Unraptured Read online

  But Jesus was coming back soon, so I had to really double down on my holiness. That meant trashing every non-Christian CD I happened to own so I wouldn’t be tempted to listen to it. (Well, except for Puff Daddy and the Family. Some things were just too precious to part with.) But I made up for it by sanctifying my car holy. When I got my first car I immediately set all the radio presets to Christian radio stations. Actually, just one: WAY-FM. I made it my preset for every single one of my radio presets lest I be tempted or accidentally tune in to heathen radio and lose some of my holiness. I smiled proudly whenever my friends tried to change the station, only to find the presets entirely sanctified.

  This may come as a shock, but I never got a single girl to ever set foot in that car.

  It didn’t matter, though. I had more important things than girls to worry about. I was about to be raptured. So once I had my personal holiness fully turned up to 11, it was time to turn my attention to everyone else around me. They weren’t my friends and family anymore. They were my mission field. And by “mission field,” I mean easy targets for harassment. But that’s not how I saw it. Most of them may have been Christians already—as a general rule I only associated with Christians, because “Flee from the presence of evil” and whatnot. But their eternal souls were in danger if they didn’t discern the signs of the times as I had. So I took it upon myself to educate them every chance I got.

  Sometimes that was as simple as offering them a recap of the previous night’s broadcast of Jack Van Impe Presents. Other times, my missionary work required more in-depth study—like the time I badgered my youth pastor into letting me lead a Bible study on the end times. When he finally relented, I came prepared with more charts, diagrams, and proof texts than had ever before been assembled in one place outside of a John Hagee sermon. (If you don’t get that joke, take a second, google “John Hagee chart.” Go ahead. I’ll wait . . . see what I mean?) I barely took a breath as I rattled off every detail of end-times theology and biblical prophecy I knew. My long­suffering youth pastor gently corrected me when I got a little, let’s say, speculative.

  I was insufferable.

  Dispensationalism

  There were no people, places, or moments that were off-limits to my end-times fearmongering. One time the pastor of our church invited the youth group over to his house for a cookout. His house was on a golf course out in the suburbs, and the weather that day was beautiful. We had a great time.

  But it was about more than fun and frankfurters for me. Much more. It was my chance to figure out the future and determine my pastor’s eschatological bona fides. You see, I was just a young dispensationalist at the time. But like all dispensationalists, I already had all the dispensations figured out. I just needed someone with ecclesiastical authority to confirm my beliefs.

  What’s a dispensationalist?3 We’ll get to the details later. But long story short, it’s someone who believes in end-times theology—and specifically, that history is divided into seven time periods, called dispensations. According to dispensationalists, we live in a holding pattern right before the final dispensation and, with it, the rapture. When exactly that final dispensation will start is a matter of much debate. And it, along with the rest of the timing of the apocalypse, was a debate I needed my pastor to settle for me then and there, once and for all.

  I didn’t wait long to grill my pastor with questions. Pun once again intended. He was standing at the grill, hot dogs on but still cold, when I approached to find out where he stood on the end of the world. Was he, as my hero Jack Van Impe was, a postmillennialist who believed the second coming would happen after the thousand-year period of peace mentioned in Revelation? Or was he a premillennialist who believed Jesus would return before those thousand years to personally reign over that period of peace? Or worse: Could he be an amillennialist, someone who rejected a literal millennium?

  After five minutes or so of breathless lecturing from me on the end times, he smiled, turned over the hot dogs, and said, “I’m a panmillennialist.” “A panmillennialist? What’s that?” I asked, as my heart began to race at the prospect of some heretofore-unknown-to-me insight on the end times that not even Jack Van Impe knew about. But it was not to be. My pastor just kept smiling and said, “It means I believe everything will pan out in the end.”

