I read it a long time ago. It’s possible they learned the moon launch was faked. It’s also possible that’s from some other book i read, and not from Left Behind.
I am not an expert in comparative religion etc, but how much commonality is there in these beliefs?
They may not all agree on what the Rapture is?
Lewis wrote a whole interplanetary trilogy about these ideas; one aspect seems to be that most other planets have not Fallen from Grace, so they don’t need a Jesus because they are still in paradise. Lewis suggests that humanity would only spread sin (and the influence of fallen angels) to the other worlds, so humanity should be prevented fom colonising the universe and spreading this infection to other worlds.
The last book in the so-called Space Trilogy makes this explicit, and it seems to indicate what a toxic view of our place in the universe Lewis had.
I don’t think either believe in the Rapture. I don’t think it makes sense in Mormon theology, where you can be saved after death. And I’ve read a LOT of C.S.Lewis, and never ran into that. Also, he writes from a Catholic/Episcopalian perspective, and I don’t believe that’s standard in either of those strains of Christianity.
After the Narnia books, I naturally turned to the Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength). I really enjoyed the writing, but slowly the antagonism towards ‘fallen’ humanity surfaces until the whole of England is destroyed in an earthquake, in order to punish some scientists (and a sadistic lesbian).
Read it, by all means, but it is appalling.
He really had issues with women in positions of power…
I’ve read all that, and also a bunch of his other Christian books, including a lot of the non-fiction. That Hideous Strength is pretty unpleasant, but I enjoyed Perelandra, despite its wordiness.
Are you claiming that the end of That Hideous Strength represents the Rapture? I admit, I’d never heard of “the rapture” when I read it, so maybe I just missed that?
I think this disaster stuff does not correspond to any kind of, e.g., Catholic doctrine: nobody but the Father knows the timing of the Second Coming/Last Judgement. But afterwards the entire universe does get recycled.
The ending is certainly cataclysmic, and might be the start of the End Days in-universe. Of course a similar End Times event, occurs at the end of the Narnia cycle, with some nastiness surrounding the ‘grown-up’ female character.
No, the closest thing that comes to talking about the rest of the universe is this passage from Matthew:
“‘the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light:
the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’
Which is a call back to the prophecy of Isaiah in the Old Testament:
For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light. All the host of heaven shall rot away, and the skies roll up like a scroll. All their host shall wither like a leaf withering on a vine, or fruit withering on a fig tree.
Which only suggests disruption of the universe, but not total destruction.
I think a fair number of the people who believe the Rapture is coming believe that there is a firmament over the Earth, the way the Bible says, and so there are no aliens out there. Think of the universe in the Divine Comedy.
That Hideous Strength is in the bottom 10% of the sf books I’ve read. Maybe lower. But isn’t the last Narnia book basically a version of the rapture?
Something like that. More akin to medieval versions of the Revelations, which don’t mention a Rapture per se. Lewis was certainly influenced by medieval eschatological beliefs.
I don’t think anything in the Narnia books is relevant to this thread. The “destruction of the world” is only the world of Narnia. In England, i believe the characters simply died in a train crash, and the world continued on. And there aren’t any people on other planets in the world of Narnia. I just don’t think that’s related to the topic of this thread.
Well, it is not as relevant as the Cosmic Trilogy of books, but it does establish the possibility of multiple Jesuses (Aslan is another incarnation of Jesus, or more accurately the same being) and multiple End-of-Times events. Perhaps if Lewis had expanded his Cosmic Trilogy to include distant stars and distant Salvations, he might have described multiple Revelations on distant stars as well.
I prefer Olaf Stapleton’s ideas about multiple Jesuses, myself.
From Starmaker (1937)
But this thread is more about what different religious sects believe about the intersection of the Rapture and extraterrestrials.
It looks very much that the question has been answered; sects that believe in the Rapture don’t believe in extraterrestrials and those that believe in extraterrestrials don’t believe in the Rapture.
There are a lot of sects. I think it’s true that most sects that believe in the rapture either don’t believe in entities with souls on other planets, or simply don’t think about the possibility. But i wouldn’t jump to concluding that none have considered it.
It would be helpful if anyone is familiar with a sect that believes in the rapture and has said anything about other worlds, however.
This is in line with my prior experience as an evangelical Christian.
This was in line with my sect, anyway. It was the age of Left Behind when kids watched shows about the end times. I don’t think I ever watched Left Behind but the rapture figured prominently in what I was taught and even what was in contemporary music at the time. In fact, as a teenager, I had a poster on my bedroom door about the rapture.
I was never taught anything about aliens or other parts of the universe. I feel like the Christians in my church were just shy of believing the sun revolved around the Earth.
One has to reason that any extraterrestrials will be Judged the same way as any other heathens who, in the past or present, have not heard the gospel. Or am I missing something?
FWIW I just asked a Presbyterian minister this question and he said he believes that after the second coming of Christ, everything in the universe is remade.
He believes aliens are pretty likely, but also that we’ll probably never meet them.
He doesn’t have the typical evangelical “Left Behind” view of the rapture, which he says is not biblical.
Based on previous conversations we have had, he doesn’t seem to believe in anything that isn’t textually in the Bible. So ideas that came after Christ’s resurrection, such as heaven and hell and rapture - he doesn’t put much stock in them. But he believes there is a Biblical basis for the Second Coming of Christ and that God is the God of the whole universe and that universe may include other beings who will also be remade.
(I’m lucky I have a friend who will field my many questions about his faith even though he knows I don’t believe any of it.)
As several of us have noted, what you may be missing is that I suspect that many Christians who believe in the Rapture either (a) believe that humans on Earth are unique in the universe, and the only such intelligent life in the universe, and/or (b) just haven’t given any thought to the impact that the Rapture and End Times would have on the rest of the universe, because it’s just not relevant to their belief.