by Zack Hunt
To those words of wisdom I would only add this: that walk is one we do together, because faith is something we do together. Faith is a way of living together, not a moment of individual intellectual assent. That’s why there’s room for doubt. If any of us struggle to stand up in the chaotic waters of faith and life, the rest of us carry them until they can stand on their own again. The way we do that—the way we carry each other and find the strength to keep going—isn’t with answers, certainty, or dogma. It’s through hope. Hope that things are going to get better. Hope that God is at work in the world. Hope that we live out each and every day until our faith becomes sight.
That’s what makes the Christian faith good news.
And that’s the story of Revelation.
6
Couch-Skiing
You probably don’t remember the story of how any of your friends met their spouses, but I bet you’ll never forget how I met mine.
It was a cold, wintery night, thanks to a rare-for-Nashville blanket of snow. I was smack dab in the middle of my college campus, getting ready to be dragged behind my friend’s Jeep on a couch—naked.
See? I told you my memory would be seared into your imagination. Sorry about that.
Anyway, earlier that day my friend Mike had gotten together with a couple of other guys from our dorm, and through what can only be described as a stroke of divine inspiration, got the brilliant idea to take an old couch out of their dorm room, nail a set of skis to the bottom of it, and tie the newly created “ski couch” to the back of his Jeep Grand Cherokee with a ski rope.
They had spent the afternoon taking turns couch-skiing across campus when my opportunity to join in the wintery hijinks finally arrived. I, too, had what can only be described as a stroke of divine inspiration and got the brilliant idea to ride on the couch naked. Okay, maybe that wasn’t divine inspiration so much as the stupidity of youth combined with a need for attention. But there I was—ski goggles on, shirt off, and almost fully disrobed—when my friend Nathan showed up to join us. He wasn’t alone. He had brought a friend with him. Her name was Kim, and they were both eager to go couch-skiing too. Of course, they were less eager to go when they learned of my plan to ski in the buff. So being the gentleman that I was, I agreed to keep my boxers on for the ride.
It was love at first sight.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite love at first sight. Although, to be fair, it never could have been, because I couldn’t see her through my fogged-up ski goggles. The only thing I could see was the vague form of my friend Nathan sitting in the middle of the couch between Kim and me—clearly to keep her as far away as possible from the moron whose company she had to endure if she wanted to go couch-skiing. My dignity tossed to the side, Mike started up the Jeep and off we went.
Across campus.
On a couch.
On skis.
Being dragged behind a Jeep.
It was more fun than one person should be allowed in this life—so much so that I didn’t even notice the cold, at least not until Mike took a sharp turn. The couch swung too wide behind him, flipped over, and tossed the three of us into a snow bank.
Thankfully for me, couch-skiing wasn’t the last time Kim and I saw each other. It was a while before we hung out again, but from time to time we would run into each other on campus and say hello. Then one day about a year later, while I was typing a paper on Mike’s computer, an instant message popped up on his computer screen.
You remember AOL Instant Messenger, right? If not, then thanks for making me feel old. Instant Messenger was like texting before texting was a thing. You could only do it on your computer; phones weren’t that fancy yet. But when I was in college, it was a great way to do some high-tech flirting. And flirt I did. Kim was looking for Mike that day, not me. But I was looking for a date. So as any young Christian man at a Christian college would do, I took the coincidence for what it obviously was: a sign from God.
So I asked her out.
Via Instant Messenger.
Which sounds really cheesy, but it was actually way cheesier than that. Being a young Christian man at a Christian college, I couldn’t ask her out for drinks. So I asked her out for milkshakes. And before you make fun of me for asking her out for milkshakes, allow me to remind you how wonderful milkshakes are. Fine. So it was cheesy. But for some inexplicable reason she said yes. Later that week I picked her up to take her out for milkshakes at a local watering hole called Jackson’s, which was filled with the kind of people who are way too cool to ask other people out for milkshakes. But I thought maybe Jackson’s could balance out my complete inability to be suave and sophisticated.
I’m not sure it did, but Kim and I did hit it off. She was easy to talk to, and more importantly, she was really smart. I loved talking to someone who could challenge me intellectually. Most of our first dates were spent just talking and getting to know each other. On one date in particular we talked so long we lost track of time, missed curfew, and she got locked out of her dorm. So we ended up sitting on a swing in the middle of campus, talking, until the sun came up and the resident director unlocked the door. It was and still is one of our favorite dates.
But Kim was much more than a good date. She was more, even, than my future wife and the mother of our children. She was my Aladdin, showing me a whole new way of looking at the world.
They love Jesus too?
I met Kim after my faith had begun to be unraptured. For all intents and purposes, though, I was still a dyed-in-the-wool conservative Christian fundamentalist who thought that the only true Christians were conservative Christians who always voted Republican. Also, real Christians were mostly from the South, where everyone still went to church on Sunday. There were probably a few Christians in exile elsewhere, but not many. They were all definitely conservative, Protestant, and probably Nazarene too.
