The End is Near?

Dan McClellan If you hear people talking about these prophecies in Revelation, in Daniel, in Ezekiel, Gog and Magog are Russia and Iran. No, they're not. If you hear people talking about this to try to predict the future, they do not have the first clue what they're talking about, and none of what they're saying is accurate. Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we seek to increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan Beecher Man, I'm ready to combat. I'm going into combat here.

Dan McClellan Let's do it. We're going to minimize the military metaphors- Okay ... to some degree.

Dan Beecher All right. That's probably a good idea.

Dan McClellan But I guess I do use combat, so, eh.

Dan Beecher Fight.

Dan McClellan Confront. I could use that.

Dan Beecher Confront.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Battle. No, we got nothing, man.

Dan McClellan It's hard to avoid that.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Well. Yeah, it's tricky.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We're going to try not to lean too much into it then. What have we got?

Dan Beecher But today's going to be a fun one. Today it's end times.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher I don't know if people are aware of this, but there are certain- We are living in the end times ... there are certain events occurring right now that are leading a lot of people to be talking end times talk.

Dan McClellan And- Imagine that. Unlike the last- Which happens like- ... 2,000 years of history.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Exactly.

Dan Beecher Every time there's any world event, somebody's going to come up with a way to make that the end times. But we're going to be talking second coming. We're going to be talking rapture.

Dan McClellan It's going to be exciting.

Dan Beecher I'm excited about it.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher I think we should just dive in with our new segment, Ex Eventu.

Dan McClellan Ex Eventu, which, as everybody knows, means after the fact.

Dan Beecher This is- I feel like it's a Harry Potter spell. I'm pretty sure- Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's eventu- ...

Dan Beecher that if you wave a wand- ...

Dan McClellan not ex eventu.

Dan Beecher But yes. What we're talking about right now, to launch into this, is some prophecies, because I wanted to get into, with you, Dan- Mm-hmm ... the idea of the second coming of Jesus.

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher It's a thing that is talked about much. It is a very important event- Mm-hmm ... in Christianity and in the, I don't want to say the lore.

Dan McClellan Anyway- ...

Dan Beecher in what's happening in Christianity.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher It's everything.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher It's the Messiah, but this time in the person of Jesus or something. So let's talk about where the idea comes from, what it means, because there are a couple things that I find confusing about it, to be perfectly honest. And maybe I'll just point those out as we go along.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher So why don't you launch in and give us a quick primer on Jesus coming back.

Dan McClellan I will do my best. It's going to get complicated, though, because there are the positions that Christians have had historically on this, and particularly now in the 21st century. The 19th and 20th century saw the innovation of very new approaches to this question, and so we have different categories and subcategories within subcategories of ways of thinking about this. But to go back to the primary text, the foundation of this is what is called the Olivet Discourse from the Synoptic Gospels. This is found in Matthew 24, in Mark 13, and in Luke 21. And scholars are in pretty widespread agreement that Mark is the earliest gospel, so our earliest version of this discourse is found in Mark 13, and this is where we get the wars and rumors of wars and things like that that are very commonly repeated every time something goes on in the Holy Land.

Dan Beecher So- Can you answer something for me?

Dan McClellan Go ahead.

Dan Beecher What is a rumor of a war? What does that even mean?

Dan McClellan Yeah, that's the King James Version's rendering. The word there means report. Report or rumor. So you will hear wars, and you will hear reports about wars.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So it's- It just sounds like people are on the sly, "Hey- Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah ... I don't know if you know this, but, uh-" "Did you hear about this new war?"

Dan Beecher "There's a war happening." It just seems like such a weird phrasing.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher So you'll see some wars, and you'll hear about other wars. Is that basically the gist?

