RAPTURE Part II

Scriptural basis and views

The belief in the Rapture emerged from the anticipation that Jesus would return to redeem all members of the church. The term rapture, however, does not appear in the New Testament. In his First Letter to the Thessalonians, the Apostle Paul wrote that the Lord will come down from heaven and that a trumpet call will precede the rise of “the dead in Christ” (4:16). Thereafter, “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up” (in Latin, rapio, the standard translation of Paul’s original Koine Greek) “in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air” (4:17). A similar idea is also seen in the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, which states, “Look, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (15:51–52). The Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) mention Jesus’ return to earth from heaven; e.g., the Gospel According to Mark cites Jesus as foretelling a “ ‘coming in clouds’ with great power and glory” (13:26).

Keep Exploring

• Revelation to John

• Second Coming

• Last Judgment

• Four horsemen of the apocalypse

• Antichrist

• Whore of Babylon

• Seven seals

• Number of the beast

Belief in the Rapture is often connected with a belief in the literal coming of the millennium, the 1,000-year rule of Jesus Christ after his return, as mentioned in chapter 20 of The Revelation to John (also known as the Book of Revelation), although there are also amillennial interpretations of the belief that reject that notion. There is also a divide among pre-tribulationists, who believe that the Rapture will occur before a period of tribulation on earth mentioned in Daniel (12:1) and Matthew (24:21) and preceding the End, and post-tribulationists, those who believe that it will come after that period. Finally, dispensationalism, the notion that God periodically enters into a new covenant with his people, has had some influence on the belief, insofar as some believers in the Rapture consider themselves to be dispensationalists.

Development of the idea

Along with the epistles of Paul and the Revelation to John, apocalyptic literature and millennialist thinking have long maintained a hold on the Christian imagination, even when they have been variously interpreted or—in the case of millennialism—even rejected by some of the major figures in the history of Christian theology. The 16th-century movement called Futurism, expounded by the Jesuit Francisco Ribera, stressed the future fulfillment of the prophecy of the End as mentioned in scripture with both the rise of the Antichrist and the return of Christ. Another historical event whose ideas may have had some influence on the later evolution of the idea was the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by Puritans seeking to build a “City upon a Hill” in anticipation of the Second Coming. The evangelical fervor of the Great Awakening (early 18th century) and Second Great Awakening (late 18th to early 19th century) in the United States widely promoted ideas about the millennium, about a new dispensation, and about the imminence of Christ’s return. The most famous of such thinkers was William Miller, whose prediction that the Second Coming would occur in 1843 inspired the subsequent formation of Adventist churches.

The idea of the Rapture persisted through the remainder of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, gaining popularity among some evangelical and fundamentalist Christians as well as among some other Christian and even non-Christian new religious movements. During the Cold War, between the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly as the threat of nuclear war grew, prophecies about the Rapture gained currency. Evangelicalism, particularly in the United States, largely embraced the premillennial Rapture scenario described in Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and reflected in the first of a series of Rapture movies, Thief in the Night (1972). In the late 20th and early 21st centuries the idea was prominent in popular culture, in part because of the millennialist fervor that arose as the year 2000 approached. The so-called “Chick Pamphlets” (illustrated tracts authored by the evangelist Jack Chick) and the Left Behind (1995–2007) novel and movie franchise were two examples of that phenomenon.

Predictions

Endtime prophecies promoting a specific date for the Rapture are myriad. Number symbolism is often an important element, with the numbers 7, 12, and 40 being significant to many such predictions. For example, many Biblical literalists and young-Earth creationists, believing that God created the universe in seven 24-hour days more than 6,000 years ago, have attempted to calculate the date of the start of the seventh millennium of Earth’s existence as the precise date of the Rapture and the Second Coming. It was in this vein that American televangelist Rex Humbard predicted the Rapture for 1983 and American Baptist Peter Ruckman repeatedly attempted to establish a date for the Rapture in the 1980s and ’90s. Similarly, two dates in 2011 were predicted by the American evangelist Harold Camping.

The Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah has often been tied to predictions of the Rapture. The holiday, which marks the religious New Year, is also called the Day of Judgment and distinctively features the blowing of the ram’s horn (shofar)—which some Christians posit is the last trumpet sound described by St. Paul in his epistles. Former NASA rocket engineer Edgar Whisenant famously predicted Rosh Hashanah in 1988 as the date of the Rapture. In 2025 South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela publicly described a vision in which Jesus announced that the Rapture would take place during Rosh Hashanah that year (September 23–24). His declaration quickly spread across social media platforms, with “RaptureTok” trending on TikTok as the date approached.

Despite the enduring popularity of predictions surrounding the Rapture and other end-of-times scenarios, many Christians reject the premise that such dates can be known. Indeed, many cite Christ’s own words in the Gospel According to Matthew:

But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man (24:36–37).