All 12 Apostles, as well as Paul, Augustine, Luther, Calvin and the odd Pope, probably sat bolt upright in their graves in 1830, when they heard about this new doctrine . . .
Millions of believers sitting in their church pews each week, naively think that the “Secret Rapture” doctrine was taught by Christ, the Apostles and the first Christians, but let’s clarify; We are NOT talking about the “Post-Millennial Rapture”, accepted by mainstream Christianity.
|
Investigation: © J. Russell, Sept, 08, 2014 |
We are talking about the imminent “Pre-Millennial Secret Rapture”, the ominous and popular belief, that thousands of preachers gleefully describe as a secret and silent coming of Jesus, when millions of people will instantly disappear without a trace from the face of the earth, leaving their families terrorized and looking for their loved ones who have vanished into thin air, all covered by massive headlines on the 24hr TV networks and endless “human interest” stories in the newspapers, not to mention the frenzy such an event would create on the “social networks”.
Those who believe in this recently invented theological fraud, will immediately start yelling and screaming that the;”Word of God is being subverted”, as they quote dozens of biblical verses, supposedly “proving they will be Raptured”. Nevertheless, as hard a pill as it is to swallow, the facts are that they have been completely fooled, duped and conned into believing they will be “Raptured by Christ” at any moment.
Those that don’t accept the facts presented here, are urged to conduct their own research and will soon discover that neither the doctrine of the “Secret Rapture” or any such phrase is found in any Bible translation, source documents or ancient writings and was never taught or preached by the Christian church, prior to the year 1830.
Even though this hoax only appeared 180 years ago, it has gone on to insidiously change the course of human history, Christianity and politics around the world. All 12 Apostles, as well as Paul, Augustine, Luther, Calvin and Knox, probably sat bolt upright in their graves and then fainted in despair, when word reached them towards the end of 1830, about this new doctrine.
Five people are primarily responsible for having invented, promoted and introduced the deceptive “Secret Rapture” virus into modern fundamentalist Christianity and as such, have a lot to answer for. The culprits are; Manuel Díaz Lacunza, Edward Irving, Margaret Macdonald, John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Ingerson Scofield.
Though the first three characters didn’t sit down to deliberately plot or conspire to introduce this fraudulent teaching into the churches, the last two men were another story and as the main instigators, used it to become famous, successful, respected and revered by millions.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Christians have no idea who these people were and few have ever bothered to question the origins and teachings of the “Secret Rapture and the Seven Dispensations” or why they believe it, as most just take it for granted that it was originally taught by Christ and the Apostles.
First we have Manuel Díaz Lacunza (1731-1801), a Chilean born Jesuit priest who wrote a book in 1790 called “The coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty” (La Venida del Mesías en Gloria y Majestad), under the assumed name of “(Rabbi) Juan Josafa Ben-Ezra”, hoping that his tome would be better accepted by the Protestants.
His book was first published in Cadiz in 1810 and eventually in London in 1826. The Vatican didn’t like anything in this book and in a fit of rage, denounced Lacunza before the “Holy Inquisition”, condemned his book, removed it from circulation and in 1824, Pope Leo XII, placed it on his “List of Prohibited Books”, because Lacunza’s detractors had reached the conclusion that it contained; “Ideas that were far too seductive to the clergy”.
Lacunza believed that he had made some “new, solid and undeniable theological discoveries”. First; he denied the world would end and return to nothing and Second; he concluded that the biblical references “end times” and “end of the world”, referred to two different events.
The “end times”, would be the end of the human history phase and this would end with the coming of Christ and the beginning of the Kingdom on Earth. The living would be judged, the Jews saved and the new society would last 1,000 years with peace and justice. To Lacunza, the “end of the world”, would be the resurrection of the dead and the final judgment, which he interpreted as a transmutation from the physical world to the eternal spirit plain.