Dan McClellan Reports of war.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's a rhetorical flourish.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And let's see, Mark 13, it starts in verse five. This is from the NRSV. "Then Jesus began to say to them, 'Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, "I am he," and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed, this must take place, but the end is still to come.'" And so what we're talking about is the eschaton, which is a fancy word for the end times. And so from that word, we get this idea of eschatology, which is discourse about or the study of the end times. And Christian eschatology is, in many ways, baffling, very complex, but it is always an attempt to try to look at the text, look at the history between the text and now, and then try to situate ourselves within what's going on there. And There are, like I said, just different categories that people talk about. The main divisions of eschatology, and this is not my area of expertise. This is something that I know on a pretty basic academic level, but you have, starting with preterism, then futurism, and then you have historicism, and those are the three main ones. Idealism is another one that's not really talked about much. But preterism is the idea that everything that Jesus is talking about here, that all culminated with the destruction of the temple in 70 CE.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So preterism is basically, they were talking about the Jewish war and everything that was going to happen right up to Rome destroying the temple, and then everything after that is immaterial. It is not a focus of those texts. And then we've got historicism, which is the idea that everything between the writing of the text and now reflects these events. So things in the medieval period and things in late antiquity and things in the 19th century. And we're basically scattering these things out across history and saying, "Well, we could interpret this as an example of that." And this is where we get into idealism, which is this idea that this is all symbolic. And so these things can be repeated throughout time because this is about empire or- Right ... this is about capitalism or something like that. The beast is nation states. And so idealism is kind of like this is all symbolic. Historicism is this is a prophecy about this event that happened 700 years ago in history.

Dan Beecher And then we- So the first two, the preterism, is that what you said?

Dan McClellan Preterism, yeah.

Dan Beecher And historicism both claim that all of the end time prophecies have already occurred.

Dan McClellan Kind of. For historicism, some of it is still going on, but preterism- Oh, okay ... yes, we're well past all of that. And I get tagged in. Some guy on TikTok has self-published books about how everything happened in 70, and so everything else after that doesn't matter at all.

Dan Beecher It's- Right ...

Dan McClellan Christianity is over kind of thing.

Dan Beecher And then- Christianity is over, everybody go home.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Basically, yeah. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay. And then we've got futurism, which is the idea that these are all prophecies about things that are going to take place in the future, and this is probably among the most common today. And these are not hard and fast categories. The edges kind of bleed into each other- Sure ... for a lot of folks for some of these. But futurism is the idea that this is about things that are going to happen in the future. We're still waiting on this kind of thing to happen.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So it gets even more complex when you then talk about what's going to happen in the future.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because you've got a handful of different things that are going to happen. You have a millennium that's going to happen, and you have- Yeah.

Dan Beecher We've had a couple of those since- Yeah ... since the book was written, so- Yeah ... there's that.

Dan McClellan Let's see.

Dan Beecher Yeah. You have- Millennium in this case does mean a thousand years. Is that correct?

Dan McClellan Thousand year, yeah, and sometimes this is understood as a thousand-year reign of Jesus on the Earth.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan You have premillennialism, you have amillennialism, and you have postmillennialism.

Dan Beecher Okay, don't keep going into all of these categories. We're going to be here all day.

Dan McClellan Yeah. But then you've got tribulation, which is- Right ... understood, usually it's like a seven-year period of just intense suffering and persecution and things like that. And you've got pre-trib, mid-trib- ... and post-trib ideas.

Dan Beecher Oh, man. And basically- You're killing me. I'm dying here.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, this is how people are interpreting these texts.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Jesus' second coming is going to usher in the tribulation, and this is the rapture specifically. The rapture is going to happen when Jesus comes, and we'll get into that a little later.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Then you have this idea that the tribulation has kind of phases. It's ebbing and flowing, and right before it gets really, really bad, that's when the rapture's going to happen.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then you have the post-trib idea that the rapture happens at the end of the tribulation. And there are different ideas about what precisely the tribulation is going to mean, the relationship of the tribulation to the millennium, whether there's another second coming, and so- You know, so- It all gets-- Go ahead.

Dan Beecher I'm trying to understand why there are these different ideas about what could happen because I know- Yeah ... that it seems like, when I've been researching this for this episode, I look in 1 Thessalonians 4, and it- Right ... seems like there's kind of an order of operations. It seems like things happen in an order. But you're saying that there are multiple orders being proposed. So is that because the different authors have different orders that they've put things in?

