r/MurderedByWords • u/Blues_Fish • 2d ago
The signs are showing that humans caused this.
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u/Knightforlife 2d ago
I’m a Christian and these kinds of views make me sick. There is a very unfortunate side effect of believing in a life after death that causes some believers to therefore care less about this life, and this earth, than they should. I say believe all you want, but still act as if this is the only life we’ll get, on the only planet we’ll ever call home, and we should care for each other and our planet accordingly.
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u/Umutuku 2d ago
There's a ton of life after death.
When we die everyone else has to live with the consequences of the actions we took when we were alive.
Heaven and hell are what we build every day for the people who come after us.
The ones who don't give a shit about the people who come after them are the real demons building hell in realtime.
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u/Magnahelix 2d ago
If Jesus is about Rapture the church, there's about to a LOT of disappointed "Christians" out there.
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u/NecessaryFreedom9799 2d ago
Where did this Rapture stuff start? The Gospels are millenarian, as is of course the book of Revelations, but they're foretelling the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem. So which group of Protestants started the idea of the Rapture and when?
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u/GaiusMarius60BC 2d ago
From Margaret MacDonald, a nontheologian but rather "prophetess" in Scotland in 1830; John Nelson Darby preached about the Rapture around the same time. However it was really popularized and spread to evangelical sects by Cyrus Irving Scofield's Bible around 1900, which embedded Darby's Rapture teachings into its commentary and footnotes directly.
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u/Free_Gascogne 2d ago
Somewhere during the Third Great Awakening. Its a fairly recent theology since most of historical christianity did not believe in rapture.
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u/SaintUlvemann 1d ago
Where did this Rapture stuff start?
The Rapture is an idea within futurism), the idea that Revelations is a book about future events. That idea was popularized by one of the Jesuits, Francisco Ribera of Spain. In 1585, he wrote a text In Sacrum Beati Ioannis Apostoli, & Evangelistiae Apocalypsin Commentarii which contained a ton of the tropes we now associate with the Rapture: a Catholic church in apostasy, a gathering of the elect, a literal Antichrist persecuting Christians, and a period of 1260 days of tribulation.
So which group of Protestants started the idea of the Rapture and when?
None. The Jesuits aren't Protestants.
The Rapture wasn't invented by a Protestant. Protestants in the Anglosphere only mainstreamed it. Ribera was actually writing with arguably one of the most Catholic goals possible, the goal of defending the papacy from Protestant accusations that the Pope was the Antichrist. He was essentially saying "the pope can't be the Antichrist because it's not the end times yet."
Rivera's ideas were largely restricted to Catholic clergy (Robert Bellarmine, Manuel Lacunza) and shunned by Protestants until the 1800s when a nexus of theologians in the UK took them up: Samuel R. Maitland, librarian to the Archbishop of Canterbury, but most importantly John Nelson Darby, one of the first Evangelicals. As Evangelicalism has spread, they took the Rapture with them.
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That said, general belief in a return of Christ has existed since the beginning, and has percolated in the background of Christian history for a long time; however, the historical view was that the "end times" was just "some day Christ will return and then it's judgment day."
And the moral teaching around that was, "So you should live every day as if today is your last chance to help the poor and make peace with your enemies, 'cause for all you know, it might be." And for 1500+ years, that was that, and whether you were Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, that didn't matter, they were all in agreement on that basic framework. The political drama of the Left Behind series developed later, about ¾ of the way through church history.
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u/purplegladys2022 2d ago
The world would be a vastly better place if all the religidiots disappeared.
I'm for the Rapture! Take 'em away, boys!
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u/Dave4689 1d ago
The death cult makes them think like they belong. Why care about something so silly as an entire planet's survival?
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u/Ehcksit 2d ago
From the apocalypse cult Christians, these are the same thing. They're ending the world on purpose to bring about the rapture.