by Gary DeMar (original source here: https://americanvision.org/22451/is-the-pre-tribulation-rapture-found-before-the-19th-century/)

I’ve been corresponding with some dispensationalists on Facebook on the topic of the rapture. There are several people who claim that dispensationalism, mostly the pretrib rapture, has some historical precedent before John Nelson Darby.

I don’t have enough access to historical sources to do the necessary research, so I am dependent on what other dispensationalists put forth as evidence. For example, I found “Pretribulation Rapture Taught by Early Church” by  J.R. Church interesting:

In 1844, a bound volume of New Testament books was found in an excavation at the Saint Catherine monastery located near the foot of Mount Sinai. It is called the Sinaiticus. It contains all 27 New Testament Books, plus two others—the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermes [Hermas].

In the Shepherd of Hermes [Hermas],the author relates a vision. He said, “I saw a huge beast ^[1] [corresponding to the beast of Revelation 13]. ^[2] The beast has four colors [corresponding to the colors of the four horsemen of Revelation 6]. It is 100 feet long. But I escaped, thanks to the grace and power of God.”

Then he meets a virgin dressed in white who says, “Thou hast escaped a great tribulation because thou hast believed and at the sight of such a huge beast, have not doubted. Go therefore and declare to the elect of the Lord His mighty deeds and say to them that this beast is a type of the Great Tribulation which is to come. If you, therefore, prepare yourselves and with your whole heart turn to the Lord in repentance, then you shall be able to escape it.”

Regardless of the stylized circumstances related in his reported vision, Hermes, nevertheless, taught a pretribulation rapture.

It’s important not to ignore “the stylized circumstances related in his reported vision.” Hermas does not argue from the biblical text. It’s based on a vision, and a weird one at that.

There are a number of ways to escape tribulation.

Notice this line from the vision that Church does not quote: “ye shall be able to escape it, if your heart be made pure and without blemish, and if for the remaining days of your life ye serve the Lord blamelessly. Cast your cares upon the Lord and He will set them straight.” There is no rapture. Hermas can escape it by being faithful for the remaining days of his life.

Richard Buckham’s offers the following commentary:

The beast is explained in xxiii. 5 as a figure (τυπος) of the imminent great tribulation. To the threat of this tribulation Christians may react in two different ways: their faith may waver (doublemindedness) (xxiii. 4) or they may repent and prepare themselves to face it (xxiii. 5). The doubleminded will be “hurt” (xxiii. 4) by the great tribulation and thereby experience God’s wrath (xxiii. 6). The repentant, on the other hand, will put complete trust in the Lord (xxiii. 4 f.), face the tribulation with courage (xxiii. 8), and “escape” (xxiii. 4). (Richard Bauckham, “The Great Tribulation in The Shepherd Of Hermas,” Journal of Theological Studies 25 (1974), 31.))

Church is importing his pretrib rapture theory into the word “escape.” Does “escape” mean being taken off the earth to avoid tribulation? To escape the tribulation in the lead up to the destruction of Jerusalem that took place in AD 70, all a person had to do is head to the hills on foot (Matt. 24:16–20). In Luke’s version, Jesus said the following:

But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, you will know that her desolation is near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out, and let those in the country stay out of the city. For these are the days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written. How miserable those days will be for pregnant and nursing mothers! For there will be great distress upon the land and wrath against this people. They will fall by the edge of the sword and be led captive into all the nations. And Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled (21:20–24).

Those who heeded Jesus’ warning escaped the tribulation without ever leaving earth.

Lot and his daughters escaped God’s wrath by fleeing to the mountains: “When they [angels] had brought them outside, one said, ‘Escape for your life! Do not look behind you, and do not stay anywhere in the valley; escape to the mountains, or you will be swept away’” (Gen. 19:17).

The Israelites escaped the plagues brought on Egypt; Rahab escaped the judgment on Jericho; Daniel’s three friends were protected in the fiery furnace; Daniel was spared in the lion’s den; Joseph, Mary, and Jesus escaped from the horror of Herod’s slaughter of the children.

