Commenting
on the very late (1830) origins of the doctrine of the pre-Tribulational
Rapture (a popular but false doctrine in many Protestant circles), Michael L.
Brown and Craig S. Keener wrote:
How did Darby arrive at a pre-Tribulational
Rapture? Darby emphasized distinguishing God’s plan from the Church from God’s
plan for Israel, and he distinguished these plans so sharply that God would
deal with only one time. (It is no surprise that he wrote before 1948.) The
Tribulation and the Millennium, he argued, dealt with Israel, and therefore the
Church could not be present on earth during these periods. The Second Coming
had to be divided so that part was for the Church before the Tribulation and
the other part was for Israel at the end. The unified picture of the Second
Coming in Scripture and throughout Church history was suddenly split into two
pieces.
In effect, Darby said that the Old Testament
and the gospels were for the Jews. (If one follows this approach consistently,
the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes, for example, were exclusively for
Israel.) Because Israel “rejected the Gospel,” he said, God started the Church,
not revealed in the Old Testament, and from Acts 2 onward we have the message
for the Church. Except that not even all of that was for the Church. Acts, he
believed, reported a “transitional” apostolic dispensation, while God still
tried fruitlessly to reach the Jews; the gifts of the Spirit were for that
dispensation, and when Jerusalem fell in AD 70, and the apostles died, God was
done with Israel until the Great Tribulation, when He would be one (in earthly terms) with the Church. (Those
of us who affirm spiritual gifts should note that Darby’s system phased them
out in the first century. It does not take an abundant knowledge of Church
history to recognize that he was wrong about that.)
Many Bible readers opposed this new idea,
including a number of Darby’s fellow brethren; a number of its early proponents
recanted it after further consideration. C.I. Scofield’s reference Bible,
however, eventually spread it widely in the early twentieth century. Under the
influence of this study Bible, pre-Tribulationalism spread widely, promoted by
prophecy conferences as a special and novel insight. World War I challenged postmillennial
optimism, strengthening premillennialism’s appeal. The view dominated many
mid-twentieth-century U.S. evangelical circles, which also promoted it widely
on mission fields that now flourish with tens or hundreds of millions of
zealous Christians.
Yet there is no record of anyone promoting a
pre-Tribulational Rapture before about 1830; until that time virtually
everyone, from any Christian or even semi-Christian tradition, expected that
Jesus would resurrect the righteous and destroy the wicked at the same time. (Michael
L. Brown and Craig S. Keener, Not Afraid
of the Antichrist: Why We Don’t Believe in a Pre-Tribulation Rapture [Minneapolis:
Chosen Books, 2019], 61-62)
