Who first used the word rapture and when?

Answer 1

A:

The word 'rapture' has been used for centuries in the sense of high emotion. There is also a definition in some dictionaries of an archaic sense of being carried away.

The first to use the term in a theological sense was John Nelson Darby, the nineteenth-century founder of the Plymouth Brethren, who invented the notion of the Rapture. Although few people belong the the Plymouth Brethren Church, many Christians believe in its founder's most enduring theological creation, the Rapture.

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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.

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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.

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It is one thing to predict the Rapture, it is an entirely different thing to demonstrate that it will ever happen. The Rapture has no genuine biblical support, so there is no good reason to believe there will ever be a Rapture or that the church and its members will be taken bodily up into heaven. John Nelson Darby has sunk into obscurity, apart from his followers in the Plymouth Brethren, and so should his theology.