Unraptured Read online

  “[A] piquant debut. . . . Hunt, who has a master’s degree in Christian history from Yale Divinity School, demonstrates scholarly expertise on the apocalypse, but also makes the book accessible to the lay reader through his personal stories, sense of humor, and casual, conversational tone. Readers eager to learn more about biblical prophecies for the end times will appreciate this informed take.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Thoughtful, entertaining, carefully researched, and rapturously (sorry) readable, Unraptured manages to be both personally edifying and culturally relevant. With some of the most powerful people in the world making decisions based on speculative end-times theology, we need better stories about what it means for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Zack Hunt is the perfect storyteller for the moment.”

  —Rachel Held Evans, author of Searching for Sunday and Inspired

  “Zack Hunt leads us on a behind-the-scenes tour of the apocalypse industry, with its many failed predictions and false promises. Thankfully, he also leads us back outside, raising significant questions about the Bible’s teachings and prophecies. Unraptured is an important book that is going to spark some overdue conversations among religious Americans. Read it now so you won’t feel, well, left behind!”

  —Jonathan Merritt, author of Learning to Speak God from Scratch and contributor to The Atlantic

  “Zack Hunt’s exploration of evangelical America’s obsession with the end times is a wake-up call for believers to break free from their doctrine of rescue and embrace a faith that resists the excuses, limitations, and assumptions that come with bad theology. Hunt’s skill as both a writer and a theologian shines in Unraptured, an offering that’s as important as it is entertaining.”

  —Matthew Paul Turner, author of When God Made You and Our Great Big American God

  “To those unfamiliar with conservative evangelical culture: be prepared to be thoroughly entertained by the idiosyncrasies of this subculture and gain an accessible breakdown of why many obsess over apocalyptic prophecies. To those of us who did grow up in this culture: you will both laugh and cry over our shared shenanigans—blissful catharsis awaits you. Woven through the humor is a poignant faith story and a hopeful retelling of the rapture mythology that is sorely needed for this time.”

  —Cindy Wang Brandt, author of Parenting Forward

  “I feel so seen, Zack Hunt—and understood, exposed, challenged, awakened, and invited. Thank you for writing this book. Hopefully everyone who holds it in their hands right now will be as transformed as I was.”

  —Carlos A. Rodríguez, author of Drop the Stones and founder of HappySonship.com

  “For almost a decade, I’ve watched Zack Hunt use wit, humor, and common sense to poke and prod the church toward action. I can’t count how many times I slow clapped while reading this book!”

  —Jimmy Spencer, founder of Glocal, a social impact marketplace

  “This is an apocalypse book, and this is a prophetic book. But this is not an apocalyptic prophecy book, and that’s a very, very good thing. Zack Hunt writes with the perfect combination of scholarship, personality, and humor. Set aside your color-coded end-times charts and pick up this book instead.”

  —Jason Boyett, author of Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse and other books

  “I’ve never read a book that’s so warm, smart, funny, wise, and relatable to my own fear-filled experiences growing up in evangelical subculture. If I had a DeLorean time machine, I’d ship Unraptured back to my younger self, knowing it’d save me from so much of the fear and self-doubt that’s still nestled in my chest today. This is an absolute must-read for anyone trying to make sense of end-times theology.”

  —Caleb Wilde, author of Confessions of a Funeral Director

  “Zack Hunt could have been an honorary general in the tribulation force. Instead, he has vulnerably and humbly shared his journey from an end-times know-it-all to a theology nerd guided by the peaceful kingdom of God. Readers who grew up with the anxiety of the end times will find Hunt a delightful, winsome guide to a book of the Bible that can be perplexing. Never forsaking his Nazarene roots, love for theology, or penchant for a solid punchline, Hunt offers a disarming insider critique of end-times theology by pointing to a more hopeful and indisputably less terrifying explanation of the end times.”

  —Ed Cyzewski, author of Flee, Be Silent, Pray

  “Zack Hunt has brilliantly put to words the stories of so many of us who grew up in a part of evangelicalism that was obsessed with being ready for the rapture. He has given voice to why many of us have left behind that theology for something more hopeful and biblical. May those who read Unraptured be enraptured in God’s love, revealed by Revelation’s slaughtered Lamb!”

  —Kurt Willems, lead pastor at Pangea Church and resource curator at TheologyCurator.com

  Herald Press

  PO Box 866, Harrisonburg, Virginia 22803

  www.HeraldPress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hunt, Zack, author.

  Title: Unraptured : how end times theology gets it wrong / Zack Hunt.

  Description: Harrisonburg : Herald Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical

  references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018045972| ISBN 9781513804156 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN

  9781513804163 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Rapture (Christian eschatology) | Eschatology.

  Classification: LCC BT887 .H87 2019 | DDC 236--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045972

  UNRAPTURED

  © 2019 by Herald Press, Harrisonburg, Virginia 22803. 800-245-7894.

