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?