Question about Christianity and Social Media

Nope and nope.

Even if the texts attributed to Ephrem the Syrian are authentic (and that is highly in doubt), they do not teach the rapture.

There is no trace of the rapture theology before John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren, in the 19th century.

Why end your quote there? Why not include the part where he claims that the righteous will escape the tribulation because they will be killed.

Not exactly the "rapture theology" that dispensationalists believe in.

"Sounded a lot like" if you cut out the parts you don't want and only use the parts you want.

Kind of like the way the pre-trib rapture people use Scripture, too...

I thought it sounded more like Heavens Gate than a rapture.

When my wife goes somewhere while I'm sleeping and I wake up to find her gone, when she returns and asks if I missed her I reply that I just assumed the rapture had happened.

it's been my experience that if she takes off after you're asleep expecting to be back before you wake, she's rapturing herself...

How likely is it that I can dig into the Bible and find support for a post-Tribulation Rapture, and even perhaps a mid-Tribulation rapture? Pretty damn likely, I imagine.

We can blame Darby and the Dispensationalists for generally introducing the idea of a Rapture to the modern world, but people like Hal Lindsey and his ilk introduced it into American pop culture. The Late Great Planet Earth was a pretty influential book.

Not hard to do at all:

"But immediately after the tribulation of those days … they will see the Son Of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory. And he will send forth his angels with a great trumpet and they will gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other" (Matthew 24.29-31.

Much harder to do. It requires all kinds of interpretational gymnastics, just like the pre-tribulational rapture.

Agreed. I vaguely recall Hal Lindsey alluding to its possibility in one of his books, but that might have been someone else. I just remember reading that after the three and a half year mark of the Tribulation, the Antichrist will drop all pretenses and start being more...antichrist-y...and it's at that point that Jesus will rapture the church. It's definitely not a commonly-held belief, though.

Sure, that does sound about right. You could not imagine an amoeba understanding what a human does, even though we exist in the same world. There is a reason for that. The amoeba only has to deal with what we consider a microscopic environment. It could not possibly process the information we do.

It would be simple logic that the universe simply is something man's brain cannot fully understand as well as it can? I am even of the idea that our conclusions about what makes something conscious is not even close to being as small as our tiny minds can imagine. For instance the sun may be constantly communicating through systems that we cannot possibly fathom simply because they are too large to see. To have such a godlike perception would be to know things that probably don't just make us look primitive, but probably less than an amoeba.

That sort of thing is interesting to think of and imagine, and I am quite sure it is out there, but I can claim no other knowledge than I have no knowledge of how it exists.

Oh, and thanks a bunch guys. I needed a good philosophy break from the world. It feels good to stretch the mind.

three and a half year mark, eh?

(checks date since Nov 2016)

Nevertheless, that "3½ years of trouble then 3½ years of even worse trouble" scenario is based on very doubtful interpretational principles as well. Personally, I am not at all convinced. (Or let's say: "no longer convinced"—I used to accept it without question, until I learned enough about the idea.)

January 2017. We've got a week or two to go.

All of this requires interpretational gymnastics. Jesus was an end-timer. His mentor, John the Baptist was an end-timer. His followers, up to and including Paul, were end-timers. They all expected an imminent and literal "Kingdom of God".

When this did not happen, later writers began trying to weasel out of it. Their wrestling with the question is visible in later books of the New Testament. So now we have a whole slew of different versions of what is supposed to happen, when, and in some cases even pretending that it already has happened, each twisting and cherry-picking as necessary the different claims made about it by the various NT writers.

I disagree very strongly as concerns Jesus, and John the Baptist as well. The fact that Scripture (and Jesus himself) spoke in ambiguous terms so that no one could know just what was going to happen and when only shows that God doesn't want us to know the details about "when" and "how", but only what the final result will be. You have a right to your interpretation, of course, but it is by no means the only possible way to interpret the passages involved, and is an extremely problematic approach to understanding Biblical prophecy as a whole.

