Transcript

Welcome to EWTN Bookmark.

Every week at this time, EWTN Global Catholic Radio features Catholic authors and their books.

You'll hear from established writers as well as first-time writers expressing their love for the Catholic faith.

Now, here's your host for EWTN Bookmark, Doug Keck.

Welcome once again to EWTN Bookmark.

I'm Doug Keck, your host.

Our guest author is Mr. David Curry, and the book is Rapture: The End Times Era That Leaves the Bible Behind, published by Sophia Institute Press.

Welcome back, David, to EWTN Bookmark.

The Rapture, obviously, I would think many people know that there's that set of books out, The Left Behind, and I notice that you've got Leave the Bible Behind.

It's kind of a play on the LaHaye books that are out there.

But one of the things that is kind of odd is, and you address it in the book when you talk about the issue, is you know, here we are, we're past the turn of the century, the millennium period in the sense of the year 2000 went and nothing really happened.

You would think all of these kind of predictions that swirl around the end times would have subsided and gone away, but that's not the case at all, is it?

Yeah, the book is actually an outgrowth of some talks I gave in 1998. It was the whole build-up toward that.

At that point, St. Joseph's Communications did the tape series, and I told people that I did not think it would subside after 2000. The next big date for the Rapture is 2007. That's the 40-year anniversary of 1967, which is the peace accords and all that when Israel took over all of Jerusalem.

The last big date for them was 1988, which was the 40-year anniversary for when Israel was founded.

2000, of course, was one that universally a lot of people looked at.

But I call it the rolling end of the world, right?

You know, they pick a date and they talk about a date, and then as that date starts to approach, they put and pick a later date.

Right?

So Hal Lindsey still feels, for example, in The Late Great Planet Earth, he made very clear that it was going to happen in the '80s.

When it didn't happen in the '80s, he said, I wasn't wrong; we're still in the final generation.

Then they tend to pick another date.

They have to go and recalculate and come up with a new date.

They recalculate, and it's getting later.

It's the later great planet Earth.

It's like in 1998, there was the little pamphlet that came out; it sold 5 million copies, 88 Reasons Why Christ Will Come Back in 1988. When it didn't happen, that same author came back with 89 Reasons Why Christ Will Come Back, and 89 Reasons Why.

So it just rolls back, and people tend to not notice for some reason.

You know, I almost feel bad because I chuckled over that because you look at it, and you kind of step back and say, Well, it didn't happen, and then it goes to 89 Reasons.

But there are 5 million people out there who—and I think you make this point in this book—it's not just a question of, Oh gee, some light reading.

There are people making decisions about their future and their lives.

You talk about it right in the beginning of the book and your true stories of whose lives are being shaped by this kind of view of salvation history, right?

Absolutely.

I have nine stories at the beginning about people whose lives have been affected by this.

Mine is one of them, where they made life-changing decisions to buy a house, to not get married, to not have more children, to invest their wealth in buying Bibles and hiding them in caves in Palestine.

These kinds of decisions that people have made based on the fact of this faulty theology, and it's heartbreaking.

Now, you trace this all the way back, in a sense, to the early Church Fathers, Irenaeus and forward.

But really, it seems to be that when we think about it today, a lot of this really seemed to bubble up in the middle of the 1800s?

Yeah, the early part of the 1800s.

Let's face it, we have the Mormons, the Seventh-day Adventists, and there was a whole—I’m not sure what culture was going on during that time—but that's when John Darby came on the scene as well, and he came up with this Rapture theology.

Technically, it's called premillennial dispensationalism or pre-tribulational premillennial dispensationalism.

That's such a long term; I don't use it a whole lot in the book.

Right, and it would be good, I think, for a lot of Catholics out there who maybe once in a while hear these words get bandied about to understand what they mean.

They sound a lot more complicated than they actually are.

Why don't you explain what it is to be premillennial and postmillennial?

There are two time frames that are in view.

The one is one that Catholics are pretty familiar with, which is called the Millennium.

It's a thousand years, and as Catholics, we follow St. Augustine, who 1,500 years ago reaffirmed the original teaching of the Church that that was the time of the Church that we are in.

It's not exactly a thousand years long; it's an extremely long time.

The thousand years, everywhere in the Bible, you can find thousand years as a symbolic number.

God owns the cattle on a thousand hills.

It doesn't mean you go out and count the thousand hills and then say, All the other ones are my cattle.

