Featured Temporal Justification

You gave a long answer not giving an answer.

Can I have just Faith alone in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour, not care and show mercy for those in need that pass through my life, then go on happily to Heaven ?

Yes or No if you are time short.

 

No, you haven’t shown St. Paul was hopeful of a Rapture as you understand it because there was no such belief until Darby invented it in the 19th century. The idea that Jesus will come twice, first to take a selected number of people up to heaven on a specific date is a fable. In fact ,many who subscribe to this Rapture fable have even put specific dates down and of course have been wrong every single time. One thinks of the latest to try this stunt and failed spectacularly, Harold Camping.

What St. Paul was teaching the faithful at Thessaloniki was that many of them expected the parousia was immanent and Christians were fearful of dying before Christ’s expected return. St. Paul is reassuring the faithful at Thessaloniki so they “may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” He assures the faithful that those who are alive when Christ returns, “…will not precede those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Thess 4:13-15). St. Paul goes on to describe the eschaton, when Christ triumphantly returns, the trumpet blows, the dead rise, then those still living reign with Christ forever in the new heaven and the new earth.

Tsk, tsk, Darrel C.

In other words, you agree with what you want to believe. That would be John Nelson Darby’s belief. Unlike St. Augustine, who learned, studied and expounded on the faith of the Church, Darby simply made up his Rapture fable out of thin air after recovering from a riding accident in late 1826. (Source)

Again, syllogism.

Darby invents a the idea of a Rapture of a select few with a quasi-second coming of Christ

Darrell C aggress with Darby.

Conclusion: there is a Rapture

lol


God bless.

 

Did any hold to the pre trib viewpoint before darby though?

 

Justification is not temporal

 

While a Freshman at Biola College I read Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and There’s A New World Coming. I marveled that so many people, including Catholics, could not see the coming of the Great Tribulation. Many sermons and Bible studies focused on the approaching Rapture, the return of Christ “in the clouds” to take his church, consisting of “true believers,” secretly up to heaven. Most mainline Protestants were not “true believers,” and as for Catholics-they were both brainwashed and ignorant of the Gospel.

The belief in the Rapture is rooted in the fourth and fifth chapters of 1 Thessalonians, which are placed into an elaborate chronology of “end-time” events based on other passages from Revelation, Daniel, and Matthew 24. Often the Rapture was called the “day of the Lord” which would come like ” a thief in the night” (1 Thess. 5:2). After this secret removal of believers would come the rise of the Antichrist and the implementation of the “Mark of the Beast” during seven years of Tribulation. At the end of those seven years would take place the second coming of Christ and Armageddon, the final battle between good and evil.

Particular attention was given to modern-day Israel, since it was believed these great events would finally come to pass in the generation immediately following Israel’s reemergence as a nation. Then, after his Second Coming, Christ would set up his kingdom in Jerusalem and reinstate the sacrificial system of the Mosaic covenant, including the sacrificing of animals in the Temple. This millennial reign would last a thousand years.

For most Catholics, such beliefs about the future seem bizarre. Many are aware that certain Evangelical and non-denominational Bible churches hold puzzling views about the end of the world, but Catholics usually ignore them. Most people, regardless of denomination or church affiliation, are unfamiliar with the term “dispensationalism.” Yet it is the common source for those groups who believe in the Rapture, the seven-year Tribulation, and the literal thousand-year reign of Christ. Dispensational assumptions permeate much of American Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism and have shaped conservative American Protestant views of “church” and “organized Christianity” to an enormous degree. In addition, dispensational methods of scriptural interpretation have left an indelible mark on millions of American Protestants.

Most people who hold dispensational beliefs assume they are based in the Bible and have ancient roots. But dispensationalism has been around less than 200 years. The father of dispensationalism is John Nelson Darby, a Protestant Irish lawyer who left his successful practice to become an Anglican priest. Born in 1800, Darby was a contemporary of John Henry Newman, the famous leader of the Anglican Oxford movement in the 1830s. But while Newman would later become a Catholic priest and eventually a cardinal, Darby’s studies of Scripture-coupled with a disenchantment with mainstream Christian churches-led him to develop the idea of a “true church” and the apostasy of the established churches, especially the Catholic Church. He believed this true church was spiritual in character and should have no involvement in earthly affairs. He wrote that “the church is properly heavenly, in its calling and relationship with Christ, forming no part of the course of events on earth. . . . Our calling is on high. Events are on earth” (quoted by Harold Bloom in The American Religion, 22).

In 1827 Darby left the Anglican priesthood and by 1831 was among the leaders of the Plymouth Brethren, a non-denominational movement which denounced mainline Christianity. He began to teach that the true church would need to be removed from the earth in order to make way for the completion of God’s dealings with the Jews. He named this secret removal of the church the Rapture. This belief was something completely new in Christianity. No previous Christian, neither Catholic nor Protestant, had ever proposed or taught such an thing.

Darby created a timeline that divided history into “dispensations,” either six or seven in number. These indicated various ages in which God dealt with humans in distinct ways. Dispensations were “administrations” through which God tested humans and proved their utter sinfulness before him. According to Darby’s scheme we live in the dispensation of the Church, which began during the ministry of Paul. For Darby the Church forms a “parenthesis” between the dispensation of the Gentiles (before Christ) and the coming dispensation of the Kingdom. It is an era of grace in which the rejected Messiah is building up his heavenly people, the Christians. Meanwhile, God’s real issue in human history is with his earthly people, the Israelites. The Rapture will be the necessary removal of the heavenly people from the world so that God’s work with the earthly people might be finished.

This all eliminates the need to 'take up your cross and follow Him.' Dallas Theological Seminary is the bastion of dispensationalism as is Biola, Azusa Pacific, and a myriad of other evangelical colleges and Seminary's.

 

No, he invented the fable of a rapture whereby a select group of people get removed via a quasi-second coming of Christ in order to escape suffering.

"...Finally, by means of an innovative theological exegesis, he [John Nelson Darby] formulated the doctrine of the pretribulational rapture of the Church, the belief that those who truly constitute the body of elect Christianity would be removed prior to the period of cosmic wrath known as the Great Tribulation.” Gary Lynn Nebeker, The Hope of Heavenly Glory in John Nelson Darby, pp. 35-36

Apart from this belief being absent in Scripture and Christian history, a clear indication of this fable's fallaciousness is the attempt to remove suffering from Christianity.

Suffering is the rule of Christianity, not the exception. There is no other way.

Man is saved BY the cross, not from it.

 

Kind of late in the day to be formulating new Christian doctrine if you ask me.

 

Agreed and my favorite is all these adherents of it actually putting down dates But for me the worst part of the fable is its desire to remove suffering from the life of the Christian. It offers a false hope that says don't worry, you can avoid suffering.

Christianity lives in the constant shadow of the cross. Sanctification involves suffering (cf. Romans 5:3-5) and anyone offering you a means to avoid it is offering you a false hope apart from the cross.

Suffering is the rule of Christianity, not the exception. There is no other way.

 

Despite the popular theology of our day, Christians should not expect to get out of experiencing the tribulation or the end times. Nowhere in the Bible does the Lord promise us this.