  I was crushed and enraged: crushed that I didn’t have the apocalyptic firepower I was hoping for, and furious that my pastor could be so glib about something so serious. I smiled politely and laughed halfheartedly as the rest of the evening faded into a fog of disappointment and frustration. But that was not the end of my obsession with the end times. Far from it. If anything, it served as fuel for the fire that burned within me to know all the secrets of biblical prophecy. If people told me I was wrong, that just made me want to prove them wrong. As much as my obsession with the rapture was driven by a fear of hell, it was also driven by a desire to feel smarter than everybody else and to know things I thought only supersmart people like Jack Van Impe could know.

  All the right answers

  As strange as it might sound, there is a certain elitism to end-times theology. After all, if you know the signs of the times and know when Jesus is going to return or when the rapture is going to happen, people turn to you for answers, just like they turned to Jack. That feeling was intoxicating. I was a nerd, but I didn’t love school as much as I loved feeling smart and having others tell me I was smart. That was—and if I’m being completely honest, probably still is—part of the reason theology appealed to me. It was, in my mind, the height of intellectual pursuit. I’m not alone in that sort of spiritual navel-gazing. In the Middle Ages, theology was known as the “queen of the sciences.” They didn’t mean exactly the same thing back then as we do now when we talk about science. They meant it more in the sense of the general pursuit of knowledge rather than in the Neil deGrasse Tyson sense.

  Regardless of how it was meant, I believed it. And if theology was the pinnacle of intellectual pursuit, then I wanted to study theology. How did the rapture get mixed into that? Well, if theology in general is the queen of the sciences, then I thought dispensationalism was the king. Not because it possesses the same intellectual rigor of systematic theology, but because it claims to. It has the veneer of sophistication—of complex thought and serious inquiry. Dispensationalism gives its disciples the sense that they are intellectual giants.

  Again, I know it all sounds a bit bizarre, but when you’re fully immersed in a certain world—trapped in the bubble, as it were—it all makes perfect sense and becomes incredibly intoxicating. You believe that you’ve stumbled onto secret knowledge that only the wise can comprehend, knowledge that is also the key to eternal life. Isn’t that what Revelation is all about? “This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast” (Revelation 13:18). I took it as a challenge—a calling, even. Here was a way for me to impress God and the people around me. Here was a way to save my soul. If I had all the right answers and believed all the right things, I could be sure to be one of the first to be raptured.

  Also, I liked to argue. And I liked to be right. Those things kind of go together. End-times theology gave me the opportunity to do both at once—or at least the former. End-times theology is a lot like apologetics. Christian apologetics seek to give intellectual justification to the things Christians believe. End-times theology does the same with its various theories on when the rapture is going to happen, who the Antichrist is, when Jesus will return, and so on and so forth.

  Although I didn’t have the self-awareness to recognize it at the time, end-times theology also appealed to me because it gave me an alternative to sinless perfection but still guaranteed me a ticket to heaven. Don’t get me wrong; I still felt compelled to live as sinlessly as possible so I wouldn’t be caught dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight when Jesus returned. But end-times theology gave me a safety net—a redundancy plan in the event that I wasn’t able to be perfect.

  How so? Whe
n I was still obsessed with the rapture, my faith was almost purely a faith of ideas. Repentance was part of the equation, and I felt immense pressure to be perfect. But that pressure was more about being a better Christian, getting more jewels in my crown, and living in a better mansion in heaven than it was about being saved. I didn’t want to be perfect just to avoid hell. I wanted to be perfect to be a better Christian than other Christians so God would love me more. But salvation, the baseline necessary just to get into heaven? All that salvation required was believing the right things. Faith alone, they told me, was all that was necessary to be saved. End-times theology played both cards. It was the right belief system, and believing in it meant I believed what Jesus said was true and thus I would be saved from hell. But if I really understood its secrets, that would mean I was special, set apart by God to know the mysteries of Revelation and the apocalypse.

  The end times weren’t just about saving my soul. They were about stroking my ego. The book of Revelation is a message of hope and reconciliation for all humankind. I had taken that good news and made it all about me.

