I knwo I have heard this before (at least once on The Simpsons although in the wrong context, I am sure) but don’t know specifically what it refers to. I guess it is something biblical and apocolyptic, but can someone give more detail?
IANAChristian, but I believe it refers to Judgment Day, when each soul is judged and those that are seen as worthy are taken into heaven.
Now let someone else who really knows this stuff take what I said and run with it.
The doctrine of the Rapture is a relatively late innovation; the modern version originated with a 19th century Anglican priest named John Nelson Darby. In short, it is the belief that true believers will be bodily taken up to heaven prior to a seven-year period of tribulation, to be followed by a 1,000 year reign of Christ on Earth. This viewpoint is behind the Left Behind books, and Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. For a skeptical viewpoint on the issue (from a Roman Catholic perspective), check out LaHaying the Rapture on Thick.
The rapture is when all Christians are removed from the Earth, and heathens like me are left here. So, if I’m a passanger on an airplane and the pilot is Christian, I’m screwed.
Just to second JohnM. From the series Frontline:
The Rapture is the belief that true believers in Christ will be taken bodily into heaven just prior to or during the Tribulation period, and thus be spared the horrible fate awaiting those left behind on earth. The rapture is an integral part of the premillennial dispensationalist systems which have dominated Christian prophecy belief in the second half of the 20th century, as it proposes faith in Christ as the only route to salvation.
The Rapture was first proposed in 1859 by John Nelson Darby, a British minister preaching in America. Today his proposal is accepted as truth by several religions.
Kudos to JohnM and Doug Bowe for their succinct definitions.
The Rapture has been an extremely hot topic in the popular culture of conservative Evangelical Christians at least since the late 1970s. It has been the subject of a number of films, ranging from cheap, laughably bad Sunday School features to more recent productions such as Left Behind, based on the best-selling series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
Such stories always suggest that The Rapture shall occur very soon. A point often overlooked by the general public is that many such Christians look forward to the End Times with happy anticipation. Central to the idea of The Rapture is the belief that the right sort of Christians are going to be plucked bodily up into heaven all at once.
No doubt many Evangelical Christians are intelligent, decent, fair- minded people. At the same time, the idea that the end of the world is nearly at hand, and that God is going to lift you up into Heaven while everybody else catches it can be tremendously empowering to a great many social frustrates. After all, it ought to come as a heck of a put-down to the girls that laughed at you when you asked them to the prom, that mean phys ed coach who made you run all of those laps, the smart-ass Jew who turned you down for a mortgage, the show-offs who stuck it out and graduated high school…
This helps account for the success of a kind of mini-industry of Rapture books and movies. The films have ranged fromcheap, laughably bad features shown in Sunday Schools to major productions such as The Omega Code, produced by Trinity Broadcasting.
Throughout much of the 90s, Evangelists and “journalists” on the Trinity Broadcasting Network treated the idea that the Second Coming was going to occur in the year 2000 as practically a given. James Agee described the legendary film Bill 'n Coo, a love story starring trained birds dressed up like people, as “the damnedest thing you ever saw”. I suspect he might have revised his opinion if he saw a mock documentary broadcast ad nauseum by the Trinity Broadcasting Network in the mid 90’s. In it, reports flashed from around the world of how millions of people aroound the world had vanished that afternoon, including the pilots of helicopters and planes which crashed to the ground. Then an effete minister from the Church of England is interviewed who explains in a patronizing tone, that this was an example of “evolution”, tereby demonstrating that there are Fundamentalists who know next to nothing about mainstream Protestantism or evolutionary theory, two things which appear to be anatema to them.
At the end of the film, an evangelist on the network breaks in to explain that the movie we are watching was one which Trinity made in advance to be shown on the day of Rapture. They had to make it in advance, he explains, because he and all of the other ministers on the network–and he begins rattling off names–were taken up bodily into Heaven earlier that day.
Now that’s confidence.
Interestingly, while it spent enormous resources insisting that it was practically a sure thing that the party would be over in 2000, Trinity Broadcasting released The Omega Codeoin October 15, 1999. When it did, an executive for the corporation was interviewed on the NPR show All Things Considered. Rather than discuss why the company had gone to such effort and expense to produce a movie which might only be “good” for another ten or eleven weeks, he confined his remarks to banalities about market share and advertising strategy.
In some denominations Rapture is referred to as “Translation”. The Roman Catholic Church has a similar idea known as The Assumption, and teaches that this happened to the body of The Virgin Mary, although it is uncertain as to whether this occured before or after her death.
It is interesting that the idea of Rapture, as has been pointed out above, is such a relatively new one. Then again, Fundamentalism only got its name in the 20th Century, it being derived from The Fundamentals, a series of pamphlets written by a group of Baptist laymen around 1909. This raises some questions–for me, at least–about the references one hears to “old time religion”, “the old time Gospel”, etc., and to the ability of Americans to maintain historical perspective generally.