The Rapture

26 Sep, 2019 230 Christianity

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas developed by the Anglican priest John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), drawn from his reading of scripture, in which Jesus would suddenly take His believers up into the air, and those left behind would suffer on Earth until He returned with His church to rule for a thousand years before Final Judgement. Some believers would look for signs that civilization was declining, such as wars and natural disasters, or for new Roman Empires that would harbour the Antichrist, and from these predict the time of the Rapture. Darby helped establish the Plymouth Brethren, and later his ideas were picked up in the Scofield Reference Bible (1909) and soon became influential, particularly in the USA.

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Guests

  • Elizabeth Phillips No other episodes
    Research Fellow at the Margaret Beaufort Institute at the University of Cambridge and Honorary Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University
  • Crawford Gribben No other episodes
    Professor of Early Modern British History at Queen's University Belfast
  • Nicholas Guyatt 4 episodes
    Reader in North American History at the University of Cambridge

Reading list

  • Discovering the End of Time. Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O'Connell
    Donald H. Akenson (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016) Google Books →
  • Exporting the Rapture. John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North-American Evangelicalism
    Donald H. Akenson (Oxford University Press, 2018) Google Books →
  • An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews
    Yakov Ariel (New York University Press, 2013) Google Books →
  • When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture
    Paul Boyer (Harvard University Press, 1994) Google Books →
  • Plotting Apocalypse: Reading, Agency, and Identity in the Left Behind Series
    Jennie Chapman (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) Google Books →
  • Christian Zionism and English National Identity, 1600-1850
    Andrew Crome (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Google Books →
  • Holy Bible Darby Translation
    John Nelson Darby (trans.) (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013) Google Books →
  • An Introduction to the Bible
    John Nelson Darby (Rani Publications, 2018) Google Books →
  • Brethren in Scotland 1838-2000: A Social Study of an Evangelical Movement
    Neil T. R. Dickson (Paternoster, 2003) Google Books →
  • The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
    Frances Fitzgerald (New York University Press, 2017) Google Books →
  • Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America
    Amy Johnson Frykholm (Oxford University Press, 2004) Google Books →
  • Gathering to His Name: The Story of the Brethren in Britain and Ireland
    Tim Grass (Paternoster, 2006) Google Books →
  • Writing the Rapture: Prophecy Fiction in Evangelical America
    Crawford Gribben (Oxford University Press, 2009) Google Books →
  • Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic world 1500-2000
    Crawford Gribben (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Google Books →
  • Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World
    Nicholas Guyatt (London, 2007) Google Books →
  • Dispensational Modernism
    B.M. Pietsch (Oxford University Press, 2015) Google Books →
  • From Awakening to Secession: Radical Evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain, 1815-35
    T. C. F. Stunt (T&T Clark, 2000) Google Books →
  • American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism
    Matthew Avery Sutton (Harvard University Press, 2014) Google Books →
  • The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology
    Jerry Walls (ed) (Oxford University Press, 2010) Google Books →
  • On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel's Best Friend
    Timothy P. Weber (Baker, 2004) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m0008p2k

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0008p2k

Auto-category: 230 (Christian theology)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. The Rapture has become a powerful idea for millions of evangelical Christians around the world, particularly in America.