They're all God's. So, in the same way, Augustine said that thousand years is a long Church period, and that makes us amillennial.

We believe we're in the Millennium, okay?

As Catholics, right now, what these people say with the Left Behind series is they say that we're not in that time period yet.

That before that time period occurs, Christ has to come again, and at that time, God will revert back to His plan for ethnic Israel.

It's a defective view of the Church.

As Catholics, we believe that the reason the world was even created was for the Church.

God had this wonderful, loving plan for His Church; He wanted a bride for His Son.

The Father wanted a Church, and so He built the world in order to build the Church.

That's not how Rapturists view it.

We are really a parenthesis.

Christ came; the Messiah came the first time, and He was rejected.

And as a result, the Church was formed, but it was Plan B. Plan A didn't work out because the Jewish leaders didn't accept Christ, so Plan B was started, and that's the period that we're in now.

The Millennium is going to be a time when God goes back to ethnic Israel.

Okay, the Church is put on the back burner; they're taken to heaven, they're not involved in really what's going on, and now Israel is again.

So that part, when the Church is taken to heaven, is that the literal Rapture then?

Right, that's why the Church is taken to heaven.

Okay, in order to start this seven-year period.

Now, right before the thousand years is this seven-year period of trial; that's the Tribulation, the Great Tribulation that they talk about.

Okay, the purpose of that is to get Israel ready to accept their Messiah for the thousand years.

Okay, and there's the pre-trib, the mid-trib, and the post-trib.

So that's when Christ is going to Rapture His Church out of here.

Some of them think the Church will be gone right at the very beginning; that's what most of them believe.

Some think the Church will be here for three and a half years, and some think the Church will be taken right at the very end; they'll have to go through it.

Right?

But most of them, as you say in the book and in your experience, would believe that they would be Raptured before that would happen.

Absolutely, I'd say probably 95%. So that has a very appealing view then, right?

Well, psychologically, it's a wonderful, peaceful way to live in the world.

Unfortunately, it doesn't help.

You can be a pessimist about things that happen.

For example, when the World Trade Centers were destroyed, I had two premillennial friends call me up and take comfort in the fact that the end was coming up close, that Babylon was burned in a day, as they say in Revelation.

They looked at that and they said, See, that shows that Christ's Rapture is just around the corner.

The trouble is, it may have been comforting to them, but it wasn't comforting to the families that lost someone in the World Trade Center.

So, psychologically, it's very appealing; there is no cross.

Right, and in your true stories section, you have a couple of different stories.

One where you, as a young boy, come home and think for a period of time that maybe your mother's been Raptured and that you missed the elevator, so to speak.

That's a personal story of myself, and there was actually more than one case where that happened, but I chose one when I was a young boy.

And there are other people then in there as well.

I know, and one of them struck me.

I remember a young woman who had to do with abortion, and she felt like her call was to work with pro-life.

I think there was a line about, Well, why?

You don't need to be really worried about that.

What you really need to do is go out and evangelize for souls because the world's going to end anyway.

So why?

That phrase was like, Why polish the brass on a sinking ship?

The world is going down; Christ is going to come back any moment to take you out of it.

Why do you want to worry about abortion?

It's interesting because, in some ways, from a Protestant perspective, that's like the other extreme of the incredibly social justice-oriented approach that you find on the other side of, let's say, the Protestant spectrum, right?

Right.

Yeah, in fact, this theology is very attractive to someone that's tired of being told to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, and to visit those in prison.

If you're tired of that Gospel, which, as you say, can be taken to the extreme in the social Gospel, but it is part of the Gospel that we hear in the Church and is part of our responsibility.

If you're tired of hearing that, this is a wonderful place for you to go because you'll never hear that, right?

Because that's not our responsibility.

Our responsibility is just to throw life jackets out to people that are going down with a sinking ship.

Right, that's not to be un-Christian to people and not help people, but that's not the priority.

It's more important that I save their souls.

Right, and from a Catholic perspective, it would be, again, that kind of middle ground where both of those are important aspects of the Christian life.

Right, and Doug, that's absolutely true.

One interesting thing about Protestantism was when it leaves the Magisterium, when it leaves the Church and its guidance, its living guidance, it tends to splinter one way or the other.

It can't keep the middle ground that the Church has always held because it gets detached from the anchor, which is Peter.

Exactly right, and the Magisterial teachings.