Thomas Ice confronted me after our debate at BIOLA (February 2002) about Francis X. Gumerlock’s statement in his book The Day and the Hour (2000), a book published by American Vision and edited by me, that “The Dolcinites held to a pre-tribulation rapture theory similar to that of modern dispensationalism” ^[3].

If Ice and other dispensationalists want to claim the Dolcinites as proto-dispensationalists, they can have them. According to Gumerlock, Brother Dolcino and his followers “believed that they were the only true church of the latter days…. Believing they were living in the last three and a half years of End-time tribulation, Dolcino and his followers, motivated by certain Bible passages, fled ‘Babylon’ for the mountains of Piedmont. In the mountains they armed themselves for conflict with the papal forces of Clement V, in 1307 a bloodbath ensued in which four hundred of them were killed. Dolcino was burned at the stake.” ^[4].

If Dolcino believed in a pre-trib rapture, why would he and his followers escape to the mountains and arm themselves?

As far as I can tell, Dolcino does not make a biblical argument for his views.

There are more problems with using Dolcino’s views to support a pre-trib rapture. The fourteenth-century text, The History of Brother Dolcino, “was composed in 1316 by an anonymous source,” ^[5] meaning that this text was not written by Dolcino. The original letters of Dolcino are not in existence.

Dolcino and his Apostolic Brethren were a violent cult hell bent on the purification of the Roman Catholic Church through violence that ended in their destruction. ^[6]

Dolcino justified the actions of his followers by appealing to Titus 1:15: “To the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure; their very minds and consciences are corrupted.”  “As reported by the Anonymous Synchronous, Dolcino maintained “[…] that it was legitimate for him and his followers to hang, behead, […] people who obey … the Roman church and burn down, destroy, […] because they were acting to redeem them and thus without sin.”

[H]e was considered by some to be one of the reformers of the Church and one of the founders of the ideals of the French revolution and socialism. In particular he was positively reevaluated toward the end of the 19th century and was dubbed the Apostle of the Socialist Jesus….

Gumerlock quotes the Historia Fratris Dolcini Haeresiarchae in an end note (the English translation is Gumerlock’s):

Again, [he believed, preached, and taught] that within the said three years Dolcino himself and his followers will preach the coming of the Antichrist; and that the Antichrist himself would come into this world at the end of the said three and a half years; and after he had come, Dolcino himself, and his followers would be transferred into Paradise, where Enoch and Elijah are, and they will be preserved unharmed from the persecution of Antichrist; and then Enoch and Elijah themselves would descend to earth to confront the Antichrist, then they would be killed by him; or by his servants, and thus Antichrist would reign again for many days. “Once Antichrist is truly dead, Dolcino himself, who would then be the holy Pope, and his preserved followers will descend to earth, and they will preach the correct faith of Christ to all, and they will convert those, who will be alive then, to the true faith of Jesus Christ” (91–92).

Even after all that we know of Dolcino and his cult, Thomas Ice still wants to claim him as someone who taught a pre-trib rapture before Darby.

This is typical of dispensationalists who will enter almost any source into evidence if it can be used to prop up their system.

1. “from its mouth fiery locusts issued forth”[↩]
2. Hermas does not mention Rev. 13.[↩]
3. Day and the Hour, 80[↩]
4. Day and the Hour, 80[↩]
5. James F. Stitzinger, “The Rapture in Twenty Centuries of Biblical Interpretation,” TMSJ 13/2 (Fall 2002), 159. See Francis X. Gumerlock, “A Rapture Citation in the Fourteenth Century,” Bibliotheca Sacra 159 (July-September 2002), 354–355.[↩]
6. Gian Luca Potesta, “Radical Apocalyptic Movements in the Late Middle Ages,” The Continuum History of Apocalypticism, eds. Bernard McGinn, John J. Collins, and Stephen J. Stein (New York: Continuum, 2003), 300–302.[↩]

Article “Dispensationalist Charges William Lane Craig with ‘Willful Ignorance” on the Rapture by Gary Demar – original source – https://americanvision.org/22432/dispensationalist-charges-william-lane-craig-with-willful-ignorance-on-the-rapture/

While doing my daily trek through Facebook looking for relevant news stories, I came across a post with a link to an article with this title: “The Willful Ignorance of William Lane Craig.” The author of the article takes Dr. Craig to task for his comments on the historicity of the rapture in his short video “Is the Rapture a Biblical Doctrine?”