  4

  Catching Cannonballs

  Everyone has their sacred space, the place they escape to for peace and solitude, to rest and rejuvenate. Maybe it’s a park or the woods, church or the beach. Growing up, mine was the basketball court in my backyard. Not a real basketball court, mind you, just an old goal perched above a patch of driveway that just happened to be something resembling a rectangle. It wasn’t much. The backboard was old, slowly rotting wood. The rim was a screwed-on-too-tightly hunk of steel that had no give, so any shot that hit the rim ricocheted off hard and out into oblivion. The net itself was a rusted metal chain. There was no baseline to speak of. Just a low rock wall about two feet high that stood behind the goal post like one of Homer’s Sirens beckoning your knees to crash into it. I answered the call. Many, many times. But I loved my backyard basketball court.

  It was my sacred space.

  Maybe it makes sense then that my sacred space was the place I used to make my boldest pronouncement of the end times. Or maybe not. I was a know-it-all end-times expert. I would have made the same arrogant pronouncement anywhere, but I just happened to be playing basketball that day in my driveway. But the sacredness of that space gave me an added level of confidence that what I was saying wasn’t just my opinion; it was coming directly from the mouth of God . . . via Jack Van Impe.

  I had a few friends over that day, Pete, Chad, and Brian, and together we were lazily shooting around when, unprompted, I decided to catch them up on the previous evening’s edition of Jack Van Impe Presents. My teenage friends were not riveted by what a random senior citizen on Christian television had to say about what was going on in Israel. That didn’t stop me from telling them. Good friends that they were, they feigned interest as I explained why Jack and I were convinced the rapture was imminent.

  “Really?” Pete said.

  Absolutely.

  “Like how soon?” Brian asked

  “Honestly?” I said, hesitating a moment to do the prophetic math in my head. “I would be surprised if we are still here by this weekend.”

  They just looked at each other and didn’t say anything. Had my teenage self even a shred of self-awareness, it would have been obvious to me that they were silently questioning whether they should call a mental health professional and/or why they were ever friends with me in the first place.

  Failure to launch

  It all seems so crazy now, but back then it was all so clear, at least to me. News was picking up in Israel, according to Jack, and a peace treaty had to be imminent. Work on rebuilding the temple could begin once those evil Muslims realized their apostasy and handed over to Israel the keys to the Temple Mount. We also had what I thought was the perfect candidate for the Antichrist in Hillary Clinton. Or maybe it was the pope? I wasn’t picky. Plus, I’d heard on TBN that some group had already remade all the temple vessels from the Old Testament, so they were ready to go when the temple was rebuilt. Surely Jesus had to be coming back soon to rapture his saints into heaven, right?

  Well, he didn’t.

  But you already knew that. You probably also know of dozens of other recent end-times predictions. But those failed predictions are just a drop in the historical bucket of end-times predictions. Predicting the return of Jesus has been something of a professional sport for centuries, and no amount of failed predictions has stopped people from trying to pinpoint the date and time of his return. Declarations by Jesus himself that no one—not even he—can know the day or hour of his return haven’t stopped them either (Matthew 24:36).

  We often think of predicting the end of all things as being confined to the purview of the eccentric, but there are plenty of otherwise reasonable Christians who have taken up the sport as well. In recent decades, the end times have gone from fringe speculation to a multimillion-dollar industry. A never-ending supply of experts stand ready to not just tell you when Jesus will return, but help you figure it all out yourself by selling you a warehouse full of books and DVDs.

  Despite the prolific business and high-profile failures, such as the May 21st folks a few years ago, the end times are still confusing for the uninitiated, not least of all because the theology has its own insider language. But it’s an insider’s insider language. Kind of like the Shriners. They’re an insiders’ club within the insiders’ club of Freemasonry. End-times theology is an insiders’ club within the larger insiders’ club of Christianity. Its insider language is based on other insider language. If you’re standing on the outside—and often even if you’re on the inside—it can all be incredibly confusing.