The other thing that was interesting in the book—I was just thinking while you were talking about that—was you talk about most of the people who would be involved, let's say, in this kind of millennialism, the Rapture orientation, would describe themselves in some fashion as evangelicals or fundamentalists, and that some of them would reject the term Protestant.

Yes, I did not consider myself a Protestant growing up.

I considered myself—and I came into the Church, as you know, at about 40, 41. Mm-hmm.

And the reason I didn't consider myself a Protestant, and most of my friends didn't consider themselves Protestants, is that Protestants started in the 1500s with Luther and Calvin.

That was the Protestant Reformation.

We viewed ourselves as the true Church that had been around since the very beginning and had to go underground in 300 when Constantine made it legal to be a Christian.

At that point, we felt that the Catholic Church was formed as part of the state, and they started killing us.

Now, forget about the fact that there's absolutely no historical evidence or credibility to that idea; there's no evidence for it.

That's what we believed, so we didn't like the term Protestant.

That put us 11 centuries too late.

It's interesting hearing that because I never thought of that in terms of Protestants.

I've heard, you know, Jehovah's Witnesses kind of approach that way or even Mormonism approach that way—this idea of the Great Apostasy, in a sense—but it's very similar in the sense that it is that same kind of approach.

Okay, we're speaking with David Curry, and his book is Rapture: The End Times Era That Leaves the Bible Behind.

It is published by Sophia Institute Press.

Much more with David right after this quick break.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.

Amen.

And thank you so much for staying with us here on Bookmark with David Curry, the author of Rapture: The End Times Era That Leaves the Bible Behind.

Rapture is certainly a word that anyone pays attention to in their Christian faith these days.

There's quite a bit we know from the LaHaye books; they're very, very popular.

It's probably right there behind Harry Potter somewhere on the sales list.

Were you surprised that it would be so popular and continue to be so popular?

I was not, Doug.

I was a teenager in the early 1970s when Hal Lindsey's book came out, which, if I am not mistaken, is the number one religious fiction of all time in America.

Now, I think the Left Behind series is leaving that in the dust, but until the Left Behind series came out, it was...

Did Hal think it was non-fiction at the time when he wrote it?

You know, people ask me if it's non-fiction or fiction, and I say it's fiction.

Okay, let's talk about how you laid out this book.

You've got a fine introduction, and we'll read some quotes from it.

A forward, I should say, by Scott Hahn, who's quite effusive in his praise of this work.

How did you decide to lay this book out?

You kind of go through what is the Rapture, terms and ground rules, and who is this really formatted and designed to reach?

Okay, Doug, there are some books out already on the Rapture or being left behind that I felt targeted Catholic audiences, and I thought that was great because Catholics need to know about this.

But what I was trying to do was bring the argument to either Catholics that are dabbling in it—in other words, a Catholic that's reading the Left Behind series and is starting to absorb some of the theology there without even realizing it, which is what happens—or Protestants that are thinking of coming into the Church but have to deal with this Rapture issue first.

Before I could become a Catholic, before I could even seriously consider being a Catholic, I had to deal with this theology because I couldn't be a Catholic and hold on to it.

So one was true, or the other was true, and so that was the other audience that I had in mind: Protestants that are open-minded enough to say, You know what?

I'm going to look at this and see if it's true.

So I started with some stories of true-life people—nine people that I've known—how this has affected their lives.

Then I went with just a summary of what the Rapturists believe because some people may not really even know what is behind these Left Behind series.

So I went through that.

Then I felt like it was a little too early to jump into the Bible; I needed to give some people some ground rules.

The Rapture is pulled out of the theology that is pulled out of some passages that are very apocalyptic and very prophetic, and that's a very special kind of passage.

So I felt like we needed to get some ground rules, so I laid down nine ground rules about reading this kind of literature when we interpret it as Bible students.

From there, I think any Protestant should be able to take those nine ground rules and agree with them.

That was my goal: to take those ground rules out of the Bible, to not say, This is a ground rule because the Church says it's a ground rule.

It's just, this is a ground rule, and here's why.

You can look and see that's how the Bible used the Bible.

So I was trying to go to the audience of someone that was accepting the Bible as their authority and wasn't so sure about the Church.

From there, I said, Okay, let's just go look at every passage that the Rapturists use.

I start with Daniel.

Most Catholics aren't familiar that that's the most important passage.

They talk about Thessalonians, or they talk about Revelation, or they talk about the Olivet Discourse.

The most important passage is Daniel.

Why?

Because that's the one that Darby said convinced him to be a Rapturist.