He also postulated that there would be a great apostasy by the Catholic Church, that would make it part of the Antichrist, as the church was not a“church of individuals”, but a “moral body”, comprised of apostates and atheists. The way Lacunza died is highly suspect, as his body was found at the bottom of a pit near his home in Imola, Italy. [Resume of Lacunza’s book]
Secondly we have Edward Irving (1792-1834), a minister of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, who had read Lacunza’s book. Irving was so impressed with the subject-matter, that he studied Castillian (Spanish), translated it into English and published in 1827 as “The Coming of the Messiah” (El Mesías que Vendrá).
Irving loved to “speake in tongues, prophesy and heal” during his services, but the Church of Scotland got so annoyed with his public conduct, spiritual claims and preachings that they finally excommunicated and dismissed him from the church in 1830.
As a result, Irving founded his own sect/cult called the “Apostolic Catholic Church” which lasted until 1901, but then just faded away and disappeared. By his practices and teachings, Irving came to be recognized as the founder of the modern day Pentecostal movement. [Biogrphy of Edward Irving]
Third we have Margaret Macdonald, (1815 – 1840) a young, sickly, 15 year old orphaned Scottish girl who during one of Edward Irving’s “prophetic sessions” on the 28th of March 1830, fell into a “trance“, and after a number of hours of “visions, prophecy and speaking in tongues”, revealed that the “Return of Christ would 
occur in two stages”: not just once, as traditional Christian theology teaches.
“Christ”, Macdonald said, “would come the first time and visibly rapture all the virtuous and just who were Filled with the Spirit, in a Secret Rapture”. Then Christ would return a second time during the “Tribulation”, with the traditional “Rapture” to; “execute his rage and destruction on all the sinners and heretics”.
Following this event, Edward Irving claimed to have heard a “Voice from Heaven”, directing him to preach and teach about the “Secret Rapture”. [Full text of Margaret Macdonald’s revelation].
The first public appearance of the “Secret Rapture” doctrine, occurred in September 1830, in an article that appeared in “The Morning Watch”, a magazine published by Irving himself.
Once the magazine received a hand written transcript of Macdonald’s “revelation”, they began to enthusiastically publish this new and unusual doctrine, going to great lengths explaining which part of the Christian church (described as the “Philadelphia” of Revelations chapter 3), would be “raptured” up to meet Christ in the air, before the “Great Tribulation” and that “Laodicea”(meaning the “church” that would confront the Antichrist) would be “left behind” to confront him.
The Fourth cog in this wheel was John Nelson Darby, a disgruntled, obnoxious and trouble-making Anglican priest in Ireland, who went on to become the founder and leader of “The Brethren” sect/cult.
He produced his own translation of the Bible from which he removed entire verses, corrupted important Biblical doctrines, and tampered with key passages concerning the second coming of Jesus Christ.
One of his first preposterous contributions to fundamentalist Christianity was his affirmation that the history of the world was divided into 7 (seven) 1,000 year periods which he called “Dispensations”.
Ignoring all scientific evidence to the contrary as a “Satanic deception”, Darby decided that planet earth and humans were created just 7,000 years ago and that we are actually living in the last 1,000 years of the “final times” or as he called it, the period of “Grace”, before the end of the world.
The first recorded history of anyone writing and preaching the idea of a one thousand year reign of Christ on this earth was Cerinthus, a contemporary and enemy of the Apostle John, and considered a heretic by the first Christians. Eusebius mentions him in his“Ecclesiastical History” A.D. 324.
Others such as Augustine, Joachim de Fiore y Pierre Poiret had dabbled with some of these ideas but never taught them. During the 16th century, the Protestants were totally convinced the Papacy was the “Antichrist”, because so many were being martyred. In an effort to take the heat off the Catholic Church, the Jesuits were called in to formulate doctrines that would counter the Reformation.
One of these was the Jesuit priest Francisco Ribera, who in 1585 published a prophetic commentary placing the first chapters of the book of Revelation in the first century and then he time-shifted the rest, far off into the distant future, claiming that the temple would be rebuilt in Jerusalem by an Antichrist who would abolish Christianity, deny Christ, pretend to be God, and conquer the world. Ribera put a rubber band on Daniel’s 70th week prophesy and stretched it to the end of time, effectively making this the beginning of the“futurist theory”, taught today.