  You may already be confused after reading the last chapter, or even that last sentence. I don’t want to assume you know all the lingo. And though I don’t want to bog you down in a dictionary of words you’ll never use in real-life conversations, I also don’t want you to have to stop and google every term or, worse, have to ask a family member who does know what those terms mean and then get stuck talking to them for hours about how Donald Trump is fulfilling biblical prophecy by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. (You almost certainly have that family member whether you know it or not.)

  So before we go any further, allow me to take you on a brief tour of the apocalypse. Our foray into the apocalypse is not intended to simply bring you up to speed on all the insider lingo. If we’re going to understand why end-times theology is both incredibly relevant and incredibly problematic, we first need to understand what is being proclaimed.

  Without further ado, here are the answers to all the questions you’re too embarrassed to ask or too lazy to google. You need to know these terms before we go any further down the path to the apocalypse. I promise I’ll be brief.

  Apocalyptic lingo

  First up: What exactly is biblical prophecy anyway? Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “I’m not that dumb. I know what biblical prophecy is.” But you’d probably be wrong about that. I’m sure you know what biblical prophecy is in the popular-Left-Behind-Kirk-Cameron-terrible-movie sense. But one of the most ironic things about biblical prophecy is that even its adherents fundamentally misunderstand biblical prophecy. Why? Because biblical prophecy actually has very little to do with predicting the future.

  Of course, you would never guess that from reading the Left Behind series or watching programs like Jack Van Impe Presents. Those authors and presenters would have you believe—as they themselves believe—that biblical prophecy is essentially a secret road map to future events. They think the clues to decipher the when, where, and how of those events are scattered throughout the Bible, just waiting to be deciphered. But that’s not what biblical prophets prophesied about. Actual biblical prophets—folks like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—were concerned with calling the people of God to repentance and the doing of justice. They certainly talked about the future, but to the extent they warned about future events, it nearly always involved a scenario like this: “You’re acting wicked
and unjust and God says if you don’t repent, turn from your wicked ways, and grant justice to the oppressed, then here’s the punishment that’s going to happen.”

  That’s why Jesus can also be considered a prophet, as well as folks like John the Baptist and even the John who wrote the book of Revelation. Biblical prophets weren’t fortune- tellers. They were prophetic because they called on the people of God to repent and demanded justice for the oppressed. That is exactly what Jesus did throughout his ministry, telling his followers to “repent, for the kingdom of God has come near!” (Matthew 4:17) and describing the last judgment as a moment when entrance into that kingdom will be decided not by doctrinal affirmation but by how we treated the least of these (Matthew 25:31-46).

  Speaking of the last book of the Bible: another name for Revelation is the Apocalypse of John. Here again you might be surprised. Apocalypse doesn’t mean “end times,” as so many assume; it means “an unveiling” or “a revealing.” Apocalypse can refer to an unveiling of the end times, but at the heart of the idea of apocalypse in the Bible is an unveiling of the truth. That truth could be related to present or future events; it’s the context that helps us know which. In either instance, apocalypse is fundamentally about truth-telling, not fortune-telling.

  Time periods are another biggie in end-times theology. As we already saw in that disastrous cookout with my pastor, another word for end-times theology is dispensationalism: the belief that history has been segmented into various time periods, or dispensations. But, once again, exactly what will happen at the end of those dispensations and in what order is a matter of intense debate and has been for a long, long time. At the heart of this debate is the matter of the millennium: a thousand-year reign of peace on earth. But that is where things start to get messy. Since the dawn of the church, folks have argued about whether that thousand years is literal or spiritual. There’s also a debate about when it will happen. Will it happen after the second coming or before the second coming? Also, will Jesus be here on earth to reign during that time, or will he wait to return until after the thousand years of peace are over?