Kim was a Yankee, born and bred in New England. Worse, she was a liberal. Worse still, she didn’t like Chick-fil-A. (Although she has come around on that last point.) To make matters even more bewildering, her mom’s side of the family was liberal, and her dad, who had a longer Nazarene lineage than I had, had converted to Catholicism after her parents’ divorce and started attending mass at a local monastery—and was now training to become a Benedictine monk.
Worse still, they all loved Jesus.
I couldn’t make heads or tails out of any of it.
On my list of people who definitely weren’t Christian were Yankees (both the people and the team), liberals, and Catholics. In that order. Yet here were these people who not only said they loved Jesus and went to church as much as or more than I did—one of them had even taken Jesus seriously when he said sell everything you have and give it to the poor, then come follow me (see Matthew 19:21). Here I was, thinking I was the perfect Christian only to find out my girlfriend’s dad was literally a monk. (He did drink beer and listen to secular music, though, so I called us even.)
In all seriousness, getting to know Kim had as profound an effect on my faith as did that embarrassing conversation in my professor’s office years before. She and her family forced me to confront the reality of the conservative Christian bubble that I had grown up in and was largely still living inside. They forced me to face the truth that there are people out there who look different from me, talk differently from me, think differently from me, believe differently from me, don’t like sweet tea and Chick-fil-A like me, and yet still love Jesus as much as or maybe even more than I do.
When I finally realized that what I thought was a heavenly choir shouting amen to all my beliefs was actually just a sanctified echo chamber, I began to see that a lot of the people I once considered my enemies were actually just my neighbors. Many of them were quite nice, decent people. It turned out that atheists weren’t agents of the devil, that Muslims weren’t all secret terrorists trying to force me to live under sharia law, that LGBT folks weren’t godless degenerates trying to turn me gay, that poor people weren’t a bunch of lazy moochers, and tha
t people having a glass of wine with dinner weren’t all raging alcoholics.
The further I stepped beyond my ideological bubble, the more my mind was blown. But more than anything else, as I left the echo chamber behind, I was finally forced to confront the truth about the rapture and why end-times theology wasn’t just bad theology but a type of Christianity that had serious, real-world problems; problems I had helped spread not just through my words but also through my actions.
Missing from the Bible
The most fundamental problem with the rapture is that it never actually appears in the Bible.
This is true in two ways. In the most literal sense, the word rapture doesn’t appear in any English translation of the Bible—and there are dozens of English translations. But it never did. There’s no verse saying, “And then Jesus will rapture some folks,” no offhand shout-out, not even a mention of the disciples feeling “enraptured.”
“But the Bible wasn’t written in English!” you say. That’s a fair point, and one we don’t take into consideration often enough when reading the Bible. We’re more open to pulling out our own toenails than to thinking about the fact that some things from ancient languages are bound to be lost in translation, especially if you only speak one of the two languages being translated. (And if the language you do speak is largely confined to emojis and GIFs, things get even trickier.)
But here’s the thing: even the concept of the rapture doesn’t appear in the original Greek or Hebrew or in the smatterings of Aramaic found in the Bible. As we’ll see shortly, the original Greek used in the New Testament passages cited as proof texts for the rapture make it clear that a rapture-like event is not what is being described by the biblical writers.
So if it’s not in our English translations, or even in the original biblical languages, then where did the word rapture come from? Like so many things in Christian history, we can blame the Roman Empire for this one. At least indirectly. Long before the Bible was translated into English, it was translated into Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, and eventually the official language of the church. In Revelation 4:1, John is told to “come up here.” In the Latin translation of that passage, the word rapio is used. Translated literally, rapio means “to snatch, grab, or take away.”
Before the dawn of dispensationalism in the nineteenth century, no one gave much thought to that word. The idea of being taken away into the heavens was widely used in the context of an apocalyptic vision and was well established in the apocalyptic tradition. The person having the vision was often snatched up or taken away to the heavens to see whatever it was God (or the gods) wanted them to see. But then John Darby came along, bringing his dispensationalism along with him. Darby loved him some secret biblical codes and timetables. Soon, what was once a standard part of an apocalyptic vision (rapio, or being taken away to heaven) suddenly became a secret code for an event the Bible never mentions: the rapture.
That’s not to say that the Bible doesn’t mention anyone being taken up to heaven at the end of all things. It does, a couple of times. But dispensationalists have cut and pasted those passages together with Revelation 4:1 to create the rapture. The problem is, those passages aren’t describing the rapture. As we already learned from 1 Corinthians 15:52, Paul was very specifically talking about the second coming. The second coming and the rapture are not the same thing at all—even rapture devotees would agree with that (well, most of them).
The other passage used as a proof text for the rapture appears in 1 Thessalonians, in which Paul writes, “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever” (1 Thessalonians 4:17). Now, if that were the only passage you were shown, and if you were told before reading it that it describes the rapture, and if you already believed that the rapture was a biblical idea: well, it’s not hard to see how you would believe that this offered a definitive biblical basis for the rapture. I know I sure did. I also bought into the Latin translation argument, ignoring the fact that to get to the word rapture, I was using the translation of a translation that translators who are experts on translation had opted to not translate that way for very legitimate reasons, like the fact that the church had never believed in the rapture before John Darby’s invention of it in the nineteenth century.