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018045972

  International Standard Book Number: 978-1-5138-0415-6 (paperback);

  978-1-5138-0417-0 (ebook); 978-1-5138-0416-3 (hardcover)

  Printed in United States of America

  Cover and interior design by Reuben Graham

  All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owners.

  Unless otherwise noted, Scripture text is quoted, with permission, from the New Revised Standard Version, © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

  Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

  Scriptures marked (KJV) are from the King James Version.

  23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Kim,

  who opened my eyes to a bigger and better world

  than I ever could have imagined on my own

  Contents

  Foreword by Rachel Held Evans

  1 Left Behind

  2 Old-Time Religion

  3 Late-Night Television

  4 Catching Cannonballs

  5 Losing My Religion

  6 Couch-Skiing

  7 Undragoning

  8 Mill Creek

  9 Saved

  10 The Last Days

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  The Author

  Foreword

  It would happen at sunset: of this I felt certain.

  My childhood home sat atop one of those little speed bumps of a mountain just outside the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Our front porch
offered a premium view of I-59, the Birmingham airport, and, I believed, the impending rapture. I always imagined Jesus appearing in a glorious sky of pink and orange, flanked by a row of angels whose trumpets would herald his arrival so loudly it would shake the ground. My family would dash out of the house to the front porch just in time to see the bodies of all the Christians in Birmingham floating toward the clouds like untethered balloons. Then a flash of light would take us with them to heaven.

  It never occurred to me that I might be “left behind”—I was the best Bible memorizer in my Sunday school class, after all. Yet even when I was seven years old, my religious fantasy was always interrupted by the thought of friends, neighbors, and relatives for whom the rapture would, in fact, be very bad news. I felt conflicted about whether I really ought to ask Jesus to hurry up and come back when I didn’t actually want him to, and when his return would mean that millions of people around the world would suffer tribulation and I would likely miss field day at school. (Only later did it occur to me that Jesus could not arrive at sunset for everyone. Considering the persecution of Christians in China, it was a little selfish to expect him to show up at 6:30 p.m. Central.)

  Most of us who were raised evangelical in America know this story and lived some variation of it. The end times. The rapture. The great tribulation. We anticipated these events the way one anticipates a Beyoncé album drop: with excitement that it could happen at any moment, and a quiet fear that maybe it won’t be everything we dreamed it would be.

  Over time, many of us came to question the theology behind this story, particularly when the fulfillment of its prophecies requires so much death and destruction. But piecing together a new and better story has proven a challenge. Does rejecting the rapture mean rejecting the second coming of Christ? Are there ways to interpret 1 Thessalonians 4 that don’t require complicated prophetic timelines and pilotless airplanes? And should we read Revelation as a predictor of future events or toss it aside as a helplessly inscrutable creative writing project gone wrong?

  As it turns out, deconstructing rapture theology is a lot easier than replacing it with something better.

  Enter Zack Hunt.

  Funny, humble, and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, Zack Hunt is the perfect person to guide us through a better story, and the book you hold in your hands does exactly that. What I love about Zack is that the only thing to rival his skill as a storyteller is the wisdom with which he excavates those stories for their most important and transcendent truths. He is one of those rare writers of faith who can stand respectfully and with gratitude within their own tradition (in his case, evangelical and Nazarene) while offering informed critique of its mistakes, foibles, and abuses. Zack never punches down. He is quick to laugh at himself before anyone else. He shows grace to his critics, gratitude for his teachers, and openness to all he has yet to understand. I daresay he meets his own definition of humility—a quality that “recognizes our own limits and ignorance and sees the limits and ignorance of others not as a chance to embarrass them but as an opportunity to show them the same sort of grace and understanding that others have extended to us.”

  These gifts appear in abundance in the pages ahead, where I guarantee you will learn something new about Christianity, the Bible, end-times theology, and yourself. I laughed out loud in several places and sloppily underlined entire paragraphs. It’s nice to know that someone else was as preoccupied with the rapture as I once was. It’s even nicer to know that person has managed to keep the faith even after the rapture ceased to be a part of it.

  Some of the most powerful people in the world are issuing statements and making decisions based on an end-times theology that hasn’t evolved beyond the speculative fiction that informed my childhood fantasies. In these days, we need people like Zack speaking with clarity and conviction about what the Bible really says and what Jesus actually teaches. As the angel in the book of Revelation likes to say, “Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying.”

  —Rachel HeldEvans,

  author of Searching for Sunday and Inspired

  1

  Left Behind

  My bedroom was dark, light just barely peeking through the curtains. My adolescent heart began to race, my stomach clinched in ever-tightening knots. Panic was strangling my senses as I rolled out of bed, calling out for my mom, my brother, sister, anybody. But no one answered. The only sound to be heard was the creaking of old wooden floorboards beneath my feet. Stepping cautiously out of my bedroom, I began making my way throughout the house room by room. Slowly at first, one step at a time down the hallway, peering into each room, hoping, praying that somebody—anybody—would be there. With each empty room I picked up my pace, worried that my worst nightmare had finally come true. I was desperate to find anyone at all, even a stranger who had broken into my house to murder me and steal everything I had.

