Not a Script for the End Time

People shake their heads over school killings and earthquakes -- and murmur about whether these events are connected to the end of the world and the prophesies in Revelation, the last book in the Bible.

But what exactly does Revelation reveal about the end?

"Revelation doesn't say all the things you've been told," says Barbara Rossing, associate professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. "It's not a script for the end time."

The book has only recently been interpreted this way. The Revelation to John was written to give hope to late first-century Christians who were persecuted under Emperor Domitian in what is now Turkey. "It's clear John is writing a critique of Roman imperialism," Rossing says. "The message is: 'Whom do you worship? Caesar or God?' "

Christians throughout history have found hope in Revelation's message that God, through Christ, ultimately triumphs over evil.

But the message changed in the 1830s when John Nelson Darby created "dispensationalism," a system for interpreting the Bible that introduced the "the rapture."

Dispensationalism says neither Christ nor the church has completely fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. Instead, Darby said, when Christ returns he alone will conquer evil in the world and usher in the millennium -- his 1,000-year reign.

Darby, reading parts of Scripture literally, said true believers will physically ascend in the rapture before Christ's final, literal battle with the Antichrist. Nonbelievers will be left behind, most likely to perish in the battle.

The idea of the rapture, which is not part of [mainline Protestant] teaching, comes from 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. Paul comforts believers who are anxious about what will become of loved ones who die prior to Christ's return. Paul assures them that the departed and the living will be reunited with Christ in the end.

Dispensationalism, popularized by The New Scofield Reference Bible, has been aggressively marketed in the last two centuries. It's the bread-and-butter of Christian TV evangelists who feature end-time prophesy.

In 1970, Hal Lindsey dramatized this view in The Late, Great Planet Earth, which has sold more than 15 million copies. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins fictionalized it in their best-selling Left Behind action novels, with sales exceeding 7 million since 1995.

The Left Behind novels feature a hero who comes to faith after he is left on earth when many of his family members are raptured. With millions of believers suddenly vanished from the earth, those left behind wander through burning neighborhoods, wreck-strewn and corpse-lined highways.

But the hero, now fighting as God's soldier, battles the Antichrist on the decimated earth -- and prays he will be chosen to kill Satan's agent.

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