Right? And this passage is appealed to by how Lindsey in his books, There’s a New World Coming and the Late Great Planet Earth. Right? And it was made very popular with the Tim LaHaye science fiction series Left Behind. There’s a variety of different views, but this is the most popular in the minds of folk on the street. This is known as the pre-tribulation rapture view.
So there are some Protestants who will appeal to a particular biblical passage, First Thessalonians, chapter four, verses 15 through 17, and conclude from that passage that Christians who are still on this earth right before the time of the final tribulation will be snatched up, caught up in the air with the Lord. So how can the church teach that when the Bible says otherwise? The idea is how can the church teach that Christians who are still alive are actually going to experience that final trial or push of evil that’s initiated by the anti-Christ? The catechism of the Catholic church teaches that in paragraph 675. So that’s the articulation of the challenge, which I address in my book Meeting the Protestant Challenge. So essentially we are faced with this challenge that essentially the objection to the Catholic teaching is Christians are not going to experience the difficulties of the time of testing at the end of time. This one, we’ll call meeting the rapture challenge today. You’ve written a bunch of wonderful books, including the two, Meeting the Protestant Challenge, and then Meeting the Protestant Response.Īnd so we’re going to meet a particular challenge.