall
descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the
trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive
and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the
Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”[2]
Presumably the “trump of God”
in the King James version of the Bible is distinct from Trump as God, for that
eventuality would raise a myriad of questions and difficulties, and at least
two difficulties pertain to the verse and, moreover, to dispensational
pre-millennialism as a Christian doctrine. That it was constructed only
recently by Christian standards raises the question of why the idea did not
dawn on Christians closer to Paul’s time. That Paul does not represent himself
in his letters as having met Jesus prior to the Resurrection and Paul’s use of
mythological/Revelations language, such as “with the voice of the archangel,”
also provide support for not taking the passage literally. After his
resurrection in the Gospels, Jesus does not have the voice of an archangel.
With Paul’s passage viewed figuratively or symbolically, rather than
empirically and literally, the underlying religious meaning would of
course remain unperturbed: keeping the faith is of value and thus in holding on
to one’s distinctly religious (and Christian) faith, this strength will be
vindicated even if no signs of this emerge during a person’s life. In other
words, faith in vindication is part of having a religious faith, which is not
limited our experience. The Resurrection itself can be construed as vindication
with a capital V, regardless of whether Jesus rose from the dead empirically and
thus as a historical event. In fact, a historical account or claim is extrinsic
to religious narrative even though the sui generis genre can legitimately
make selective use of, and even alter, historical reports to make theological
points. The writers of the Gospels would have considered this perfectly legitimate,
given that they were writing faith narratives and not history books. Making
this distinction is vital, I submit, to obviating the risk that one’s
theological interpretations lead to supporting unethical state-actors on the
world stage, such as Israel, which as of 2025 was serially committing genocidal
and perhaps even holocaust crimes against humanity in Gaza. In short, the
theological belief that supporting Israel will result in the Second Coming happening
sooner than otherwise can be understood to be an unethical stance based on a
category mistake. American Evangelical Christians may have been unwittingly
enabling another Hitler for the sake of the salvation of Christians, while the
Vatican stood by merely making statements rather than acting to help the innocent
Palestinians, whether with food and medicine, or in actually going to Gaza’s
southern border (or joining the flotilla) to protest as Gandhi would have done.
One
problem with dispensational pre-millennialism itself is that predictors keep
getting the date wrong, and this may be because a category mistake has been commonly
committed between the faith-narrative genre and those of history and empirical
science. Joshua Mhlakela, an African, whose dream in 2018 predicted that Jesus
would return on September 23rd or 24, 2025, obviously did not pan
out, for I write this essay on September 25, 2025 and the Christians are still
with us here below. That the Second Coming presumably comes at the end of time
means that today should not exist, which would mean that I am not writing this
essay (and you are not reading it). Lest we have slipped into a supercomputer’s
Matrix, named after the famous solipsistic movie, other people had predicted
the Second Coming, also without success. William Miller, a Baptist pastor, had
read the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation and concluded that “Jesus
would return sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. When this date
passed, he recalculated the date several times and finally landed on Oct. 22,
1844.”[3]
Similarly, “Ellen G. White, a founder of the Seventh-day Adventist movement”
and “Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, predicted
Jesus’ return in 1914. Over time, many others have attempted to predict Jesus’
Second Coming. Harold Camping’s 12 failed predictions being the most famous.”[4]
Interestingly, all of these Christians had forgotten “Jesus’ own warning that
no one knows the timing of this event (Matthew 24:36).”[5]
Moreover, I contend that applying calculation
of empirical events from mythic language involves making a category mistake
regarding qualitatively different domains. A person would not try to predict
next year’s gross domestic product from calculations based on passages in
Revelations, for example. Sometimes it’s easier to recognize category mistakes
when they are made from the other direction.
Furthermore, Jesus not only
says that no one but the Father (i.e., not even Jesus himself) knows when the
last judgment will occur—and notice that Jesus is thus not omniscient by his
own admission—but also that “this generation will not pass away” until the Son
of Man will come “in the clouds with power and great glory.”[6]
It is interesting that Jesus would make any prediction, since he is
aware that only the Father knows, but, in any case, even this prediction is
wrong. Such an uncomfortable conclusion points back to a conflation of history
and myth, two distinct genres and domains, each with its own type of
valid meaning that cannot be touched by the other domain even in overreaching.
Besides those problems,
dispensational pre-millennialism can lead to rather unethical political and
ethical stances. Many Christians “influenced by dispensationalism believe that
the re-establishment of Israel and the return of the Jews to Palestine,
especially since the 1920s, is a sign that the end is near. The centering of
the re-establishment of Israel has important political implications, including unquestioned
support for Israeli actions by many evangelicals.”[7]
Conflating myth, such as is evinced by the Book of Revelations, and empirical,
historical events can give rise to giving even a genocidal regime a blank slate
and lots of military hardware. Both politically and ethically, even supporting
Israel politically in 2025, when God was supposed to take humanity out of its
self-imposed misery even in acting as bystanders, had become deeply
problematic—especially ethically. In the Gospels, Jesus would obviously not encourage
his disciples to support a genocidal regime even though he does not support the
zealots acting against the Romans in the Gospel narratives. Giving what is Caesar’s
(i.e., Roman coins) to the Romans does not mean actively supporting Rome. Were the
imperator Romanorum to decide in the story to kill every Jew in Judea so
to build Roman luxury resorts in and around the Temple in Jerusalem, Jesus
would likely urge turning the other cheek and loving the enemies rather than
either helping them to kill Jews or fighting the Romans as they do so.
To respond to the humanity of
those whom a person dislikes (or is disliked by), according to Samuel Hopkins,
who was Jonathan Edwards protégé, is the essence of the Kingdom of God
available here and now, rather than after a final judgment. In fact, choosing
to value and incorporate in practice such a kingdom as Hopkins sketches
survives any Jansenist, strict Augustinian, view of free-will as profoundly
wounded by the Fall. Looking the other way, not to mention supporting
politically, ideologically, or ethically a heinous regime that is starving and
killing millions intentionally out of sheer hatred, even relegating the other
as subhuman, whether Jews in Nazi Germany or Palestinians in Gaza nearly a
century later, reflects how deplorable a human’s use of one’s free-will can be,
post-lapsarian (i.e., due to original sin). Even given the mythic fall of Adam
and Eve in the Book of Genesis, we are all responsible for how we use our
free-will, even though it is tainted.
It may even be said that there is a special place
in hell for Christians who look the other way on Israel’s extermination of the
Gazans, as if all of them were culpable for Hama’s day of attack in which 1,200
Israelis were killed and a few hundred taken hostage by a subjugated people
occupied by an apartheid regime. The doctrine of collective justice, which Yahweh,
not human beings, apply to Israel in the Hebrew Bible, is in human hands
nothing but a weaponized fallacy. To give this a blank slate because Israel’s
existence empirically is requisite to the Second Coming even raises the question
of whether the human brain is inherently compromised cognitively and ethically
in relating the domains of ethics to religion/theology. It used to be asked
whether atheists could be ethical. Perhaps the question has become whether
pre-millennialist theists (i.e., evangelical Christians) can be ethical and
politically responsible.
