What is the definition of 'rapture'?

Answer 1

Another answer from our community:

The rapture is when God descends from heaven and brings every true believer with him back to heaven, while everyone else remains on Earth.

Answer 2

The word rapture usually refers to a state of bliss or ecstasy. An archaic definition is the transporting of people to another place.
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It can also be used in a different sense for the 'Rapture' that was a theological invention of John Nelson Darby, the nineteenth-century founder of the Plymouth Brethren. Although few people belong the the Plymouth Brethren Church, many Christians believe in its founder's most enduring theological creation, the Rapture. .

Barbara R. Rossing (The Rapture Exposed) says that according to one critic, the Rapture has its origins with a young girl's vision. In 1830, in Port Glasgow, Scotland, fifteen-year-old Margaret MacDonald attended a healing service. There, she was said to have seen a vision of a two-stage return of Jesus Christ. The story of her vision was adopted and amplified by Darby. .

The belief that Jesus will come again was not new, and Christians have always taught that Jesus will return to earth and that believers should live in anticipation of his second coming. Darby's new teaching was that Christ would return twice, first in secret to "Rapture" his church out of the world and up to heaven, then a second time after seven years of global tribulation for non-believers, to establish a Jerusalem-based kingdom on earth. .

John Nelson Darby has sunk into obscurity, apart from his followers in the Plymouth Brethren, and as the Rapture has no genuine biblical support, there is no good reason to believe there will ever be a Rapture such as he defined.