Chapter One: The End Is NearONE The End Is Near I was expecting some significant culture shock when I moved to North Carolina in 1988. I had spent ten years in New Jersey, four of them teaching at Rutgers University. It was a position I loved: teaching the New Testament to students who were curious but not, as a rule, particularly invested in the subject before taking the class. Most of my students were Roman Catholic, at least nominally; others were Jewish or secular. Not many were Bible-reading evangelicals. I was pretty sure things would be different in the South. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was not known as a bastion of conservative thought, but it was, after all, in the Bible Belt. I braced myself, imagining that--as a former evangelical Christian myself--I knew what to expect.

But the world is full of surprises. I arrived in early August, and about a week after unpacking I received a call from a local newspaper. The reporter had heard I was a New Testament scholar and he had a pressing question: "Is it true that Jesus is returning in September?" My first thought was "Here we go." The reporter was asking because there was a booklet in wide circulation by someone named Edgar Whisenant, who mounted numerous biblical arguments that the "rapture" would occur that year during the Jewish festival of Rosh Hashanah--just weeks away. There were some two million copies of the booklet in circulation. For readers who do not know about the "rapture": for well over a century now, self-identified fundamentalists and other conservative evangelical Christians have maintained that Jesus is soon to return from heaven in order to take his followers out of the world.1 They will be "snatched" up with him from earth to heaven--hence the term "rapture" (meaning "snatched up"). Jesus will remove them from the world so they can escape the coming "tribulation," a seven-year period of absolute misery in which the chief opponent of Christ, the Satan-inspired "Antichrist," assumes sole political power over all the nations of earth, while natural and military catastrophes occur one after the other.

At the end of this period, when the world is about to blow itself into oblivion (in most scenarios since 1945 through a massive nuclear exchange), Jesus will return again, this time to put an end to the madness before all is lost. He will then bring a thousand-year period of peace on earth, to be followed by a last judgment and then a utopian kingdom for the saved, for all time. Whisenant argued that the rapture was going to happen next month. I assured the reporter that, well, no, this wasn''t going to happen. He was a little disappointed, but I did tell him the good news: if I was wrong, either he wouldn''t be around to worry about it or he would have lots to write about for the next seven years. Since the end of the nineteenth century, most fundamentalist Christians have maintained that all this is taught in the Bible. That would have been news to Christians throughout most of the first nineteen hundred years of the church, who thought no such thing. But starting especially in the 1890s, this view spread in popularity until it became the standard understanding of what was to happen here on planet earth, at least among Christians in North America and some parts of Europe.

Today, a belief in the coming rapture is held by hundreds of millions of people--not just fundamentalists--all of whom believe it is simply what the Bible teaches, especially in its final book, the Apocalypse of John, also known as the book of Revelation. The author, who calls himself John, assures his readers that these events are "coming soon." But when? Edgar Whisenant had narrowed the options down to September 11-13, 1988. Almost no one had heard of Whisenant before he placed his booklet in circulation. He started out as a NASA rocket engineer, but he was less interested in propelling people into space than in knowing when God would take them there. To find the answer, Whisenant engaged in an intense investigation of the Bible. The hints he found were scattered in verses here and there throughout the Old and New Testaments: a verse from Daniel combined with one from Matthew, together with one from Zechariah, another from Romans, and, of course, a number of them from the visions of the book of Revelation. When Whisenant had assembled the requisite pieces of this divine jigsaw puzzle, he produced his small book, giving it a compelling title: 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Is in 1988 .

2 Whisenant does indeed provide eighty-eight arguments for his prognostications, based mainly on the Bible but also on historical events and, well, "common sense." It would be tedious to discuss these at length (I can assure you), but a solitary example should give an idea. Matthew 24 shows Jesus speaking about what will happen at the end of time when the cosmic "Son of Man" arrives from heaven in judgment. His disciples, somewhat naturally, want to know when all this will happen, and so Jesus tells them: "Learn the parable from the fig tree. When its branch becomes tender and it puts forth leaves, you know that summer is near. So I tell you, when you see all these things happen, you know that he is near, at the gate. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place" (Matthew 24:32-34). To explain the parable, Whisenant asks what the "fig tree" represents and points out that elsewhere in Scripture it is a symbol of the nation of Israel, expected to bear good fruit.

In Jesus''s saying, the tree has lain dormant through the winter--as if dead--but then comes back to life in spring and puts forth its leaves. When does the nation of Israel come back to life after a long period of dormancy? Israel was destroyed as a nation in the second century CE and did not become a sovereign state again until 1948. Jesus declares: "This generation will not pass away before all these things take place." How long is a generation in the Bible? Forty years. And so, it is a matter of simple math: 1948 plus 40. Bingo! Jesus himself says he will return in 1988. There are eighty-seven more of these arguments.3 Most people will find this kind of reasoning puzzling, or perhaps weirdly interesting.

But Whisenant did not write his book for scoffers who could easily poke holes in his thinking. His predictions were for those who were inclined to be convinced. And many were. Not so much in New Jersey, but certainly in parts of the South. I had an undergraduate student that semester whose parents literally sold the farm. It is not that there was unanimous fundamentalist support for Whisenant''s convictions. Even conservative Christians often refuse to set a date for the rapture, and many of them pointed out to Whisenant that Jesus himself said that "no one knows the day or the hour" when the end will come, "not the angels in heaven nor even the Son" (Matthew 24:36). Whisenant, though, had a ready response.

He agreed no one could know the day or the hour. He just knew the week.4 HAL LINDSEY AND THE END OF THE WORLD The Whisenant affair was new to me, but I had long been familiar with these lines of reasoning--even with the idea that Jesus would return around or even in 1988. That had been my own view for years. I had been brought up as a decidedly nonfundamentalist Episcopalian. But when I was fifteen, I had a "born-again" experience and became convinced that if I was going to be a "serious Christian," I would not do something pedestrian like go to a major university or liberal arts college. I decided to attend a fundamentalist Bible school. Someone suggested Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, so, in August 1973, there I went.

The summer before going, I studied the Bible as best I could. I knew there was an entrance exam at Moody, and I didn''t want to seem like an idiot. But the book of Revelation scared me. I had glanced at it and had heard people talk about it, but it sounded so bizarre and puzzling that I wasn''t sure I could handle it. The week before leaving for Chicago, I decided I had to bite the bullet, but it was to no avail: I couldn''t make heads or tails of it. My sense is that most readers are like that. It really is a mystifying book, and unless someone gives you a road map to explain how the author gets from point A to point B and tells you how to interpret the signs along the way, you''ll get lost. After getting to Moody, I was given that map.

I got the general lay of Revelation''s land right off the bat--the book is quite popular among fundamentalist futurists--and in my second year I took a semester-long course on it. In addition, I had a private guide, recommended by millions of travelers before me: Hal Lindsey, whose book The Late Great Planet Earth , first published in 1970, became something of a second Bible for evangelicals around the country.5 Lindsey was a graduate of the fundamentalist Dallas Theological Seminary--the school all we burgeoning fundamentalist intellectuals aspired to attend--and had become a spokesperson for the imminent end of the world. Unlike Whisenant, he was not on the fringes of American culture. On the contrary, The Late Great Planet Earth was the single bestselling work of nonfiction (using the term loosely) of the 1970s, a book later important to none other than President Ronald Reagan, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and other members of Reagan''s cabinet, who were convi.