Dispensationalism’s reliance on proof-texting reveals a fundamental flaw with how our modern Bibles are constructed with chapters and verses. That might sound like a strange complaint to you, but chapters and verses are a rather late addition to the Bible, not appearing as we know them today until the middle of the sixteenth century. Something like our modern chapter divisions were created a few centuries earlier, but to put all of that in context: the church went two-thirds of its life without the sort of Bible we have today.
Sure, chapters and verses can be helpful when trying to quickly look up or cite a particular passage, as I just did. But they often obscure how the books of the Bible were originally written. Most of what we call books in the New Testament weren’t even books at all. They were real letters to real churches in Rome, Ephesus, Corinth, and other places around the ancient world, and just like a letter you would write today, they didn’t come with chapters and verses. Just to make things even more confusing to modern readers: those letters, and the rest of the Bible, didn’t even have modern sentences with punctuation and capitalization like we’re accustomed to today. If you were to look at an ancient copy of, say, Paul’s first letter to the church in Thessalonica, it would look like one continuous flow of words. That wouldn’t have been a major issue to his original audience, because they were native speakers of the Greek language Paul was writing in.
But that sort of formatting isn’t the real issue anyway. The important thing to remember when reading a letter like 1 Thessalonians is that it was originally intended to be read all at once, as one coherent thought. When we chop it up into chapters and verses and then read only a verse or two at a time, and then when we present that verse or two as definitive evidence of a claim, it’s like taking one or two text messages out of a thread, or one sentence out of an entire email, and saying “This is what they meant!” But the hundreds or even thousands of words before and after that sentence could change the meaning dramatically.
The context of 1 Thessalonians 4:17 erases the possibility of this verse being a description of the rapture. We should have been tipped off by the verse itself, which begins “Then” in the NRSV and other translations—or “After that” in the NIV. If a verse begins with a transition like that, or a word like thus or therefore, it’s important to ask “After what?” or “What was said before that makes this verse therefore?” If we zoom out a bit from 1 Thessalonians 4:17—not even to the entire letter but just to the surrounding verses—it becomes apparent fairly quickly that the “After that” matters quite a bit for understanding 1 Thessalonians 4:17. In this case, “After that” is referring to a sequence in Paul’s understanding of the “coming of the Lord,” or the second coming. Those who have died, or “fallen asleep” (NIV), will go first (verse 16). Then, “after that,” those who are still alive will join them and Jesus and be with him forever.
But isn’t that the rapture?
No.
The rapture is a moment when believers who are walking around on earth are zapped away to heaven to join Jesus there and to avoid the tribulation until Jesus returns to clean up the mess down below and start things over. What Paul is describing in 1 Thessalonians is the second coming itself. How do we know? Because Paul said Jesus is “coming down from heaven.” In the rapture, Jesus stays up in heaven and we go up to meet him. Unfortunately, the key word here—meet—originates in Greek, not English. The word apantesis means “meet,” but it means “meet” in a very specific way. Apantesis describes a visit from a dignitary. In antiquity—that is to say, in Paul’s day—if a dignitary came to visit a town, some of the citizens of that town would go out to meet him as he approached. What makes
this practice so important to our understanding is that the dignitary always continued on into the town. Dignitaries never just met the people they were visiting outside of town and then turned around to leave.1 In the rapture, Jesus, the visiting dignitary, comes just above the earth, where the faithful meet him in the air before he turns around and returns to heaven with them. What Paul is describing in 1 Thessalonians is the completely opposite type of encounter. In Paul’s twinkling of an eye, Jesus returns for good. He never turns around and goes back to heaven.
If we keep reading, in chapter 5 we see Paul clarify again that he is talking about “the day of the Lord”—that is, the return, or second coming, of Jesus. After his famous description of the “twinkling of an eye” in 1 Corinthians 15:52, Paul goes on to borrow from Jesus himself. Like Jesus, Paul talks about a thief in the night as he encourages the church, in the closing of his letter to the Thessalonians, to stay faithful to Jesus until he returns because Jesus will do so when they least expect it, like a thief in the night. It’s a phrase Jesus used to describe his return, not the rapture.
This leads us to yet another passage that needs a bit of unrapturing: the so-called Little Apocalypse in the Gospels. In Matthew 24 we get the well-known caution from Jesus telling us that “about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matthew 24:36). Of course, even though it came from the lips of Jesus himself, that passage has never stopped dispensationalists from predicting either the rapture or the second coming. Matthew 24 is also where we get a list of the signs of the times, imagery for movies like Thief in the Night and lyrical inspiration for songs like the Larry Norman classic “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” Both derive from Jesus’ descriptions of his return: like a thief who comes unexpectedly in the night to take everything you have, or like people working in a field or women working a hand mill, with one being taken and the other being left behind.