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, a while ago, I did a video where I talked about how some people talk about reading the Bible is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and you have to look at the picture on the box.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And this is kind of the 30,000-foot view. You have to look at the Bible as a whole in order to be able to interpret the different constituent elements. And I said, "I think it's better thought of as a pile of Lego blocks." And I got-I got ridiculed for saying Legos, because just in case you were not aware, I was made abundantly aware, Lego does not have a plural.

Dan Beecher Yes, it does. Shut up. I'm sorry. To all of you who are very into the semantics of a toy, just shut up. We can refer to it as Legos. Everyone does. But- Anyway, go on ...

Dan McClellan my-- So I suggested that it's better to think of this as a bucket of Lego bricks or blocks or what have you, where there is no design. You're putting it together to create whatever you want to create. And with the Second Coming, people are looking at all parts of the Bible. We've got this assumption of univocality, that because it all is referring to one thing, because it is all speaking with a single, unified, consistent voice from a single, unified, consistent perspective, if anybody references the eschaton in any part of the Bible, you can bring them all together- Mm ... and that is going to give you the maximum coverage of what's going to happen. And so you have to triangulate what is going on from Daniel, and from Ezekiel, and from Isaiah 2, and from 1 Thessalonians, and from Mark 13, and from Matthew. And you have to put it all together to try to figure out what's going on. And the whole time, you're doing this in a historical situation. You are embedded within history- Right ... and so whatever's going on around you is going to inform these things. And so, this is why with the horrific things that are happening in Gaza and Palestine, in Israel right now, you immediately have people going, "Oh, Daniel 9." And we get all these different interpretations where people are going, "Well, the one group has to come down from the north, and the other group has to come up from the south, and they've got to sign a seven-year peace treaty with the Antichrist." And so this is all an attempt to take this giant mass of Lego bricks and create something that is going to be rhetorically meaningful or useful to the groups to whom we're speaking. And so frequently, this is leaders speaking to their congregations. These are people on social media, like me, just crying out for attention, just wanting to remain relevant. These are people trying to combat other positions that might have more attention than their own. So whatever makes this Lego creation more meaningful or useful is going to be how they're going to do it. And because there are so many different bricks, there are so many different ways to put this together.

Dan Beecher Well, and it seems to me that if there's one thing I've learned from being a part of this show and consuming your content, it's that- It was a mistake ... a lot of these bricks-- Yes, exactly. I quit. A lot of these bricks don't actually line up with each other, so you have to hide some bricks with other bricks in order to harmonize or to come up with a single narrative that works completely.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And this is something that is required for all of these renegotiations with the text. And one of the biggest things that needs to be overlooked, except for the preterist view, which only really holds if you accept this as actual, real predictive prophecy, but we've got in Matthew 16, this statement, "There are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And this seems to be a pretty clear prophecy on the part of the author of Matthew, that this second coming, Jesus's kingdom arriving on Earth, will happen within that first generation of followers of Jesus.

Dan Beecher In other words- That does seem like an important point.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It seems like unless those dudes are still alive- ... that seems pretty solid.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It seems like that. The idea here is that this is coming quickly, and this is what we see in Paul as well. Paul thinks all of this is going to happen any day now, and so we all need to be totally prepared. And it does not happen within that first generation, which requires you kind of reinterpret what Jesus is saying here. "Oh, well, generation can mean the whole race of humanity," and- ... or stuff like that. And so you have a bunch of reinterpretations. And then the Son of Man coming in his kingdom is reinterpreted. Oh, well, maybe this is a reference to Christianity taking over the Roman Empire, and now we have the kingdom that is Jesus's. Maybe it's talking about that. Maybe it's talking about Jesus's resurrection. That's Jesus coming in his kingdom. So it gets reinterpreted, and so yeah, you have the Lego block being covered by other Legos, being incorporated into a different design in an effort to ensure that whatever way you put these things all together, they inform our experiences, and they help us make the text more meaningful and useful to us. Ultimately, the goal for most of these folks, preterism is a little bit different, but for most of these folks, the goal is to find a way to make this connect with us- Right ... and help us understand how we relate to all of this and how we are a part of the story. The idea is to extend the narrative from all the way back then down to today, so we can be a part of the same story.