Although there is no Scriptural reason that warrants separating the 69th and 70th weeks in the book of Daniel, Ribera took fulfilled Scripture and time-shifted it into the far off future. In 1826, S. R. Maitland, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s librarian, who was interested in prophecy, re-discovered Ribera’s writings and published them out of interest sake, and Darby was persuaded.
Another industrious Jesuit priest, Luis de Alcazar, time-shifted the fulfillment of prophecies in the book of Revelations backwards into the past and his scheme is what is now taught by the“Preterists”.
No one has had more influence on Protestant Christianity in the last 200 years than “The Brethren” and John Nelson Darby. As the originator and inventor of “Christian Zionism”, “Creationism” and“Dispensationalism” and the packaging expert on “The Secret Rapture”, his ideas and teachings impregnate the beliefs of millions of fundamentalist Christians around the world and drive the US political agenda.
His influence on seminaries in England, Switzerland, Germany, France Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, as well as his 7 tours of the US promoting the “Secret Rapture”, left an indelible mark that trickled down into the bowls of fundamentalism. Darby wrapped it all up into a neat package and came to be recognized as the maximum world authority on these subjects. [Resume of John Nelson Darby]
| Darby’s history of the earth and humanity in 7 time periods | ||
| Eternity | Infinity | Before the Creation |
| 1. Innocence | 1,000 years | Creation to the fall |
| 2. Conscience | 1,000 years | The fall to the flood |
| 3. Human Government | 1,000 years | The flood to Abraham |
| 4. Promise | 1,000 years | Abraham to Moses |
| 5. Law | 1,000 years | Moses to Calvary |
| 6. Grace | 1,000 years | Calvary to the Kingdom |
| 7. The Kingdom | 1,000 years | Messianic era |
| Eternity | Infinity | End of the World |
Darby had previously toyed with the “Pre-Rapture” idea, but hadn’t managed to successfully integrate it into his new “Dispensation” fraud.
On hearing about the book that Irving had translated and the new “revelations” by the Scottish teenager, Darby immediately jumped on the first train to Scotland and insisted on being told all the intimate secrets of the “Secret Rapture, Visions and Trances”.
Ecstatic by his “new discovery” and back in London, Darby set about gathering a gaggle of out of context biblical verses that supposedly “proved” his new“Secret Rapture and Dispensations” doctrine, and made this total invention his “own holy grail”.
Within a short time, Darby was recognized as an eminent authority on this subject and his followers just loved the whole “Secret Rapture” shenanigans, specially when he told them that this great event would happen “exclusively” just for them and that all the other “Christian heretics” would be “left behind”. Up to 1837, Darby was still preaching about the “Post-Tribulation” but from 1839 onwards, he began preaching and teaching his “New Dispensationalism Doctrine”.
The Fifth accomplice in this fraud was the American Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843-1921), better known as C.I. Scofield, author of the “Scofield Reference Bible”.
The“Secret Rapture and Dispensationalism” doctrine became even more popular and was rapidly deployed to all parts of the world when Scofield published his Bible in 1909, based on the King James (KJV), edited and interpreted in such a way that it incorporated all the eschatology of the “Secret Rapture and Dispensationalism”, all copied word for word from John Nelson Darby’s writings.
“Scofield’s Reference Bible” has commentaries beside the text that re-interpret the meanings of many words and terms, a reference system to all the supposedly related biblical verses, supposed exact dates of the Creation, the Seven Dispensations and all the other events, which permit the reader to follow subjects from one chapter or book to another, with numerous notes in the margin about the “Secret Rapture” that the majority of believers today accept as a “God’s Word”.