Eschatology is not Dr. Craig’s main field of study.

In recent years, several scholars have worked hard to prove that dispensationalism existed prior to John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) around 1830. Here’s the standard argument: “Dispensationalists … argue that while Darby may have been the first to order dispensational distinctives into a lucid system, other theologians held certain dispensational-like presuppositions far before Darby.” ^[1] For example, William C. Watson’s Dispensationalism Before Darby: Seventeenth-Century and Eighteenth-Century English Apocalypticism (2015), a book that is loaded with great historical sources, argues this way.

I contend that every prophetic system can make the same claim. For example, dispensationalists are premillennial, but premillennialists often argue vociferously against dispensationalism. Consider historic or classical premillennialist George Eldon Ladd:

We can find no trace of pretribulationalism in the early church, and no modern pretribulationist has successfully proved that this particular doctrine was held aby any of the church fathers or students of the Word before the nineteenth century. ^[2]

Also, apocalypticism and dispensationalism are not synonymous since amillennialists believe in an end-time apocalypse. Neither is a belief in a future great tribulation, the rise and demise of antichrist, or the future redemption of Israel. These and other prophetic doctrines can be found among most prophetic systems.

For example, in the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer (“Thy kingdom come”) of the 17^th century Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, the following is found: “we pray, that the kingdom of sin and Satan may be destroyed, the gospel propagated throughout the world, the Jews called, [and] the fullness of the Gentiles brought in … and that he would be pleased so to exercise the kingdom of his power in all the world, as may best conduce to these ends” (Larger Catechism, Q/A. 191).

A dispensationalist could agree with what’s stated above, but only within the context of its system. It’s dispensationalism as a system that does not have historical support.

Long before dispensationalism, many Christians commenting on eschatology, most of whom would be described today as postmillennialists, taught the future conversion of the Jews. What they did not teach is the “rapture of the church” prior to a seven-year period in order to separate a remnant of Jews from a new entity called the “church.” See Chapter 3 of my book 10 Popular Prophecy Myths Exposed and Answered.

So much of what we read in the historical record on the topic of Bible prophecy is marred by a failure to consider the nearness of certain prophetic events that Jesus and the New Testament writers specify. Watson and Craig are aware of preterism but do not do a good job dealing with preterist arguments from a biblical perspective.

Watson has numerous entries of preterism in his subject index. He mentions and quotes John Owen (1616–1683) who believed in a future papal antichrist, a belief common to most of the Reformers, many of who were historicists. There is no way that anyone would identify Owen as a dispensationalist even though dispensationalists and Owen (among others) believed in a future conversion of the Jews.

As Watson admits, Owen was mostly a preterist who believed that in the Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21) Jesus “came to destroy Jerusalem and put an end to the Jewish state and dispensation.”

Owen had this to say about 2 Peter 3:10 and the passing away of heaven and earth, a position that dispensationalists, premillennialists, and most amillennialists and postmillennialists would not agree with:

On this foundation I affirm that the heavens and earth here intended in this prophecy of Peter, the coming of the Lord, the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men, mentioned in the destruction of that heaven and earth, do all of them relate, not to the last and final judgment of the world, but to that utter desolation and destruction that was to be made of the Judaical church and state — i.e., the Fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. (John Owen’s Works (9:134–135).

Dr. Craig has addressed the subject of preterism from a biblical perspective here. My responses are here, here, and here.

Craig and the dispensationalists share a similar textual fault by failing to account for audience relevance and the timing of prophetic events.

Craig’s views on eschatology are all over the map, but he does seem to share some of the same tenets of dispensationalisms, for example, the belief that “[t]he fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 may have been just a foreshadowing of a final great tribulation and fall of Jerusalem that will take place again at the end of the age. Although Jesus may have thought that many of ‘these things’ would take place within his generation, I don’t think we have any solid grounds for saying that Jesus believed that the coming of the Son of Man was going to take place within the lifetime of his contemporaries.”

To repeat, to hold similar positions on some prophetic topics does not mean that the people who held these similar positions can or should be identified as proto-dispensationalists.