Dan Beecher Yeah, I hear a lot of pastors when they talk about the second coming or when they talk about the Rapture or whatever, they talk about-- I think there was a scripture in Thessalonians, or I'm not sure where it was. Anyway, a scripture about Be prepared, be doing the work. And I hear a lot of pastors talking about, "Don't get caught off guard like you're not doing it."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And it's a good way to say, "It could happen at any time."

Dan McClellan Yeah. So you've got to be ready.

Dan Beecher There's vigilance. But it does create, I don't know, an anxiety. We'll talk about that in the second half of the show. But I just think it's a double-edged sword where, yes, it's a good way to say, "Hey, let's all be prepared. Let's all be ready to go- Mm-hmm ... when this thing happens. And let's keep our vigilance up." But also, the other side of it is a massive amount of angst about, "Is it coming?"

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "Is it coming?"

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And that's where we get this vigilance where we're watching every world event. "Is that a rumor of a war? Is that the war? Is this the one?"

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Sort of thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and we're kind of on the back nine of the whole COVID thing, but- Yeah ... that was a huge part of this as well. All the- Yeah ... pestilences, and we saw all the folks talking about trying to read COVID into the scriptures. But yeah, you've got Jesus talking about this coming like a thief in the night, and you have the virgins, the wise virgins, and the foolish virgins who are not prepared for the bridegroom to show up. And I think this is particularly harmful when we take it from, "Hey, be good Christians," to, "We need to change things so that we're prepared for this, and we need to ignore other problems because this is coming so soon."

Dan Beecher Yeah. And this- Yeah, I definitely have seen that. People talking about, "Who cares about the environment?" Or, "Who cares about this, that, and the other thing?"

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Jesus is coming.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And we see this, and particularly, again, going back to the horrific things happening in Gaza and Palestine and Israel right now. You see folks saying, "Well, the only resolution of this is Jesus's second coming, and so all these people need to get with the program and become Christians," which is phenomenally ignorant and phenomenally harmful, and tokenizes the lives of these people that- Right ... are being lost, that are being destroyed, that are being forever changed, and turns them into just pawns in this game, this eschatological game, where we get to sit back and have a front row seat to the end of the world, and we're grabbing our popcorn, and talking about this like this is something to be excited about. When the reality is, this is not the eschaton. This is just horrific suffering and war.

Dan Beecher Well, and this is not something we haven't seen over and over and over again.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And if you're using the same images, the same things happening, to mean, "This is the eschaton. This is the end times," even though it happened 100 years ago, it happened 50 years ago, it happened 300 years ago, it happened blah, blah, blah. You can point to the same thing happening all the time. How is there any reason to believe that this is any different?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And so yeah, it's kind of disgusting to see people using it in that way.

Dan McClellan Well, and I think one of the things that makes it easier to reduce to that is the fact that those events that have happened in the past, we didn't directly experience. They are- Right ... entirely abstract to us.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so it becomes easy to think about the things that we're actually experiencing right now as a lot more real. There's a lot more of a... The Spanish words are coming to my head. Can't remember the English words for the things.

Dan Beecher There's just a lot- In fairness to you, you did just- Yeah ... come back from England, so how would you know any English words?

Dan McClellan Ah. Yeah, well. I was more recently, though, in Germany and Amsterdam, so.

Dan Beecher Well, okay. Well- Well, then the Spanish all makes sense.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And funny enough, I heard an awful lot of Spanish.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, because these are things that we are actually experiencing, it makes it a lot more easy to say, "This is real. Everything else is conceptual, is abstract." And then you have people making excuses, "Well, there are multiple fulfillments of this kind of stuff." And so, for instance, Isaiah 2, verse 2, where it talks about in that day. "The Lord's house will be established in the top of the mountains, and all nations will flow into it," and all this kind of stuff. Within the Latter-day Saint tradition, that has had multiple fulfillments.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan We had, prior to the church arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, that was understood to refer to the establishment of the New Jerusalem.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan Once we did arrive in the Salt Lake Valley, that was understood as the building of the Salt Lake Temple. And then we had the Olympics in- ... what was it, 2002? And Gordon B.

