AMERICA'S PRETRIB RAPTURE TRAFFICKERS
by Jonathan Edwards
There are some who haven't been taken in by noisy pretrib rapture traffickers in America such as Thomas Ice. He's the "genius" (with a "Ph.D" from a Texas crackerbox that was fined for illegally issuing degrees, according to World Net Daily!) that LaHaye etc. count on to stiff-arm historian Dave MacPherson's fastidiously accurate research. (The late F. F. Bruce, world-class theologian and encyclopedia contributor who wrote a glowing Foreword to one of Dave's books, could find only one typo in it: an accidental listing of something like "Vol. I" instead of "Vol. II" on one page!) And his research of decades is highly endorsed (Google "Scholars Weigh My Research"). On the other hand, Ice's rapture-rush-job research includes sloppiness - Google "Thomas Ice (Bloopers)" - as well as deviousness.
In a 1990 article (in Dallas Seminary's journal Bibliotheca Sacra) on Margaret Macdonald, the long covered up pretrib originator, he quoted up to line 55 in her revelation explanation, deliberately skipped over her main point in lines 58-63 (where she saw "one taken and the other left" BEFORE the "WICKED" [II Thess. 2:8] is "revealed" - phrases even Hal Lindsey views as "pretrib" in his books!), and resumed his extensive quotation in line 72! Ice has knowingly repeated the same omission in later writings because he is aware of her (pretrib) partial rapturism (Google "X-Raying Margaret") which cancels out his falsehood that she was a posttrib - even though his former mentor, the late John Walvoord, stated in his books that partial rapturists ARE pretribs! Ice is just as devious with his Pseudo-Ephraem and Morgan Edwards claims (Google Dave's "Deceiving and Being Deceived") and lately - fearing neither God nor man - has been claiming to find pretrib rapturism in MANY pre-1830 writers (who were actually posttrib) simply because they used the word "rapture" (as if pretrib has a monopoly on this word!).
Even Walvoord could find only a trio of ancient writers who seemed to support pretrib, but their support was seemingly the only kind of imminence Walvoord embraced - but was really no support at all since the rest of the quotation, which Walvoord chopped off, was posttrib through and through! Before anyone badmouths Dave's research, he or she should see his bestselling book "The Rapture Plot" (available for a great price at Armageddon Books online) or at least borrow it cheaply via inter-library loan at any library. Or even more cheaply Google his unique articles including "Famous Rapture Watchers," "Pretrib Rapture Diehards," "Walvoord's Posttrib Varieties - Plus," "Appendix F: Thou Shalt Not Steal," "Wily Jeffrey," "Thieves' Marketing," "The Unoriginal John Darby," "Pretrib Hypocrisy," "The Rapture Index (Mad Theology)," "Open Letter to Todd Strandberg," "The Real Manuel Lacunza," and "Roots of (Warlike) Christian Zionism."