Remember the song "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" written by Larry Norman in the 60's and covered by DC Talk in the 90's? It's about Christians worldwide suddenly disappearing in The Rapture.
I remember sleepless, anxious nights as a child sitting alone on the staircase of the house where I grew up. I wondered if I should go wake my parents to comfort me, terrified that Jesus would return and take my family away leaving me behind because I was not right with him due to some unconfessed sin or something.
I still can't believe that whole swaths of western Christian world passionately believe and espouse a strange doctrine that can be found nowhere in scripture and was completely foreign to church theology until the 1800's.
Thankfully, I think due to the availability of information on the Internet, good Bible exegetes like NT Wright, and a thousand failed false prophecies of when the rapture would happen, and maybe some really bad rapture movies, the rapture is being left behind by a lot of the western church.
But this is also a lesson concerning popular theology. Look how The Rapture became a self-evident "Biblical truth" within a century.
What else might we have wrong?
What else are we projecting onto scripture because of how we have been told to read scripture?
