Rapture

This page looks at the debate which has raged, for want of a better term, between exponents of the Pre-, Mid-, and Post-Tribulation Rapture positions.

It provides evidence against the first two positions, which are of comparatively recent origin, and presents evidence for a fresh view of the timing of the Rapture which is broadly in line with Postribulationist position, but which argues, on the basis of the typological significance of the Old Testament Autumn Feasts (Trumpets, Day of Atonement and Tabernacles), that there is in fact a fifteen-day interval between the Rapture of the Church and Christ’s visible return to earth, during which God’s judgments will be poured out, that final war to end all wars, popularly known as Armageddon, will take place, and many will survive to go on into the Millennium in their natural bodies to re-populate the earth.

It also looks at the origins of the pretribulationist theory, which has been debated with as much ferocity as the debate over the timing of the Rapture itself.

Posttribulationist Dave MacPherson claims that this teaching began with a prophecy given by a teenage Scottish lass by the name of Margaret MacDonald, which she wrote down and sent to Edward Irving, a minister in the Church of Scotland who presided over the Caledonian Church in Regent Square, London, and who was eventually deposed by the church in his home town of Annan on grounds of heresy. He further claims that John Nelson Darby, the father of modern dispensationalism, derived his pretribulationism from MacDonald, whose prophecy he ascribes to occult influences.

Pretribulationists rightly contend that while MacDonald spoke of a secret coming of Christ for his saints, she did not teach a pretribulation Rapture. In fact, she spoke of the fiery trial that the Church would go through during the rule of the Antichrist, which is the posttribulationist position.

They wrongly contend, however, that Irving and his followers did not teach pretribulationism. I will shortly be posting several articles written by Irving and his followers in the early 1830s for the Irvingite magazine, Morning Watch, clearly promoting a pretribulationist view, on this site.

One of the members of Irving’s church, Robert Baxter, a lawyer from Doncaster gave what purported to be a prophecy saying that the Holy Spirit was the “restrainer” of 2 Thessalonians 2, and that when the Holy Spirit in a holy body of believers in the Church was taken away at the Rapture then the “man of lawlessness” would be revealed. Baxter later renounced Irvingitism and ascribed this prophecy to the operation of Satan.

The question now is: Did Darby derive his pretribulationism from the heretic Irving? Or did he devise it independently from his understanding of the Bible?

That Darby came into contact with Irvingites at the Powerscourt prophetic conferences held at Powerscourt in County Wicklow in the early 1830s suggests he might have derived it from Irving.

However, Pretribulationist author, Huebner, argues that Darby derived his dispensationalism directly from the Bible and that he did so while convalescing from a riding accident during December 1826 and January 1827, three years before Irving started to teach pretribulationism.

Drawing on Huebner, pretribulationist author Thomas Ice, writes:

Darby’s pre-trib and dispensational thoughts, says Huebner, were developed from the following factors: 1) “he saw from Isaiah 32 that there was a different dispensation coming . . . that Israel and the Church were distinct.” 2) “During his convalescence JND learned that he ought daily to expect his Lord’s return.” 3) “In 1827 JND understood the fall of the church. . . ‘the ruin of the Church.’” 4) Darby also was beginning to see a gap of time between the rapture and the second coming by 1827. 5) Darby, himself, said in 1857 that he first started understanding things relating to the pre-trib Rapture “thirty years ago.” “With that fixed point of reference, Jan. 31, 1827,” declares Huebner, we can see that Darby “had already understood those truths upon which the pre-tribulation rapture hinges.”

I haven’t yet read Huebner’s book, Precious Truths Recovered and Defended Through J. N. Darby, Vol. 1, but it seems to me from what Ice has written that the case for Darby having independently arrived at his dispensationalist views as early as 1827 is far from proven.

Indeed, MacPherson shows that at this time, Darby was still operating within the traditional historicist paradigm in his understanding of Biblical prophecy.

Whatever the case, there is a further parallel between Darby’s teachings on prophecy and those of the Irvingites.

In his, Notes on the Epistles to the Thessalonians, Darby writes, concerning the identity of “that which withholdeth” of 2 Thessalonians 2:6:

Verse 6. “What withholdeth.” It is not in order to prevent the revelation of the lawless one that God has put a restraint; it is to prevent his being revealed before his time. The adversary is always ready for evil. In the day that God takes away the bridle, Satan will immediately shew himself at work to drag men into apostasy.

“That which restrains;” the Greek means a thing. What is it? God has not told us what it is, and this, doubtless, because the thing which restrained then is not that which restrains now. Then it was, in one sense, the Roman empire, as the fathers thought; who saw in the power of the Roman empire a hindrance to the revelation of the man of sin, and thus prayed for the prosperity of that empire. At present the hindrance is still the existence of the governments established by God in the world; and God will maintain them as long as there is here below the gathering of His church. Viewed in this light, the hindrance is, at the bottom, the presence of the church and of the Holy Spirit on the earth. [My Italics]

The view the the mysterious “restrainer” of 2 Thessalonians 2 was the Holy Spirit within the Church was taught by the Irvingites and featured in Baxter’s “prophecy” cited above. It was later popularized in Scofield’s Reference Bible. Did Darby derive this second feature of his dispensationalist scheme from the Irvingites?

This page is page parent to the following articles:

A Newly-Converted Christian Comes Across the Pretribulation Rapture Theory

The Case for Pretribulationism Examined

God’s Prophetic Calendar Foretold in the Old Testament Feasts