The Rapture: Is it Biblical?
One of the hallmarks of contemporary conservative theology is the idea that Jesus will come and rapture (take away) the church during the End Times. See for example:
But is the rapture Biblical, or read into the text artificially? Dr. Bart Ehrman, a Biblical scholar and New Testament specialist teaching at an accredited secular university doesn’t thinks so.
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- At that point I had come to realize that the whole idea of a “Rapture” in which the dead would rise to meet God and then the living believers in Jesus would be taken up to meet them all in the clouds was a metaphorical description of how in the final analysis, however the end comes, God will make right all that is wrong in this world. The passage is ultimately about how God is sovereign. This world may be a cesspool of misery and suffering now, but God will overcome all that is evil and will repay all who do it, and he will reward his faithful, somehow or other. It was a passage meant to inspire hope, not a passage that was meant literally as a indicating a calendrical event that was to occur sometime next Thursday.