  But all I found was emptiness.

  And silence.

  It had finally happened.

  My worst nightmare had come true.

  The rapture had occurred and I had been left behind.

  Jesus had come to collect his saints, but I had been found wanting; a sinner unworthy to be taken in the twinkling of an eye to heaven with the real Christians. But why? What had I done? I had been so careful not to sin—at least not too much. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t drink. I didn’t do drugs. I wasn’t having premarital sex. I never missed church. I only listened to Christian music, and I had, like, every Christian T-shirt ever made. What else did Jesus want from me? What unknown sin had I committed that kept me on earth with the reprobate?

  As I raced through my suddenly foggy memory searching for some reason for finding myself on the path to hell, I threw open the back door to get one last look at the sun before beginning my search for a bunker to call home for the next seven years as the tribulation poured out its wrath on left-behind sinners like me. But then I saw him.

  The most glorious thing my eyes had ever beheld.

  No, not Jesus.

  It was my stepdad.

  Cutting the grass.

  I hadn’t been left behind after all! My family was still earthbound and accounted for. My stepdad had been outside, working in the yard. My mom was running errands, my sister was hanging out with friends, my brother was fishing. And I—well, I would have known all this if I hadn’t slept in till the crack of noon.

  The end-times industrial complex

  If that scenario sounds unimaginably bizarre to you, then clearly you didn’t grow up in conservative evangelicalism. Moments like this one are a regular occurrence for countless people who grew up convinced Jesus will return at any moment to whisk faithful Christians away to heaven, leaving behind non-Christians to suffer through a seven-year tribulation in which the Antichrist will rule the world through a one-world government while horrific plagues rain down on those left behind until Jesus returns to enact a thousand-year reign of peace.

  Or maybe the thousand years will start and then he will return—it depends whom you ask. What is certain is that you don’t want to get left behind. And you don’t have to be! All you have to do is say the Sinner’s Prayer, accept Jesus into your heart as your personal Lord and Savior, and pay careful attention to the signs of the end times that unfold anytime Israel is in the news. Discerning those signs won’t necessarily get you past the pearly gates, but it will help you keep on your toes. If you have backslidden a bit, you’ll know when you need to get your act together so you won’t be left behind.

  Thankfully, discerning the signs is easy. There are plenty of televangelists ready to break it all down for you with charts and diagrams and books and videos. Best of all, these guides to the apocalypse can all be yours for a small love offering of only $29.95. Or if you can’t wait that long for the mail to arrive, your local Christian bookstore is stocked full of end-times resources. I should know, because I bought most of them in high school.

  But I wasn’t alone. The Left Behind series of novels has
sold more than eighty million copies, but it is far from the only cash cow of the apocalypse.1 Long before Left Behind authors Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye showed up on the scene, another end-times expert named Hal Lindsey wrote The Late Great Planet Earth to nearly the same acclaim—and book sales. Not long after Lindsey set the world on fire with guarantees of an impending Armageddon, former NASA scientist Edgar Whisenant had his own bestseller: 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. Spoiler alert: the rapture didn’t happen in 1988.

  If books aren’t your thing, folks like San Antonio–based preacher John Hagee are prepared with oversized charts and weekly television programs, in which his church services are transformed into apocalyptic lectures. Or for the younger generation, there’s the Third Eagle of the Apocalypse on YouTube, who is more than eager to explain to you the demonic imagery at the Denver International Airport or reveal the secret prophetic symbols in the latest iPhone commercial—that is, if he’s not too busy composing an original song on the end times.

  And then there’s my personal favorite prophet of the end times: Jack Van Impe, who along with his wife, Rexella, produces a weekly faux news show in which he quotes an awe- inspiring number of Bible verses while breaking down news stories, usually connected to Israel, to reveal how they are clear fulfillments of biblical prophecy.

  But that’s just the tip of the apocalyptic iceberg. There are rapture-themed movies designed to scare you into not being left behind; bumper stickers to warn your fellow drivers that should the rapture occur, your vehicle will be driverless; and rapture pet insurance, which guarantees that a left-behind heathen sinner will take care of your pet when you get zapped to heaven.2 To be fair, that last one was revealed to be a hoax, but that only means the market is ripe for a new rapture insurance company should you be looking for an investment opportunity.

  The point is, the rapture can take over your life if you let it. Plenty of folks are eager for that to happen, because they’ve got lots of stuff to sell you. Rapture-related businesses may seem like obvious scams, but that’s because you’re not terrified of being left behind, or worse—and this is the real fear behind it all—going to hell.