Tomorrow, Dec. 1st is "Giving Tuesday" for United Methodists. That means you can make a donation to any mission project you'd like - be it digging wells in Africa, planting new churches in Russia, or helping Syrian refugees in Central Europe. On this one day only, Tuesday Dec. 1st, online gifts will be matched up to a million dollars.
As I recall, I have talked about 'the Rapture' in a sermon on one occasion, saying that it was a relatively recent idea in the history of Christianity and there is no mention of "the rapture" at all in our classic doctrinal statements in Methodism (derived from Reformation-era doctrinal statements of Anglicanism). Good Methodists may disagree on this issue, for the church has no official teaching regarding it. Thus anything I share here is my own approach, not that of United Methodism.
You will not hear me say that "there is no rapture" - for I do not know this. What you will hear me say is that, I think many Christians over-state the case for the Rapture, when actually the Scriptural evidence is quite weak, and possibly even non-existent.
Growing up and ministering in the Bible Belt of the American South it is common for me to hear people talk in a matter-of-fact way about 'when the Rapture happens.' I am one of those who believes that, if this really were a major "first order" Biblical teaching the Scripture would say a bit more about it (and it would have been included in the ancient Creeds). As it is, almost the whole idea is built on a certain way of reading only one or two passages of Scripture.
One of my favorite contemporary theologians is N.T. Wright, the retired Anglican bishop who now teaches at St. Andrews in Scotland. Having grown up in English Evangelicalism, he too is quite familiar with talk about the Rapture, but as a New Testament scholar he is quite critical of the idea, claiming that it is based upon a mis-understanding of the New Testament imagery, as he explains below. Advent is a time when, traditionally, the church focuses on our teachings about the Return of Christ and the Last Things (eschatology), so it is a good time to ponder this issue.
In a future video we will learn more about the history of "Rapture Theology" and what (if any) connection it has to the broad and ancient Christian tradition.