I would like you to give examples of this, that are not simply your personal interpretation of it. Yes, they expected the setting up of the kingdom on Earth soon, but when it didn't happen that way, they took it in stride, realizing that Jesus had simply left the question open. They did not "try to weasel out of it", as far as I can see.

This is because too many people think Biblical prophecy is about predicting times and places and events. It is not. It very clearly is not. It is about revealing what God's program is (delivering man from sin, teaching us to live in holiness and love), so that those who choose to cooperate with that program can do so more fully, knowing what the final goal is.

It should be blatantly obvious to anyone who studies Biblical prophecy as a whole that God is not trying to show the details of the future, because when he wants to reveal something clearly, he does so. It does not require using a half-verse here and a metaphorical interpretation of a verse there to discern that Jesus rose from the dead, for example, or that man can be saved from sin only by trusting God to do it for him, rather than by his own efforts, to give another example. If God wanted to reveal the details of how the future is going to work out, he could have done so just as clearly. The only rational conclusion (other than dismissing the whole thing because you don't understand how it can be true) is to realize that that was never his intention.

The problem is that religion always degenerates, as man tries to use God for his own selfish ends. People like fortune-tellers and all the various means that have been used throughout history to predict the future, so they try to use Biblical prophecy the same way. Biblical prophecy teaches very clearly that when God has completed his work in us, we will be perfectly holy. That theme is developped over and over and over again, in one Biblical passage after another. Thus, it is clear that that is what God wants to communicate. As for the "when" and "how" of it all, it really doesn't matter.

But if you look at it closely, you see that those who are the most concerned with their own system of "when" and "how" are also those who are the least concerned with pursuing holiness and love.

A great truth. Well done. Or as I like to say, people are idiots.

And this is where I have issues. If that's the end goal, why not just create us that way to start with? I mean, you can say that Adam and Eve were created that way, then buggered it up with the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but then the question arises as to the point of the exercise. Realizing that I as a finite being have no hope of comprehending the mind of an infinite one, it just seems . . . inefficient.

That's an ex post facto rationalisation that you are making because you have a fixed view that Jesus and the associated prophecies can't just have been wrong.
If I say that "it will rain tomorrow" and it doesn't, one can always decide that there were other ways of "interpreting" my statement than the most direct one. Maybe "rain" is a metaphor for something else, or maybe "tomorrow" is the tomorrow of some other day. And so forth. But everyone was quite clear on what I meant when I said it, and reason is not on the side of those seeking to maintain that there must be some way of preserving the truth of my prediction.

"Realizing" that Jesus didn't actually literally mean what he had said and "trying to weasel out of it" strikes me as two ways of saying the same thing, albeit with different value judgements.
So I'm sure you know the examples. The author of Second Peter (who is not Peter) and the author of Jude (who is not Jude) specifically refer to "scoffers" who pointed out that the end times hadn't come as their community had expected, and prevaricate about why that is so, pushing it back by talking about a day being like a thousand years for God and so on. The later Pauline letters - those not actually written by Paul but by people trying to soften and institutionalise things - dodge it entirely by presenting a realised eschatology completely at odds with that found in Paul's genuine writings, implying that the calaclysmic events foretold were really internal changes in the hearts of the believers.

That's only "very clear" if you've abandoned any sense of realism and need to avoid getting pinned down to specifics. If it is so, then the prophets should have been much more careful not to attach the very explicit timetables to their prophecies that they did, thus avoiding for you the embarrassment of having to cover up for them and avoiding all of the controversy and textual lawyering between the sects believing different things - all of whose interpretations are equally clear to them as yours is to you.

In my mind (and I don't pretend to understand all of God's doings...), it has to do with free will. As long as we choose to be selfish, mean, petty, proud, and so on, then we can be, because God himself gave us that right. But he still knows that it would be better for us not to be, and wants to make us into something better because he cares about us enough to want what is best for us. He is quite capable of doing it (he is God, after all), but one thing God will never do is to fight against himself. And since he is the one who made us with free will (I am convinced that that is what "created in his image" means), if he changes us against our will, he is going against himself.

