Will there be two raptures

Answer 1

A:

Few people belong the the Plymouth Brethren Church, but many Christians believe in its founder's most enduring theological invention, the Rapture.

Barbara R. Rossing (The Rapture Exposed) says that the Rapture has its origins in the nineteenth century beginning, according to one critic, 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 John Nelson Darby, a British evangelical preacher and founder of the Plymouth Brethren.

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. The first return would be in secret, to "Rapture" his church out of the world and up to heaven. Christ would return a second time after seven years of global tribulation for non-believers, to establish a Jerusalem-based kingdom on earth (called the "Glorious Appearing" - a phrase from Titus 2:13).

John Nelson Darby has sunk into obscurity, apart from his followers in the Plymouth Brethren, and so should his theology. There will be no Rapture, but even if these events do occur one day, they would only affect a tiny proportion of Christians and non-believers. Nearly all the Christians who have ever lived and nearly all non-believers would have quietly lived their lives and passed away in the fullness of time, oblivious to any "Rapture".