Dan Beecher Hinckley said this is- Man, if the Winter Olympics is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy- ... something weird is happening.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, and Mitt Romney's got a prominent position in the fulfillment of that prophecy.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But that was interpreted as one of the fulfillments of this prophecy. And so you have these texts get pulled into multiple different uses. And you have multiple fulfillments of prophecy. And that brings up one of the other main texts that is used for this, which is Daniel 9, the prophecy of 70 weeks. Have you heard about this one?

Dan Beecher Yeah, and I want to get into it.

Dan McClellan So we have this prophecy in Daniel 9, and the first thing to note about Daniel is that this is not something written by a historical Daniel during the Babylonian exile. This- How dare you This is ex eventu is the name of the segment.

Dan Beecher Okay, fine.

Dan McClellan The Book of Daniel is brought together from some traditions that were collated and finalized in the middle of the second century BCE. In fact, we can probably date it to within maybe two or three years of when it was.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan It was probably written around 167-ish BCE. And the reason we know this is because the story is, the earlier in time it gets, the closer it gets to its ostensible composition, in the beginning of the Babylonian exile, the less historically accurate it is.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan The closer it gets to 167 BCE, the more historically accurate and the more detailed it gets. And then once we get past 167 BCE, it all falls apart. None of it is accurate.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so, this is an ex eventu prophecy. It is being written, and most of it is being written in or being gathered and collated. Some of the traditions probably date to earlier around that time period. But we have this idea of... So this is the NRSV, Daniel 9:25. "Know therefore and understand, from the time that the word went out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the time of an anointed prince, there shall be seven weeks. And for 62 weeks, it shall be built again with street and moat, but in a troubled time." Now, this is the author basically redoing the prophecy that we originally find in Jeremiah about how long the Babylonian exile is going to last. Jeremiah said it would be 70 years, and then everything would be restored. And we did come back, but during the Persian period, Israel did not become an independent kingdom all over again. So for someone from a later period, they look back on this and go, "And that's not really what we were expecting to happen, so it must not have happened yet."

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan "So we're going to redo the prophecy." And now it's not just 70 years, but 70 weeks of years, which would be 70 times seven.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan 70 weeks of years.

Dan Beecher Yes. I'm pretty sure that's not a thing, but okay. Keep going.

Dan McClellan And then, so we have our seven weeks, and we have our 62 weeks, and then it says, "After the 62 weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing, and the troops of the blah, blah, blah, blah." And then, "He shall make a strong covenant with many for one week and for half..." And this is that seven-year peace treaty that people are talking about being signed right now.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So basically, we've got seven, 62, and then we got another week, and so that would be the 70 weeks. Now, Jeremiah's prophecy was supposed to be around 605, 604 BCE. Some people read the seven and then the 62 as back to back. I think it's more likely that they overlap. You have them running concurrently, because if you go 62 weeks of years from 605 BCE, the beginning of this period of exile, you get 171 BCE, which is when a high priest named Onias is killed. And this is right before Antiochus Epiphanes and the Seleucid Empire comes in and ravages Jerusalem.

Dan Beecher No idea what any of that is, but okay.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher So- I'm just going to believe you. But when we- We don't have time. We can't get into all of this. We don't have the time.

Dan McClellan Okay. The short, short version.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So basically, Daniel is writing from the late 160s BCE and redoing the prophecy about how long the exile is supposed to last so that it is all culminating right there around 167 BCE.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But now, 2,167, 193 years later, whatever- ... we're looking back on this again and saying, "Well, that didn't turn out the way they thought it was, so we're going to redo it." So it must've been about now. Yeah, must've been about now. And so you've got all kinds of different ways to redo the math, to play with these numbers, to make it sound like this is all happening today. So if you hear people talking about these prophecies in Revelation, in Daniel, in Ezekiel, Gog and Magog are Russia and Iran. No, they're not. That does not work at all. If you hear people talking about this to try to predict the future, they do not have the first clue what they're talking about, and none of what they're saying is accurate. So there's a lot of anxiety out there about what's going on, and leaning into this kind of stuff will only make the situation worse and will only spread more harmful and more problematic ideologies that are only going to make it harder and harder for us to get out of these problems and actually come up with solutions that are going to lead to a better world, rather than just more anger, more anxiety, more conflict. So this is an ex eventu prophecy. Don't be afraid.