So all he requires of us is the permission to do it. We cannot transform ourselves fully (though anyone can improve, even without God's help, by his own effort -- even though a lot of people don't seem to be making too much of an effort in that direction), but God can do it for us. If we trust him enough to let him do it, he can and will.

That's the point that is the very clearest in the whole Bible: the goal of God's work with mankind, since the beginning of humanity, has been to bring us back to following his law of perfect love for others, rather than continuing in selfishness the way we do.

Unfortunately, religion more often gets mixed up fighting about details that are very much a question of opinion than teaching us how to be holy. That means living in perfect love -- Leviticus 19 is all about "be holy as I am holy" and it is that very chapter that says: "You should care about [love] others as much as you care about [love] yourself." Jesus, and Jewish theologians both before and after him, have always maintained that that sums up the whole law of God. It "fills in the gaps" as it were, in all the details that aren't spelled out explicitly for every situation in every culture throughout history. If you truly act toward everyone else the way you would want them to act toward you, that is what "holiness" is about. It's not about living in some ivory tower and spending all your time praying.

And I suppose it would have been simpler if we had never chosen sin and thus didn't have to be redeemed, as you say. But it didn't happen that way. God "had a plan for that" from the very start, however. Even though he was aware that free will would be used to rebel against him, he had a way of bringing us back to following his law of perfect love, if we are willing to do it.

I'm not going to get into huge long posts that try to respond to every point of each preceding post, because that results in a geometric progression that looks like covid-19 infection last March. But this seems to be the crux of the whole question.

What "very explicit timetables" are you talking about? All I see are ambiguous statements that can be interpreted various ways, depending on one's presuppositions. And since the goal was never to predict the details of the future, but only the goal of God's plan (which requires looking at the future -- hence the ambiguois formulations), I am not aware of any "very explicit timetables". Please quote them. With something as clear as your "It's going to rain tomorrow" example.

Following his predictions, which include all sorts of cataclysms, Jesus says "I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened." Another verse has him say "‘I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power."

This is consistent with Paul who predicted things like "we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed", and referred to "we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord" in letters to communities he had founded. He insisted that people not bother getting married because "the time is short"" and there are other references to "the time is near" throughout the New Testament.

These statements are not ambiguous unless you are determined to make them so. They were clearly understood as referring to a few decades at most, which is why the later writers that I cited needed to explain them away and why these arguments about the rapture exist at all.

The Bible is, broadly speaking, the foundation of our understanding of God. But it isn't the beginning and end of our understanding. There is nothing in the Bible that says it is. We each still have to gain further understanding from our individual life experiences if we're to live up to our potential. Mistakes we make, people we meet, the still small voice in the dark of night, Creation itself. All this underscores and builds upon things in the Bible, and all of this can resonate for each individual and tell us how to live in ways that simply reading a book intended for all to read cannot.

There's too much "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it!" going around to not emphasize that we should be growing and learning from non-Biblical sources as well.

Basically, it's "irregardless".

It is. But it's idealism from the Creator, who made us and knows what is good and what is evil, who pushes us within the context of our lives toward the ideals. He knows the right ideals. Not crabbed little human political ones that people worship to their own destruction, but the final ideal: love, with faith, hope, truth, justice, and mercy right behind. And the grace given through Jesus and the Spirit makes that drive realistic. Nobody becomes perfect and stays perfect in this life, but we can approach it, and even achieve it perhaps for brief moments.

You know what you never see?
Characters in the Bible going "shit, what does the Bible say!!??".
Howcome they were able to wing it?

To me, it just means that freedom is so important to our existence reaching its full potential, that God takes that risk of us screwing up. Maybe we can't fully enjoy things like beauty, or being loved, or choosing to sacrifice for someone else's good, if we're just programmed automatons who clack out YES THAT IS EXCELLENT ALL PARAMETERS ARE CLEARLY OPTIMAL every time God shows us a sunrise.

I actually just finished II Kings today, where the Torah is found and King Josiah freaks out because apparently they were supposed to be doing Passovers and not worshipping other gods all this time, and nobody had told him?

