Could you clarify? By pretribulational, I presume you mean that the Church will be raptured before a Great Tribulation...so by saying the church will exist during this tribulation do you mean those who would later become Christians?
Greetings. You got it
I know it's a strange system, but I see that, since the ekklesia existed in the OT Septuagint, and dispensationalism teaches that after the present church gets raptured things revert back to the mosaic dispensation, it would logically follow that saints during that period are part of the ekklesia: the only difference being that they are now the ekklesia of Christ. The ekklesia of Christ didn't exist in the Septuagint: the ekklesia did though.
And the early church fathers were pretribularional and also believed that the church existed in the tribulation: so my belief isn't as strange to Christian theology as you may think.
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