Thursday, October 3, 2019

Michael L. Brown and Craig S. Keener on John Nelson Darby and Pre-Tribulationalism


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)