MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

In the article below Episcopal theologian Marcus Borg is referring to a ‘pre-trib rapture’.  And he is correct.  It was never taught by the early church at all — and not until the mid 19th century — which is just one of the many reasons why I do not teach it.  But ‘the gathering’ (post-tribulational ‘rapture’ of the elect) is explicitly taught by not only Jesus and Paul, but even John …

By John Blake – “Can you speak Christian?

Have you told anyone ‘I’m born again?’ Have you ‘walked the aisle’ to ‘pray the prayer?’

Did you ever ‘name and claim’ something and, after getting it, announce, ‘I’m highly blessed and favored?’

Many Americans are bilingual. They speak a secular language of sports talk, celebrity gossip and current events. But mention religion and some become armchair preachers who pepper their conversations with popular Christian words and trendy theological phrases.

If this is you, some Christian pastors and scholars have some bad news: You may not know what you’re talking about. They say that many contemporary Christians have become pious parrots. They constantly repeat Christian phrases that they don’t understand or distort.

Marcus Borg, an Episcopal theologian, calls this practice ‘speaking Christian.’ He says he heard so many people misusing terms such as ‘born again’ and ‘salvation’ that he wrote a book about the practice.

People who speak Christian aren’t just mangling religious terminology, he says. They’re also inventing counterfeit Christian terms such as ‘the rapture’ as if they were a part of essential church teaching.

The rapture, a phrase used to describe the sudden transport of true Christians to heaven while the rest of humanity is left behind to suffer, actually contradicts historic Christian teaching, Borg says.

‘The rapture is a recent invention. Nobody had thought of what is now known as the rapture until about 1850,’ says Borg, canon theologian at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon.” Read more.