While I would agree that right-wing evangelism is growing within mainstream churches and that schism could well result, I see no evidence that left-leaning and ecumenical churches (which are not a union set) are leaning more left. Heck, these days, nobody is leaning left much, any more.
Well- I mean left/liberal theologically- one such shift being towards gay-marriage/ordination, another being doctrinal latitude to the point of accepting
Jesus Seminar/Bishop Spong-style teachings which radically reinterpret or deny cardinal C’tian doctrine.
In the 1960s, Bishop James Pike may have been considered an aberration not worthy of causing much upset; but are the doctrinal teachings of Bishop Spong that out of step with his ecclesiastical contemporaries?
Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonian Church - I Thess 4:16-17 actually uses that phrase…
16. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:
17. Then **we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: ** and so shall we ever be with the Lord.
which could have been based on Jesus’s statement in Matthew 24:27-31…
27. For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
28. For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together.
29. Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken:
30. And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.
31. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.
The 70 AD-Apocalypse believers (Preterists) can point to both certain apparitions reported by Josephus over the skies of Jerusalem and also the destruction of the Priestly-Sanctuary-Temple system of the Mosaic Covenant as Signs that the Son of Man has arrived in Heaven to receive God’s Kingdom (a reference to Daniel 7).
The trumpeting angels gathering the elect are regarded as referring to the Apostolic messengers (Greek word- angels) bearing God’s Word all over the world gathering (Greek word literally - synagoguing) the elect into the Church. While many (perhaps most) Preterists hold to a future final return of Jesus to raise the dead, end this old world & create the new one, and judge all humanity, another
group- the Full Preterists hold that Jesus actually returned in His fulness in 70 AD,
judges the dead immediately at their decease, and resurrects His faithful believers into the New World- and that this world & the human race will never see a return of Jesus to end the world & do all that other stuff on this side. I can’t go that far with it.
The rapture will never come as long as there is a book to be sold.
The earth will blow up, tomorrow,
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow,
We’ll be killed.
Just thinking about, tomorrow,
with the horror and the sorrow,
it’ll be fun.
When I’m stuck with a day, that’s warm and sunny
I just stick out chin, and grin and say
The Rapture’s, Tomorrow!, I love you Tomorrow,
You’re always a day away.
I read it last year (same class that had me reading Left Behind.) It’s hard to take a guy seriously when he’s going on about the dangers of what have become a fairly ineffective EU and a collapsed Soviet Union and bloc, where parts of the bloc are now in the EU, NATO, or both. And I never understood why he thought ecumenicalism is such a threat. As for the whole Gog-Magog thing, it’s a misinterpretation of both the actual text and of the context. As can be seen on a map, nobody is going to try to move an army straight overland and across desert–they’ll follow the river as long as they can. So any attack from the east–Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian–will have come from the north. The enemy, no matter who it was, always came from the north in the ancient Israeli experience.
Don’t feel too bad. Hell, I fell for Wilson Bryan Key’s *Subliminal Seduction * books, so you’re not alone. 
Bastard. Now that will be stuck in my head all day.
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
And I feel fine!
It’s easy enough for me to see the faults in the book now but in 1972 the fall of the Soviet Union wasn’t foreseeable. I did wonder about his Chinese army, though.
Also the Common Market (now EU) didn’t have 10 members then and his predictions just seemed to ring true.
Last I heard, it was rescheduled for Xmas this year. Stay awake!
[QUOTE=asterion]
And I never understood why he thought ecumenicalism is such a threat. QUOTE]
The fund’ist/evangelical fear was that the Ecumenical movement would lead to a lowest-common-denominator C’nity in which doctrinal conviction was de-emphasized, leftist politics exalted, and the only heresies would be in standing up for the main doctrines of the C’tian faith & traditional moral values. Visualize an
authoritarian, PC-enforcing Unitarianism.
Jack booted Unitarian thugs? Bit of a stretch.
Ve haff vays of making you think for yourzelf!
As for the Rapture, nothing happened, man, they’re still together: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture
Or not, as the case may be.
Yer bad. 
True - before then, it didn’t need to be a school of theology any more than there needed to be an “earth is the center of the universe” school of astronomy before Copernicus. It was simply what everyone took for granted.
You know the first time I heard of the Rapture? It was Blondie’s song “Rapture.” At first I had no idea what she was going on about. It was only later that I found out about the religious background of the song. Blondie didn’t exactly support the religious dogma in the song. She exploited it as a basis for a surrealistic wordplay rap. Totally irreverent. The video portrayed the voracious man from Mars as one of those New Orleans parade guys in top hat, tails, umbrella, and buggle glasses.
With that as my introduction to the subject, no way could I ever take it seriously.
Er, actually there WAS, y’know. Ptolemaic scholars did a lot of work to make the geocentric model fit to observation. 
I know, I know you mean that for the people-at-large it was a non-issue because there was no other viable explanation, but really, the people-at-large were probably never quite aware of any cosmo/theological dispute that did not end up with people getting killed in their hometown streets. But for theologians, the idea of symbolic/allegorical interpretation of the Bible, as opposed to absolute textual literalism, did exist for a long time.
Absolutely true. But during the millennium or so immediately preceding ol’ Nick…
It wasn’t just the people. The literal truth of the Bible was the operative theory with respect to the origins of the Earth a century before Darwin. In the early chapters of The Song of the Dodo (one of the best nonfiction books ever), David Quammen recounts the means by which successive findings in geology and the flora and fauna of distant lands during that century were crammed into increasingly complicated theories designed to coincide with the strictures of the Biblical creation-and-flood texts.
But the Biblical model was still the reigning theory, even during the half-century or so before Darwin when anyone intelligent knew it was bullshit, because nobody had yet come along with anything satisfactory to replace it.
I didn’t think Blondie’s song was in any way referring to the Rapture- I thought her use of the word was playing off the use of rap in the song.
Now I gotta hear what lyrics actually refer to the religious concept.
Now to be a pisser- I have to say that dismissing a religious concept based on a song parody of it is about as deep as dismissing Republican concepts because of Newt Gingrich’s funny first name or Democratic concepts based on Bill Clinton’s BJ.