Dan Beecher Well, speaking of problematic theologies, I think it's time to move on to our next segment. What is that?

Dan McClellan I don't know. Man-na in Hebrew, so manna. What is it?

Dan Beecher Today's What is That?

Dan McClellan is the Rapture.

Dan Beecher All right. And I got to say- I grew up in the LDS tradition that you're a part of.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And I never heard the word rapture.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I never heard anything about a rapture. And so when I started to hear that word, and when I started to hear people very adamant about what's about to happen, or about its coming, or about the rapture, I was, A, confused, and B, couldn't really find it when I looked for it in the Bible. I didn't know what it was referencing. So, talk us through, where did the concept come from? Where is it in the Bible? What are we talking about? What is the rapture?

Dan McClellan So, the word rapture comes from the Latin translation, the Vulgate translation of the New Testament, and specifically first Thessalonians 4:17, where we have this statement, and reading from verse 16 to 17 from the NRSV. It says, "For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So this is- Caught up in the clouds, baby. Caught up in the clouds. And this is appealing to imagery that is associated, the storm deity imagery, basically. So, the New Testament concept of Jesus coming in the clouds, that comes from Daniel 7, which itself is drawing from earlier storm deity imagery, where the storm deity was the rider of the clouds.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan So this goes all the way back to Baal in the second millennium BCE.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan And so it's going all the way down to Jesus. Jesus is coming in the clouds, and it says we'll be caught up together. And, the word there, harpagisometha, has reference to being snatched, but also just being caught up. To make off with someone's property by attacking or seizing. To grab or seize suddenly so as to remove or gain control. To snatch, to take away.

Dan Beecher So we who are alive, who are left, will be stolen in the clouds.

Dan McClellan That's how some people think about it. When you hear people talking about the rapture, it's like you're going to wake up one day and there are going to be a pile of clothes where- Oh, yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And- I've seen that imagery a lot.

Dan McClellan Yeah. But what this is referring to is, Paul here is using imagery associated with a new sovereign's arrival to their kingdom. Where what would happen is when the person is approaching, the whole city comes outside the city gates and goes out front, and there's a kind of reception committee out there. And then they travel with the new sovereign back into the city, where they take up their rule.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so Paul is kind of reorienting this vertically- ... because our sovereign is coming from up.

Dan Beecher Right. And so just like- Clouds are up, so.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So just like Jesus ascended, Jesus is going to come down. And so the idea is we're all going to rise up into the clouds to meet him, not to then take a trip in our big old rocket ship into the heavens, but to come back down with Jesus so that Jesus can take up his rule on Earth, in his kingdom on Earth. Now, but people reading this 2,000 years later who are not familiar with these literary conventions, with this imagery, are not going to understand what's going on here. And so you got this guy named Darby, John Nelson Darby, in the early 19th century with, I believe the Plymouth Brethren, if I'm not mistaken, who, again, triangulating with a bunch of the other Legos that we find in the Bible, decided to try to work this into a theory about what was going to happen and came up with this idea of the rapture. That this is about the people who are followers of Jesus who are alive when he comes are going to be snatched away to go up to heaven with Jesus.

Dan Beecher And this- So this is as recent as the early 1800s.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I don't remember the exact year, but it would have been, I think the 1830s, is when Darby initially came up with it.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Translations of the Bible that John Nelson Darby analyzed in 1833.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So yeah, this is a very recent idea. You don't have any concept of the rapture for the other 1,800 years between Jesus's death and Darby. And this wouldn't really gain a bunch of traction until it was picked up in a study Bible, I think it was called the Scofield Reference Bible.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan Which was popular in the United States. And these days, most Christians around the world don't accept the rapture. It's almost entirely, it's concentrated within the United States. It's US Protestants primarily who maintain this concept of a rapture. And speaking about the end of the 20th century, the beginning of the 21st century, a series of books called "Left Behind" were very influential in kind of embedding this rapture anxiety in a whole generation of Evangelicals who- Well- ... carry that with them to this day.

