[OBW]

I read something a few months ago that got my attention. It was asserted that prior to JN Darby, there was no teaching of a "rapture" as we now call it. This is not to say that there was no teaching of Christ coming for believers, but the thing that was "imminent" was Christ's return, not some escape from earth.

Further, there is something unsettling about the way that dispensationalists of all ilks refer to the various signs found in Revelation as if they have everything figured out except for when it will happen. It will be the revived Roman Empire. A resurrected Caesar Nero will be involved (Lee wasn't the only one to come up with that). Because the weeks in Daniel were each 7 years, it definitely means that now. And so on.

And since we live in a time when a large group of countries have banded together in limited legal and economic ways that includes some of the old Roman Empire (but not all, and it includes areas not covered from that empire, plus it is not "ruled" from Rome), we conclude that now is the time. If doing that is to help wake up the sluggards among us, I can't complain. But most of the effort results in a kind of "separate from the world and hide until He comes" kind of mentality.

That is not the kingdom of God.

So in the section on the implications of imminence, under the heading "2. The History of Imminence" there is the following sentence. "Imminence is not a recent innovation." But the following references only get back as far as 1878. This is about 25 years after Darby gave us dispensationalism and the teaching of the rapture. The real question is whether there was really any kind of teaching like that before Darby heard the utterances of a young woman alleged to be speaking prophecy of some kind in a revival in about 1825, and the following 25 years in which Darby spent creating the dispensational doctrines out of it.

How old are dispensationalism, "rapture" teachings, and all of the stuff that so many people get distracted by? I'm not saying that there is nothing in Revelation to consider. I'm suggesting that we are distracted from our present-age charge of living the kingdom lifeby instead going to "kingdom" meetings and hoping for the future kingdom. And the distraction is by relatively brand-new doctrines not discussed in the first churches, or even those in the following centuries. Not discussed by Augustine, Thomas Aquinas or any others.

But after all of that, this detailed paper clearly puts Lee into some kind of marginal group like Harold Camping who thinks he can discern the day and hour of the coming of the Lord. For that, I am continually grateful.