Excerpt: The "Index" (as in Todd Strandberg's "Rapture Index") lists 45 "precursors" (events on earth reportedly acting as signposts pointing to the rapture, and showing how close the rapture is).
And here's where the mad theology comes in. The Rapture Index "precursors" (including "Antichrist") are on earth even AFTER the point in time for a "pretrib" rapture, are fulfilled DURING the seven-year tribulation period, and actually point to ONLY the (posttribulation) Second Coming to earth and not to any sort of "pretribulation" coming - a concept that NO church before 1830 ever taught!
Excerpt: Since the 1970's stunning new data has been surfacing about the pretribulation rapture's long-covered-up beginnings in the 1800's. In recent years several persons associated with Dallas Theological Seminary (which had long been pretribized) have reportedly gone to Britain to check on my research sources and then write books opposing my claims. In 1990 an Ohio pastor told me that Dr. _____ _____, the most qualified DTS prof, traveled there and came back and wrote nothing! The pastor added that he and some others had a good laugh. But change was coming.
Excerpt: Margaret Macdonald's handwritten account in 1830 of her pre-Antichrist (or pretribulation) rapture discovery was reproduced in two of the 19th century books written by Catholic Apostolic Church historian Robert Norton. Her statement has long been in the public domain. Following my discovery of Norton's works and my publication of her words, several persons in recent years have reprinted it.
But some, like militant pretrib rapture defender and diehard Thomas Ice, have had trouble reproducing it accurately. In addition to a total of 49 omitted words in different sections, Ice's 1989 reproduction had 12 added words plus errors in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation! Moreover, I discovered that Ice's version also included four distinctive errors that Hal Lindsey had made in his 1983 reproduction, and that Tim LaHaye's 1992 reproduction left behind the same 49 words that Ice had left behind three years earlier! I've found that pretrib rapture promoters would rather copy - and miscopy - each other than take time to locate primary research documents! (By the way, my margins pinpoint Ice's - and LaHaye's - missing words; e.g., "10W" = 10 words.)
Excerpt: Prior to our increasingly "Hell-Bound and Happy" era, America's greatest leaders were part of the (gulp) Religious Right! Today we have forgotten God's threat (to abort America) in Psa. 50:22----"Now consider this, ye that forget God, lest I tear you in pieces, and there be none to deliver."
Excerpt: Pretrib icon C. I. Scofield could be hypocritically double-minded. In a 1921 letter to his daughter Abigail, who had a financial need while then living in San Luis Obispo, California, he advised her to pray to a Catholic saint: "...why don't you seek the special intercession of the San Luis in whose name-town you live?" (This entire letter is in Joseph Canfield's classic work The Incredible Scofield and His Book published by Ross House Books.)
But a dozen years earlier in his Scofield Bible (p. 1346) he had begun predicting a future reign of "apostate Christendom, headed up under the Papacy"!
Excerpt: Go ahead. I dare you. Type in the name "John Darby" on Yahoo and other internet "search engines."
You will find that many still assume that this 19th century leader of the evangelical, Britain-based Plymouth Brethren was the most important figure in the development of "premillennial dispensationalism" - or, if you like choices, "dispensational premillennialism." (Those fond of brevity can call it "d-ism.")
Excerpt: You've probably heard that the pretribulation rapture view was published by a Rev. Morgan Edwards in 1788 and also by a Medieval writer called Pseudo-Ephraem 1000 years earlier.
The Edwards claim (promoted by John Bray and copied by Frank Marotta, Thomas Ice, Tim LaHaye etc.) is based on a 1980 book by Thomas McKibbens and Kenneth Smith, while the claim for Pseudo-Ephraem (promoted by Grant Jeffrey and copied by Thomas Ice, J. R. Church, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, Chuck Missler, Dave Hunt, Hal Lindsey etc.) rests on a 1985 book by Paul Alexander.
Not only have these promoters covered up and twisted what McKibbens/Smith and Alexander have written, but they've also concealed and perverted Morgan Edwards' and Pseudo-Ephraem's own words!
Excerpt: Professor John Wallboard: Welcome to Advanced Rapture Techniques, course no. 666. If you study hard you'll get a Rapture Franchise someday. Talk about money! You'll be so successful you can even have a scandal or two and folks will still love you. Some of our star graduates are Tommy Eisegesis, Hal Lindseedy, Dwight Plentycost, Chas. Ryewheat, Chas. Stainley, Jimmy Swagger, Jack Van Empty, Edgar Whizheain't, and Jack Wiles. Does anybody already know any rapture gimmicks?