In other words, Scofield incorporated the“Pre-Tribulation” doctrine directly into his Bible and managed this way to introduce this doctrine to North America at the beginning of the 20th century. Even though there was much resistance to this doctrine at the beginning and it caused much conflict between many of the Christian churches, bit by bit it began to be accepted and defended as facts by many and as “true biblical doctrine”.
Scofield was a conman and larcenous serial criminal, both before he was saved and after. In 1873, he helped John J. Ingalls get elected to the Kansas Senate and as a reward, he was given the post of state Attorney General, but he had to resign the same year and ended up in jail because he accepted bribes from railway operators, stole Ingalls´s political contributions and forged signatures on bank notes and IOU’s.
He abandoned his wife Leontine Cerré and his two daughters and she finally filed for divorce in 1883, accusing him of having abandoned her, the children and the home.
The same year he married Hettie Hall von Wartz and started to call himself the Reverend C. I. Scofield, D.D. (Doctor in Divinity), however numerous intensive investigations have found no records that support his having received a degree in Divinity.
The dates, place and the hour of his “conversion” turn out to be total fabrications. He self-promoted himself by lying and claimed that he had consoled the whole city of Belfast in Ireland, with a sermon he gave on the Sunday after the sinking of the Titanic. His assistants covered up his serial larceny and exaggerated his supposed Biblical knowledge and great wisdom.
The Topeka newspaper The Daily Capital dated August 27, 1881, had this to say about Scofield:
|
“Cyrus I. Scofield, formerly of Kansas, late lawyer, politician and shyster generally, has come to the surface again, and promises once more to gather around himself that halo of notoriety that has made him so prominent in the past. The last personal knowledge that Kansans have had of this peer among scalawags, was when about four years ago, after a series of forgeries and confidence games he left the state and a destitute family and took refuge in Canada. For a time he kept undercover, nothing being heard of him until within the past two years when he turned up in St. Louis, where he had a wealthy widowed sister living who has generally come to the front and squared up Cyrus’ little follies and foibles by paying good round sums of money. Within the past year, however, Cyrus committed a series of St. Louis forgeries that could not be settled so easily, and the erratic young gentleman was compelled to linger in the St. Louis jail for a period of six months. Among the many malicious acts that characterized his career, was one peculiarly atrocious, that has come under our personal notice. Shortly after he left Kansas, leaving his wife and two children dependent upon the bounty of his wife’s mother, he wrote his wife that he could invest some $1,300 of her mother’s money, all she had, in a manner that would return big interest. After some correspondence he forwarded them a mortgage, signed and executed by one Chas Best, purporting to convey valuable property in St. Louis. Upon this, the money was sent to him. Afterwards the mortgages were found to be base forgeries, no such person as Charles Best being in existence, and the property conveyed in the mortgage fictitious…” |
Scofield’s Bible was published by “Oxford University Press” in 1909 and by 1930 it had sold more than a million copies, introducing these false doctrines into the US churches, Bible Colleges, study groups and a myriad of Evangelical denominations.
The fundamentalists loved it, Scofield’s Bible turned out to be marvelous because they finally had something that differentiated them from all the other Christians and it’s no coincidence that they use this version of the Bible or the King James (KJV) as these are the only two versions of the Bible considered to be “divinely inspired by God”, considering all other Bible versions to contain “heretical” passages.
The sales of his Bible were spectacular and his author’s royalties so great that he didn’t know what to do with all the money, so he spent it on properties in Dallas, Ashuelot, New Hampshire and long Island as well as on a membership to the prestigious Lotus Club in New York.
One of Scofield’s more suspect activities was his visit to England during production of his“Reference Bible” to meet and consult with Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828–1892), two of England’s most polemic experts and occultists who had founded various Satanic groups so as to be able to regularly communicate with demons.
Wescott and Hort guided and counseled Scofield on how to adapt and incorporate the “Secret Rapture and Dispensationalism” into his new Bible. Scofield preferred the RV (Revised Version) of the Bible, which had largely been the product of Westcott and Hort and was based on corrupted manuscripts born in Alexandria, Egypt and espoused by the Vatican.