Many premillennialists and amillennialists hold a similar mixed view of the Olivet Discourse but would not see eye-to-eye on the rapture of the church. See Chapter 4 of my book Prophecy Wars for my response to this interpretation.

Prophecy Wars

Prophecy Wars covers topics related to (1) the time texts, audience reference (the use of the second person plural), and prophetic signs that are described by Jesus in the Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21), (2) the claim made that preterism is based on the historical works of first-century Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (AD 37–100), (4) the meaning of Jesus’ use of “this generation,” (5) John Murray’s (1898–1975) interpretation of Matthew 24–25, (6) Isaiah 17: Prophecy Fulfilled, (7) Blood Moons, Prophecy, and the Integrity of the Bible, (8) “Just Like the Days of Noah,” (9) Calculating the Number of the Beast, and (10) Refuting the Charges of “Replacement Theology.”Buy Now

If there is something in the historical record that aligns with something dispensationalists teach, then that source is often used by dispensationalists to support their claim that dispensationalism was taught before the 19^th century. For example, in the first chapter of the book Ancient Dispensational Truth, the author states the following as if it’s historic evidence that dispensationalism existed before Darby and Co.:

Ancient writers called the various ages in which God dealt with mankind in different ways, “dispensations.”

This claim isn’t new to critics of dispensationalism. The system called dispensationalism is more than differences between the covenants or the fact that theologians divided redemptive history into dispensations. “Rightly dividing the word of truth” (a more accurate translation is “accurately handling the word of truth”: 2 Tim. 2:15), a favorite Scofieldian phrase, does not mean dividing up the Bible into sealed off redemptive divisions. The NT itself makes this clear by declaring that there has been a change in the operation of God’s covenant as is obvious from the book of Hebrews and Paul’s writings.

In reading some of these early authors, the word “dispensation” is most often used as a synonym for “covenant.” For example, from John Chrysostom’s “Letter to a Young Widow”: “And God has furnished us with certain tokens, and obscure indications of these things both in the Old and in the New Dispensation.”

Chrysostom is saying nothing more than that both the Old and New Testaments have something to teach widows. This is hardly an endorsement in any way of modern-day dispensationalism.

Dispensationalism, as a system, is not found prior to the 19^th century. There is no such system among the early church fathers since their writings lack the necessary elements of the system that defines dispensationalism.

Alan Patrick Boyd, author of “A Dispensational Premillennial Analysis of the Eschatology of the Post-Apostolic Fathers (Until the Death of Justin Martyr),” submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Theology (May 1977) at Dallas Theological Seminary, sums up his detailed study of the period with the following:

It is the conclusion of this thesis that Dr. Ryrie’s statement [that “premillennialism is the historic faith of the Church” ^[3]] was the view of the early is historically invalid within the chronological framework of this thesis. The reasons for this conclusion are as follows: 1). the writers/writings surveyed did not generally adopt a consistently applied literal interpretation; 2). they did not generally distinguish between the Church and Israel; 3). there is no evidence that they generally held to a dispensational view of revealed history; 4). although Papias and Justin Martyr did believe in a Millennial kingdom, the 1,000 years is the only basic similarity with the modern system (in fact, they and dispensational pre-millennialism radically differ on the basis of the Millennium); 5). they had no concept of imminency or a pre-tribulational rapture of the Church; 6). in general, their eschatological chronology is not synonymous with that of the modern system. Indeed, this thesis would conclude that the eschatological beliefs of the period studied would be generally inimical to those of the modern system (perhaps, seminal amillennialism, and not nascent dispensational pre-millennialism ought to be seen in the eschatology of the period).

This means, if premillennialism is not the historic faith of the Church, then neither can dispensationalism be. The system known as dispensationalism is a 19th-century invention.

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1. Scott Aniol, “Was Isaac Watts a Proto-Dispensationalist?,” Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal, 16:1 (2011), 91.[↩]
2. The Blessed Hope (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), 31. [↩]
3. Charles C. Ryrie, The Basis of the Premillennial Faith (Neptune, NJ: Loiseaux Brothers, 1953), 17. Also see page 33. [↩]