Farewell to the
Rapture
(N.T. Wright, Bible
Review, August 2001. Reproduced by permission of the
author)
Little did Paul know how his colorful metaphors for
Jesus' second coming would be misunderstood two millennia later.
The American obsession with
the second coming of Jesus--especially with distorted interpretations of
it--continues unabated. Seen from my side of the
Atlantic, the phenomenal success of the Left Behind books appears puzzling,
even bizarre[1].
Few in the U.K. hold the belief on which the popular series of novels
is based: that there will be a literal "rapture" in which believers will be
snatched up to heaven, leaving empty cars crashing on freeways and kids
coming home from school only to find that their parents have been taken to
be with Jesus while they have been "left behind." This
pseudo-theological version of Home Alone has reportedly frightened many
children into some kind of (distorted) faith.
This dramatic end-time
scenario is based (wrongly, as we shall see) on Paul's First Letter to the
Thessalonians, where he writes: "For the Lord himself will descend from
heaven with a shout of command, with the voice of an archangel and the
trumpet of God. The dead in Christ will rise first; then
we, who are left alive, will be snatched up with them on clouds to meet the
Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord" (1 Thessalonians
4:16-17).
What on earth (or in heaven)
did Paul mean?
It is Paul who should be
credited with creating this scenario. Jesus himself, as I
have argued in various books, never predicted such an event[2].
The gospel passages about "the Son of Man coming on the clouds" (Mark
13:26, 14:62, for example) are about Jesus' vindication, his "coming" to
heaven from earth. The parables about a returning king or
master (for example, Luke 19:11-27) were originally about God returning to
Jerusalem, not about Jesus returning to earth. This,
Jesus seemed to believe, was an event within space-time history, not one
that would end it forever.
The Ascension of Jesus and the
Second Coming are nevertheless vital Christian doctrines[3], and I don't
deny that I believe some future event will result in the personal presence
of Jesus within God's new creation. This is taught
throughout the New Testament outside the Gospels. But
this event won't in any way resemble the Left Behind account.
Understanding what will happen requires a far more sophisticated
cosmology than the one in which "heaven" is somewhere up there in our
universe, rather than in a different dimension, a different space-time,
altogether.
The New Testament, building on
ancient biblical prophecy, envisages that the creator God will remake heaven
and earth entirely, affirming the goodness of the old Creation but
overcoming its mortality and corruptibility (e.g., Romans 8:18-27;
Revelation 21:1; Isaiah 65:17, 66:22). When that happens,
Jesus will appear within the resulting new world (e.g., Colossians 3:4; 1
John 3:2).
Paul's description of Jesus'
reappearance in 1 Thessalonians 4 is a brightly colored version of what he
says in two other passages, 1 Corinthians 15:51-54 and Philippians 3:20-21:
At Jesus' "coming" or "appearing," those who are still alive will be
"changed" or "transformed" so that their mortal bodies will become
incorruptible, deathless. This is all that Paul intends
to say in Thessalonians, but here he borrows imagery--from biblical and
political sources--to enhance his message. Little did he
know how his rich metaphors would be misunderstood two millennia later.
First, Paul echoes the story
of Moses coming down the mountain with the Torah. The
trumpet sounds, a loud voice is heard, and after a long wait Moses comes to
see what's been going on in his absence.
Second, he echoes Daniel 7, in
which "the people of the saints of the Most High" (that is, the "one like a
son of man") are vindicated over their pagan enemy by being raised up to sit
with God in glory. This metaphor, applied to Jesus in the
Gospels, is now applied to Christians who are suffering persecution.
Third, 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.
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?
