The Dispensationalist Heresy

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Dear N.,

Thank you for your brilliant and extremely important question. Due to the amazing popularity of the Left Behind book and movie series, the doctrine of the Rapture, which is only one element in the entire theological system called dispensationalism has made profound inroads into virtually every Christian community in North America, including even Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism. The rapture is in fact a heresy, a direct and unmitigated denial of the eschatological teaching of the Creed of Nicea-Constantinople and the New Testament itself. The rapture is found nowhere in the text of the New Testament, but is contrived through proof-texting, the isolation and use of particular passages or pericopes of the Bible apart from their original context.

The Rapture is the doctrine that there is in salvation history a third secret coming of Our Lord in-between his First and Second Advents, in which he will mystically resurrect and remove the Elect, the true believers, from the earth in advance of a coming Anti-Christ and the final Judgement. The rapture doctrine is a contortion and perversion of I Thessalonians 4 and I Corinthians 15, which taken together clearly teach that there is only one final coming or advent of Our Lord at the end of time, the Day of Judgement on which the General Resurrection will take place. The Second and Final Advent is explicitly taught by Our Lord in Saint John 5 and 10. The rapture doctrine was invented in the nineteenth century by a Scottish evangelical mystic, a girl named McDonald, who claimed to see visions of a rapture for God's special believers before the General Resurrection. It first entered evangelicalism in America and Britain through two different sects, the Plymouth Brethren and the so-called 'Catholic Apostolic Church,' otherwise known as the Irvingites. The rapture doctrine was unknown to the Apostles, the Church Fathers, the Undivided Church, and the magisterial Reformers of the sixteenth century. It is an utter and complete theological novum first introduced into several small evangelical sects 150 years ago. From such humble beginnings it spread like wildfire in the twentieth century thanks to the likes of men like Hal Lindsey, Jack Van Impe, Oral Roberts, and John Hagee. The Scofield Reference Bible is a hallmark of this egregious and heretical system.

The rapturists' basis of belief for the removal of the Church, the true invisible Church, from the earth before the final judgement is the dispensationalist heresy that the Christian Church is God's 'plan B' for salvation; it is a body totally unrelated to and disconnected from ethnic Israel, the Israel of the flesh and of the Old Covenant, a body for Gentiles alone which must be removed, gotten out of the way, so that God's original plan of salvation can finally be accomplished as He originally intended - for the Jews. There are two separate Peoples of God with two completely different plans and means of salvation, Israel and the Church. You see, Christ failed in His original intent to create an earthly kingdom for the Jews, and wound up with the spiritualised Church instead. The rapture makes it possible for Him to correct the situation. According to dispensationalist teaching, Christ will return to set-up a literal earthly Jewish Kingdom for one thousand calendar years, based in a new third Jewish millennial temple in Jerusalem in which He will preside over the restoration of animal blood sacrifice and the recreation of the old Jewish priesthood. Not only does this heresy blatantly reject the whole teaching of Saint Paul in his epistles and that of the Epistle to the Hebrews, it also embraces an error condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople II (AD 553) called chiliasm, a belief in a literal one-thousand year earthly reign of Christ before the end of time. In biblical numerology, the millennial kingdom, the one-thousand years, refers to the Church Age, to the reign of Christ in His Mystical and Militant Body, the Catholic Church.

The premillennial pretribulationist dispensationalist heresy is so fraught with a multiplicity of false doctrines that I cannot even begin to scratch the surface of the problem in a letter. May I recommend two excellent books on the subject: Will Catholics Be Left Behind? by Carl Olson and The Rapture Trap by Paul Thigpen, both splendid Catholic books by great writers and commentators.