Wednesday 9 January 2013

A life in letters: Rapture

Nothing caused me more terror as a teenager than what I heard at church about ‘The Rapture’ According to the teaching of the New Testament, Jesus promised that he would return to earth, making a decisive intervention at the very end of history when the human race would face a final judgement. Some Christians however, discerned in the New Testament the teaching that Jesus would return secretly for his followers at some point prior to this final, cataclysmic appearing. At that secret ‘coming’, those who had believed, and placed their faith in him, would be seized, or ‘raptured’ into his presence, while those who had rejected him would be left behind to face a period of mounting crisis in world affairs without the leavening presence of God’s people and God’s Spirit, and they, we were given to understand, would have no hope of seeking and finding Christ. To be lost when the King came for his people was to be forever lost.

The Christians my family associated with when I was young believed that the return of Christ for his people was imminent – he could appear at any moment. Much read among our kind of Christian at the time was Hal Lindsey’s book The late great planet earth which expounded these beliefs about God’s end-of-the-world programme in the context of world events in the 1960s. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was seen as a fulfilment of Biblical prophecy, which only intensified expectations that the end was near, and during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 many Christians believed that God must soon intervene on behalf of the Jewish people. Similar convictions led to publication of the Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins published between 1995 and 2007.

The purpose of the sermons on ‘the rapture’ which I heard as a child was to encourage listeners to prepare themselves for Christ’s reintervention in history by embracing the faith, thus ensuring that they would not be left behind, but in me they induced a paralysing terror. When the minister announced his Bible reading, and it included Jesus’ words about some being taken and some being left, or St Paul’s words that ‘the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord for ever.’ (1 Thessalonians 4:16) I would desperately attempt to distract my mind from the rest of the sermon, building imaginary Lego structures in my mind; the more complex the better, but I could never quite divert my attention totally away from the terrible words coming from the pulpit. I’d imagine myself waking up one morning to find my parents gone, raptured by Christ, leaving me hideously alone to face a maelstrom of personal and social trauma with the prospect of a ‘lost eternity’ ahead of me. I think that sometimes in Sunday School the same teaching was directed towards children, so that we were encouraged to envisage the awfulness of life in a Christless world, and encouraged to seek him while there was still time.

I remember sitting on the stairs in our house in Carluke in the mid-1960s when my parents had gone off shopping to Glasgow, and were late back. Looking out through the landing window, I hugged Prince, our King Charles spaniel as I waited, with mounting anxiety, for the familiar car to come along the road. On other occasions when my parents had been delayed, I’d lift the phone, and dial the number of someone in our church, and then, having heard their voice, putting the phone down without answering, secure in the knowledge that in those pre-1471 days they wouldn’t be able to detect the identity of the caller. It was enough that I had heard their familiar voice. The Lord had not come.

In the crisis of the autumn of 1973, fraught with union militancy and the ‘three-day week’, and a further war in the Middle East, it seemed to me the Lord would surely come. Daily, it seems as I look back, I walked home in the early-evening autumn darkness from my shift at the library as fast as I could. I dreaded finding the house unlit and my parents snatched away by a briefly-returned Saviour, leaving me to endure dark years of Tribulation without any hope of finding the Bridegroom whose coming (to use the imagery in one of Jesus’ parables) had found me without oil in my lamp.

It would be a long time before I could face with equanimity a situation where a Christian was not where I expected her to be at a particular time. I was hugely blessed by my time as part of an annual Scripture Union Mission Team in St Andrews in the late 1970s, and yet I still was not free of this fear.

One Friday evening the team had been out very late, and some of them, including the leader Hugh McWhinnie got into conversation with a very intoxicated fisherman whom we had met down beside the harbour with his rod. I came back to the church hall with the others, and went to bed. Time passed, and those who had stayed with the fisherman still had not returned. By 3am, I was still surrounded by empty camp beds, and I began to be afraid.  For there was a subset of the doctrine of the ‘rapture’ according to which there would be a ‘partial rapture.’ Those who promulgated this view held, on the grounds of very shaky biblical exposition, that while faithful believers would be taken by the returning Lord, unfaithful Christians would be left behind to pass through the ‘Great Tribulation.’ And as I lay there in Martyrs’ Church Hall while the others who had returned with me slept securely, I saw faintly illuminated in the soft light from the streetlamps still rolled-up sleeping bags, I fought against the terrible fear that the Lord had come, and that I was among those who had been left behind. Eventually there were footsteps in the hallway, and whispers about how the drunken fisherman had had to be escorted back home to Cupar and I was greatly relieved. ‘I thought it was the partial rapture,’ I muttered to Hugh, but he looked at me blankly.


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