Dan Beecher Yeah. There's two sides to this coin because there's rapture delight as well. There is rapture anxiety, and we should talk about that because I have spoken to many people who spent many years or decades of their lives just really freaked out about this idea. But other people delight in it. "Oh, I can't wait."

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher "I get to be- I get to be caught up with Jesus and all of the sinners and all of the bad people and all the people that I fought against my whole life and all the people that I dislike and all the Democrats or whatever are going to have to stay and be in the tribulation, and it's going to be awful for them and blah, blah, blah.

Dan McClellan Well, that would be the pre-trib concept of the Rapture.

Dan Beecher Yeah, okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yes, exactly.

Dan McClellan We'll see.

Dan Beecher But I think that's pretty common, is this pre-trib idea of like, yes, all the good people get raptured up so that they don't have to be part of the horrible tribulation.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher And then all of us sinners are going to be left here, and then the various tortures will happen to us.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And there's something a little gross about both sides of that coin. Either taking delight in it, not great. You don't look good, guys. It's not an awesome look to be delighting like that. And as we talked about, that's the same delight that people are taking when they see signs that they think are leading to the Rapture, including horrific things happening.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Bloodshed around the world. They're like, "Oh, yay."

Dan Beecher Yeah. Or the climate change or whatever. A lot of people are saying, "Aha, this is the prophecy.

Dan McClellan It's going to happen now."

Dan Beecher And it's like, yeah, but you're taking delight in something that's really very scary.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And then on the other side, yeah, all these poor people who live with just terrible fear that they're not going to have been good enough. They won't be caught up. They're not going to have made the cut, or someone that they love dearly won't make the cut. And they'll be left to be tortured.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I don't think a lot of people think about when they're coming up with a lot of the rhetorical ways that they try to emphasize the importance of certain principles that we live within Christianity or whatever worldview. There are a lot of ways we try to rhetorically emphasize how important things are, and what we tend to not think about is the unintended consequences of using that rhetoric. And within the Latter-day Saint tradition, you have the idea of chastity as something that is emphasized and punctuated and rhetorically and hyperbolically kind of centered. And so you have the whole, for those of you who are not at all familiar with the Latter-day Saint tradition, for a long time, they would tell, and I'm sure it still goes on in some parts of the United States, they would compare a young woman who has lost her virginity prior to marriage to a chewed piece of gum.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Or to a licked cupcake or something like that. And they were like, "Nobody's going to want a cupcake that's already been licked," or something like that, which is awful imagery anyway.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But what they don't realize is that they are embedding within the psyche of these young, impressionable children the notion that I am not worthy. I am not even worthy to live if this happens.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so it inevitably will for a portion of the population who then get to feel like they would be better off dead. And we've even had, over the pulpit, church leaders say that... One told a story during general conference about a young man who was going off to war and told his mom, "I know that you would rather I come home in a box than unclean." Meaning unchaste.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan The idea being, I am not worthy to live. And you have people who take their own lives because they are riddled with that kind of stuff. And so Rapture anxiety is another example of not thinking about the negative consequences of trying to emphasize how important these beliefs are to children. And so I wish people would think for a second about those negative consequences so people don't have to do that. People don't have to go through that, because that kind of thing can stay with somebody throughout their entire life.