Elwood and Async are doubtless much better at talking about the important point you raise, though.

You mean like how that time Jesus talks about the law and what the law says?

He doesn't bend the knee to it though, does he?
He kinda lawyer twists out of it.

No. That is the exact opposite of idealism. In idealism whatever is trying to be achieved, by definition, cannot actually be achieved. You’re always striving to be better because humans are not perfect and therefore cannot achieve perfection.
In my opinion, this is the reason Christianity fails and so many believers end up being worse than those they accuse of wrongdoing.
If a specific goal is set “this is right”, “this is wrong”, there is no room for improvement after you achieve it. So..., you don’t murder. Are you now perfect?
This is the perils of confusing Realism with Idealism.

that's not a specific Christian thing, it's just tech-ignorant Facebook users in general

someone writes about themselves, their job, their family, their illness - and a bunch of dopes share it without qualifying where they got it and then THEIR dopey friends reply to it as if their dopey friend wrote the thing instead of sharing someone else's work. Partly explains why the olds can't move past "I read it on Facebook (or saw it on You Tube) so it must be true"

Sorry, I've been very busy the past couple of days. I'm not ignoring you. I'll take these in order.

In the context, "this" generation refers to the generation that sees the Great Tribulation, not to the generation that was listening to Jesus. So that has nothing to do with how soon Biblical prophecy will be fulfilled.

Which is true. In the minds of most Jews at the time (and most Christians today...), "the kingdom of God" is some distant thing that we have to wait for, when the Messiah will reign on the whole world. But Jesus' message, and the message of many others (including John the Baptist), was "the kingdom of God is right here and now". IOW, the kingdom of God (which means, the sphere in which God reigns) is not something you have to wait for, something distant you can do nothing about, but something you can experience any time you want. You can be a part of it today.

In the context, Jesus' reference to that kingdom "coming (i.e., being manifested) with power" refers to his death to bring victory over sin and his resurrection as a demonstration of that victory. That is the ultimate demonstration of the kingdom of God: God has victory over the sin that separates us from him, so any of us are free, right here and now, to enter into his kingdom without having to wait passively until it takes some particular form which we can do nothing to produce. And some of those who were listening to him not only lived through those events (that would in fact be a very large majority of them) but actually came to see the truth of it: God's kingdom is here and now, in power, and we can be part of it if we want.

His statement clearly means that some people will not die, because they will still be alive when Christ returns (in the context of 1 Corinthians 15, his subject is not when that will happen, but the certainty that it will; in that particular passage he is answering the potential objection that it couldn't happen because our bodies are not adapted to eternal life -- he thus teaches that everyone will be changed, even those who do not die, and in the context of 1 Thesalonians 4 he is saying there is no need to worry that those who die before it happens will be exluded) and since he has no idea when that will happen (it could be in the next few moments or it could be in the distant future) he uses the term "we" for those who will still be alive, because he and his readers are currently alive. But it is obvious that in a large enough group of readers (plus the writer), one or more could die very quickly; thus only an idiot would write such a thing thinking that the use of "we" means "none of you will die before that is going to happen". And whatever else you think of Paul, he was not an idiot. His term is merely a writing technique (similar to some other writing techniques associated with Greek such as the gnomic future tense, which should never be understood as a prediction but merely as a statement of a general principle). He could have written "those" instead of "we" and that third person could also have turned out to be false, if it happened that he was still alive when Christ returned. There just aren't any simple pronouns that mean "we, if we're still alive then, or they, if we're not". Reading into the "we" a prediction that neither he nor his readers would die before it happened simply is not justified.

Actually, he did not insist that people not "bother getting married". Quite the contrary. He wrote that it would be better if they did. But as for his own choice to remain unmarried, he explained that there are clear advantages to remaining single because "the time we live in is shortened (literally: contracted, constricted)". The context clearly is about having enough time to do everything: if you have the responsibility of a wife and family, you don't have as much time for ministry. It has nothing whatsoever to do with when Christ will return.