Knowing that if he coupled his notes with the RV they wouldn’t sell very well, he used the KJV. When the two versions differed on his doctrine, he placed a footnote giving a supposedly more correct rendering, which almost always agreed with the RV and his Bible continues to be praised and utilized today by unscrupulous men with questionable motives.
During the production of his Bible, Scofield was financed and constantly supported by the 33 degree Mason, George Bannerman Dealey, owner of the newspaper the “Dallas Morning News” and a member of Scofield’s church.
In 1890, Scofield founded the “Central American Mission”, today known as CAM International, often involved in some various dubious practices during the Guatemalan 30 year long civil war. [Secret archives of the Brethren cult in Guatemala 1924-1985]
| Some of the more notable “Secret Rapture” predictions: | ||
| 1844 | William Miller | |
| 1977 | William M. Branham | |
| 1981 | Chuck Smith | |
| 1988, 1989, 1992, 1995, | Edgar C. Whisenant | |
| 1992 | “Mission for the Coming Days” | |
| 1993 | Predicted by many | |
| 1994 | Pastor John Hinkle | |
| 1994, 2011, | Evangelist Harold Camping | |
Many “Rapture Preachers”, cheerfully preach that those “left behind” will think that the “raptured”, have been captured by aliens or are victims of some unexplainable phenomenon that made them disappear.
They split their sides laughing at the devastation that such an event would cause on earth and the enormous losses of life in the buses, metros, trains, aircraft, ships and automobiles etc., cause by the disappeared drivers, pilots, chauffeurs and engineers etc., while all those that“stay behind”, panicking, confused, desperate and terrified, begin the long wait for the second coming of Christ to be judged and sent to the“Eternal Lake of Fire”.
Predictions on the date of the “Secret Rapture” have been numerous with a 100% failure rate so far, even though thousands of promoters of this false teaching unashamedly continue predicting new dates without blushing, terrifying the naive and making Christianity the laughingstock of the world.
These events are looked forward to gleefully, by those who believe in the “Secret Rapture”. To them, those that are“left behind” deserve everything they will get. It’s their most spectacular revenge against all those that didn’t listen to them and believed the “heretical” teachings of other churches.
Such an event in fact, would not be very “secret”, as the coverage by CNN, CBS, BBC, Aljazera and Tele-Sur would be excellent, however at Fox News, there would hardly be enough “righteous souls” left, capable of covering the event.
Let’s not forget the popular fundamentalist urban myth about the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) in the USA, which claims that commercial airline pilots who believe in the “Secret Rapture” are always accompanied by a non-believing pilot, for safety reasons.
What we do know for sure is that this teaching is a new invention, rejected by the all traditional Christian churches, including the Catholics. It has no Biblical basis and was never taught by Christ, the Apostles or the early Christians. The modern teachings of a “Secret Rapture” of the church, a “Seven-year Tribulation”, and a “Literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth” are simply not found in the Bible.
Without these “fabricated truths”, there would be no Christian Zionism, hell bent on triggering and hurrying up the Second Coming of Christ and there would probably be no state of Israel, as it was members of the Brethren cult, who were also members of the British Parliament, who engineered the “Balfour Declaration”, but that is another subject.
As more and more legitimate scholars, thinking people and searchers of the truth have begun to question the validity of these teachings, their research always leads them down the trail to English libraries.
Here they are amazed to learn that a handful of industrious Jesuit priests, “The Brethren” cult, John Nelson Darby, Edward Irving, Margaret MacDonald the fifteen-year-old sickly orphan and Cyrus I. Scofield, concocted a truly fantastic story.
Martin Luther had previously warned about such things when he wrote; “No greater mischief can happen to a Christian people than to have God’s word taken from them, or falsified, so that they no longer have it pure and clear. God grant that we and our descendants be not witnesses of such a calamity”. [Martin Luther, Table Talk]
|
Investigation: © J. Russell, Sept, 08, 2014 |