Dan Beecher Absolutely. I think it's fascinating that this Rapture idea, it's so thin. When you look at the verses in the Bible that are used to justify this idea, it's so obvious to me. I read 1 Thessalonians. I've read some of the other verses that people have used. It's very clear to me that I can see how you could justify that concept, this concept of the Rapture with those verses, but I don't see how you can say with any degree of certainty that that's definitely what these verses are talking about. These verses are really oblique. You know what I mean?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You can't say absolutely this is what this means.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Using the Lego metaphor, this is a rickety tower- Yeah ... that they have constructed. And it is wobbling. But because it gives them a sense of exceptionalism, like, "Oh, we're special. We're going to be taken."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan That makes things particularly useful and meaningful for the in-group. It's a way to kind of shore up boundaries and things like that. And it also is a very useful rhetorical tool. Are you going to be left behind, or are you going to be taken with the rest of us? And it's a good way to draw a firm, hard boundary and say, "You need to be on this side of the line. Everybody else is on the other side of the line." It's a very us versus them kind of approach, which for groups is very utilitarian.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It helps them stick together. For the whole, it is phenomenally harmful, but that's something odd about so many folks who suggest that they believe everybody is a child of God, is that they are firmly set on keeping many people on the outside, and keeping others on the inside.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Which I think leads to one of the funny approaches to the rapture. You talked about rapture anxiety, you talked about, and I forget what word you used, but rapture euphoria or fantasies or something like that. I think a wonderful response to this has been those folks who are approaching the rapture euphorically from the outside. "I can't wait for all the self-righteous Christians to vanish and leave us alone."

Dan Beecher "Jesus, please come take your people here." "They've been really mean to us, and if you could just snatch them up, that'd be great."

Dan McClellan There's a Brigham Young quote, and I don't know the words exactly, but something to the tune of, "If Mormons go to hell, then we'll turn out the devil and make a heaven of it."

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And I think there are a lot of non-evangelicals or atheists who are like, "If the rapture takes all the Christians away, then Earth will become heaven."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because the rapture stuff tends to be a pretty myopic, close-minded, kind of insular approach to living in a world that is not ending anytime soon, at least because of anything supernatural going on. Our myopia and our misanthropy might lead to us destroying it before too long. But yeah, I think the folks who pound the rapture drum the loudest are the ones that most people would just like to see disappear.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan In a good way. Go up to heaven. Do your thing.

Dan Beecher Go, yeah.

Dan McClellan Leave us alone.

Dan Beecher Knock yourself out. Have a great time in the clouds. You'll like it. They're fluffy.

Dan McClellan Yeah. As Delta says, "Keep climbing." I've been on Delta planes a lot in the last couple weeks.

Dan Beecher Yes, you have.

Dan McClellan Yeah, I've had to stare at that motto for a while now.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow. I'm just impressed that you haven't, or confused that you haven't figured out how to tune it out completely yet, because I've been on a lot too, and I have no idea what they say in that thing. I know I'm supposed to pay attention, but...

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher What's our final thought here?

Dan McClellan Yeah. I think the final thought is that this rhetoric does a lot of damage, not only to the psyches of new generations, people who are growing up in a time when their brains are formulating a concept of their identity and their position in the world around them. We don't want to embed that field with this idea that you could wake up and all your loved ones could be gone, and you could be left behind because you rubbed one out the other day to a Katy Perry video that you saw, or something like that. That kind of anxiety is so corrosive, and it also interferes with our ability to govern, in a world where we have so many issues that we have to address, to have so many people with their hands on levers of power who can say things as brainless as, "Well, Genesis 8:22 says that climate change is a hoax, and so we're going to stand in the way of making a better world." That is so phenomenally harmful, and the notion that people are giddy about people suffering and dying on the other side of the world, people that they've never met, that they will never have to think about in anything other than a purely abstract sense, that they are happy about this, or that they think this is an opportunity to evangelize and to say, "Those Jews better become Christian soon, because that's the only way they're going to bring an end to this suffering." That is so unimaginably harmful.

Dan Beecher And it's not just that, it's also that they're using unrelated texts. They're using the Bible, pretending like it's talking about this moment, this thing, and then saying that that's how we should structure policy, that's how we should structure our approach to a world tragedy.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Which leads to not caring about what the best possible outcome is for everyone involved, but rather only looking to what's the best possible outcome to make Jesus come again.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And that's all they're looking to, and they're pressuring, they're voting for people who have that particular view. It's not a worldview, it's a theological view, and they're basing their ideas of world policy and sort of international relations on something that doesn't even apply.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and this is something that we've talked about a number of times. Not enough times. We're going to talk about it again.