And so it is, and always has been and always will be. Because even if Christ does not return for another ten thousand years, no one has ten thousand years to take a stand. That is why God's time is always "now". IOW, "don't put it off" thinking that you have plenty of time. You don't know that, and in any case, eternity will catch up with you much quicker than you think. So for any given person, the time is indeed "near".

And here is where I disagree with you very strongly. It seems that you have fallen into the error (for which you can hardly be blamed, a huge amount of Christians have fallen into the same error) of the Pharisees in Luke 17:20-21, who wanted to know when the kingdom of God was coming (they were thus more concerned with the time frame than with the nature of it all). Jesus told them: "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed. People won't be able to say, 'Look, here it is!' or 'There it is, over there!' Look and see: the kingdom of God is in your midst." (My own accent on those final words, for the purpose of our discussion here.) Sure, there will come a time, at some indistinct point that may well be in the far future (or could be right away; that point is deliberately never cleared up) when that kingdom will manifest itself in a visible way. But that is not the most important, and is not what should concern you now. What should concern you is that it is possible to be part of the realm where God reigns, right now. You don't have to "wait for it".

When Jesus was questioned by Pilate, Pilate asked him bluntly at one point: "So is it true, are you a king?" There is no ambiguity in the Greek tense of the question (and it is highly unlikely that Pilate, a Roman who really, really, really didn't like Jews, was speaking the local dialect to Jesus -- the conversation almost certainly took place in Greek, the common language of the entire eastern portion of the Roman empire). It is present, active, indicative: "you are a king". And Jesus confirmed that he had spoken correctly, but that his kingdom "is not of this realm".

In Luke 19, starting in verse 11, Jesus told a parable specifically to correct his disciples impression that "the kingdom was going to appear immediately". The point of the parable is that there is work to be done that is much more important than when the culmination is going to happen. The same subect came up in Acts 1, when the disciples asked Jesus if he was going to set up the kingdom right then. He told them (and I paraphrase): "That's not your concern. Your concern is to be my witnesses even to the remotest parts of the world."

Other passages in the Gospels refer to the kingdom of God "having come near to you". The Greek uses the perfect tense: it is something that has happened (as opposed to something that will happen at some point in the future), because the possibility of entering into that kingdom has been presented to you here and now.

The bottom line is that the speculation (which admittedly has marked Christian history and continues to do so today, though to a much smaller degree than it did 40 or 50 years ago) about about when it's all going to come to an end flows from a fundamental failure to understand what Jesus actually did teach about the kingdom: "Don't worry about the form that kingdom will take some time in the future; your concern is what you need to be doing right here and now as a part of (or in order to become a part of) that kingom."

So I will grant you that many Christians have thought Christ was coming back in the near future. I have a "nut file" of claims in which Evangelical preachers specifically gave dates (they are not a case of misunderstanding and misinterpreting, such as what happens when one reads back into selected Biblical passages an understanding of when the end will come; these are people who gave specific dates, all of which are now far in the past). But I disagree thoroughly that they had any serious grounds for doing so on the basis of Jesus' teachings or anything else in the New Testament. If they took into account all of what the New Testament says, instead of simply their own particular interpretations of those selected passages that heppened to suit them, they would not have been able to say that. The error is theirs, not one that is taught in the Bible. The Bible never, ever, ever gives any specific information about when that kingdom will take some physical form on Earth. What it teaches over and over again is that the kingdom is already here, right now, and it is up to us to choose whether or not we want to really be a part of it.

Actually, you do see that, many times.

One specific example: the Jews in Berea, when they heard what Paul was preaching (and which was radically different from the way they understood their religion), diligently turned to the Scriptures every day to see if it was correct (Actes 17:10).

And there are plenty of other examples as well. Paul himself had to re-think his theology entirely, and in order to do so he spent at least two full years more or less in isolation, going over what the Bible says about the Messiah. I won't bother multiplying the exemples, though. The point is that you do see characters in the Bible taking that approach, very regularly.