Yesterday 5-21-2011 was predicted by a small sect of evangelicals to be the date of the “Rapture” an innovative belief in the snatching away of the Church by Jesus to spare them the trials of the period of Tribulation and Antichrist to occur shortly before the inauguration of a Millenial Kingdom of Christ: A 1000 year reign of Christ and His Church to be followed by the unleashing of Satan for a final battle, Armageddon, and the Last Judgment. This teaching has been preached in evangelical circles for the past 150 years but gained greater traction following the preaching and publications of Hal Lindsey, most significantly his book “The Late Great Planet Earth”, as well as the popular Tim LaHaye/Larry B. Jenkins literary franchise, Left Behind. Despite details in date prediction, the Rapture belief is an apocalyptic theory based on an erroneous interpretation of scripture: 1 Thessalonians 4: 15-17. To his credit, Hal Lindsey has publicly repudiated the teaching of Pastor Harold Camping.
I think the challenge for the Orthodox is to respond to this teaching effectively by challenging the basis of Rapturist ideology, sola scriptura and sola fide: scripture alone and faith alone. Going after the “proof text” themselves has not been successful because misguided individuals will fall back to the use of decontextualized quotes from the Bible as evidence and justification for this error. The opportunity presented is to evangelize those who have been mislead into believing that the Bible alone is the sufcient source of Christian belief and that Faith alone is sufficient for salvation.
While Biblical sources are an important source of Christian belief, Christian Faith comes from the Church, apostolic sources which have maintained Orthodox teaching since the Apostolic preaching of the Gospel. The Gospel is the preaching of Christ Himself, of which the New Testament is a textual record of the earliest period of the Evangelization. The Gospel is more than the printed text, and Faith is more than belief in the words of the printed text of scripture.
The Gospel is the preaching of the Church and the teaching of the Birth, Crucifixion, Burial and Resurrection of Christ: that the Logos of God became Incarnate and born the of the Theotokos, that He was Crucified, buried and Resurrected, that He ascended and will return. The Gospel is the preaching of the overcoming of Death by the Crucified Lord and that humanity has been delivered from this eventuality. This is the Gospel preached by St. Paul:
The Gospel is the power of Christ over Death through the Resurrection and that through this overcoming we too overcome Death. The scriptures are a testimony, a Testament of this Gospel, which is the preaching of the Resurrection of Christ. Thus the Gospel is the living teaching of the Orthodox Church, the Church which is teaching and has taught the Resurrection of Christ for 2 millenia.
This is the meaning of 1 Thessalonians Chapter 4: that those who sleep in Christ, that is to say those who have have died, are not dead as those who are pagans, but sleep in Christ and will be raised at the Last Day along with those who are living at that time.
A good treatment of the sola scriptura fallacy can be heard at this podcast on Ancient Faith Radio.