Excerpt: ...this shocking story really began in 1997. That was when I discovered that much of a 1990 book, Escape the Coming Night by David Jeremiah and C. C. Carlson, was a brazen plagiarism of Hal Lindsey's 1973 book There's A New World Coming. I can't recall which part of Escape made me suspicious and led me to do a thorough examination. It may have been the description of the 144,000 as "Jewish Billy Grahams"----an unforgettable phrase I knew Lindsey had used. (Originally published by Word Publishing, Escape had later been taken over by Thomas Nelson Publishers, the largest Bible and inspirational book publisher on earth.)
The year 1997 also found me working on a new book, one that came out the following year. After I ran across even more plagiarism in some influential evangelical publishers including Moody Press, I decided to confront them.
Excerpt: Sergeant, now where did you get some of those substandard items that are in your "Margaret MacDonald Who?" article that's in the "Pretribulation Rapture" section of your "Rapture Ready" website?
You maintain that I "have never been able to prove that Darby ever heard of MacDonald or her vision."
FACTS: In John Darby's Book The Irrationalism of Infidelity (1853), pp. 283-5, he described in great detail his visit with her in her home in Scotland in mid- 1830 and even talked about her endtime outlook and the Scriptural texts she used for support...
Excerpt: Jeffrey also sees pretrib in some pre- 1830 writings and quotes a portion of the 2nd century Didache. In the part Jeffrey quotes, the early writer said that the Antichrist "shall appear" and "shall work signs and wonders" during a "fiery trial" (Jeffrey omits this last phrase). In the next sentence Jeffrey includes, the same early writer wrote: "And then shall the signs of the truth appear, first the sign of a rift in heaven, then the sign of the sound of a trumpet, and thirdly, a resurrection of the dead." (Even though the trumpet-sounding rapture follows the Antichrist's reign, Jeffrey concludes that this early document taught that a rapture will precede the Antichrist!)
Excerpt: (For several decades some pretrib leaders have deceitfully isolated Margaret Macdonald's posttrib-resembling statement "The trial of the Church is from Antichrist" to try to establish that she was posttrib. I have in mind leaders like R. A. Huebner, Charles Ryrie, Thomas Ice, and Frank Marotta. Like terrorists who destructively orchestrate mass confusion...
Excerpt: Since 1976 John Walvoord, in The Blessed Hope and the Tribulation and The Rapture Question: Revised (hereafter BH and RQR) and on the Internet, has seen four distinct (BH, p. 21) and "contradictory" (RQR, p. 144) schools of thought within the posttrib view. (Later I'll show that within Walvoord's own pretrib view the crucial 'timing of the rapture' has had incredible variety along with fluctuating scriptural bases!)
Excerpt: Justin Martyr (100-168): "The man of apostasy [Antichrist], who speaks strange things against the Most High, shall venture to do unlawful deeds on the earth against us the Christians..." (Dialogue with Trypho, 110).
Melito (100-170): "For with all his strength did the adversary assail us, even then giving a foretaste of his activity among us [during the Great Tribulation] which is to be without restraint..." (Discourse on the Resurrection, i, 8).
Excerpt: (This book excerpt is found on pages 227-231 in my book The Rapture Plot, my most comprehensive work on pretrib rapturism's earliest development in the early 1800's. It's my summary of the book's highlights and takes the unusual form of an imaginary phone call from a dispensationalist, with a dash of humor thrown in. Incidently, all of my book royalties have always gone not to me but to our nonprofit research group, a group that has never paid salary to myself or anyone else! You can obtain The Rapture Plot through Armageddon Books on the Internet or by calling 800-967-7345.)
Excerpt: Marotta has no in-depth analysis of the main thrust of my Plot book and says, p. 15, that the plot in it "is considerably more dull than his Margaret MacDonald material." Yes, so dull that Tommy Ice couldn't wait to feature Marotta's non-analysis in his Pretrib Research Center paper; under the headline "Dave MacPherson's The Rapture Plot: Weighed and Found Wanting," Ice reprinted what Marotta had quickly weighed with 19th century Darbyist Brethren scales over his eyes!