It's the only passage in the Bible that gives you a seven-year Tribulation.

Okay?

Daniel chapter 9 has an oracle in there where there are the 70 weeks of Daniel, and people are familiar with the last week of Daniel, the final week, or the 70th week.

Darby took that 70th week and put it into the future, and that's where he comes up with that seven-year Tribulation.

Now, there's a major problem that Darby has that most Rapturists are not familiar with, and most Catholics don't know either.

I've heard Catholics talk about the coming seven-year Tribulation.

Well, the problem is the majority of the early Church did not consider it to be a seven-year Tribulation to come; they considered it to be seven decades of covenantal transition—the transition from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant.

In that transition was the Incarnation, was the Passion, and all of those events.

That's where 70 AD shows up.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so that was the culmination of the 70 years or seven decades of transition, which is in that Daniel 9 passage, and it's the destruction of the Temple.

Okay, so it's from Christ's birth, approximately, to the destruction of the Temple—from about 4 BC when Christ was born to 67 AD, which is when the assault on the Temple started.

So that 70-year period, if you look at Daniel 9, that's what he's talking about.

Oh, okay, and the majority of the early Church agreed, right?

And you say majority because the reality is there were some Catholic early Church Fathers who had differing opinions.

Absolutely, even some saints who had different views at different times.

One of the wonderful things about being Catholic, Doug, is that you have the option to follow Scripture as long as you stay in the realm of what the Magisterium has laid down.

So, follow Scripture where it takes you.

Mm-hmm.

And so I don't have really an argument with the Catholics that say to me, Dave, I don't agree with your interpretation of Daniel; this is what I believe.

But what I try to lay out is that any one of the Catholic views is more credible than the Rapturist view, and that's what I was arguing for.

That's what I was going to ask you.

What do you say to someone who says, Well, you know, Dave, I'm Catholic, and I do believe in the Rapture in some way, you know, and I believe in these other things because I find comfort or they make sense to me?

Is there a problem with that as a Catholic?

Yes, specifically with the Rapture, there is.

Because what it does, Doug, is it takes the Second Coming and splits it into two.

In other words, you no longer have a Second Coming as the Rapturists teach it.

As the Rapturists teach it, it's now no longer a Second Coming; it's really a Second Coming and a Third Coming.

Now, they get around that by saying that Christ doesn't actually touch down the first time.

Okay.

He just kind of passes over; he passes over, and we go meet him in the air.

But really, what it boils down to is two comings to come, and the Church has always said that there's only one more coming.

Now, what that leads to then is more than one judgment, and the Church has always been very clear: there's only one more judgment.

We all have our particular judgment, but that general judgment will be the great white throne that Revelation talks about.

There's only one of those, right?

And if you start to split the Second Coming into two, you end up with more than one judgment.

Some Rapturists have as many as four.

Wow, okay.

It just goes to show, once you get started, it can go anywhere, right?

It can go anywhere.

You can almost find anything to support any particular theory one might come up with.

That's right, which is why, once again, you've got to come back to the Magisterium.

Well, what's interesting in looking at it and reading it is to realize how you've got Daniel or Thessalonians, and it's kind of like picking revelations.

It's not like you go and there's the book, like some people have in their mind, I guess, Oh, this is all out of the book of Revelation.

They just are interpreting the book of Revelation, but they're really not.

They're pulling some out of Revelation, as you said, a little bit out of here, a little bit out of there—that whole idea of just pulling pieces together and assembling a theory.

Exactly, and that's one of the major points I'm trying to make.

If St. Paul had believed this, if St. Peter had believed this, if Christ had taught this, if this was a part of the original deposit of faith, why can we not find any one passage that teaches both comings—the Rapture and the Second Coming?

Why can we not find any passage that talks about the split?

All they do is they say these passages are speaking of this, and these passages are speaking of the other, but there's no passage that talks about the split or the two comings together.

It actually pulls them together.

One of the things I know, I guess Schofield's a name that's very important in this because I guess the study Bible that he authored or carries his name.

The interesting thing is a lot of people use that, and then they go to the notes, and the notes seem to support that approach.

But—and I think I've heard you on other programs mention the idea that it is easy for people to read the notes as if the notes were part of the Scripture.

By having it at the bottom of the page, it gives them a sort of extra special authority.

They are all written from a very specific slant, so somebody reads the passage and then goes to the notes, and the notes support that interpretation.

They say, Well, it's clearly...

and part of it is because some of Jesus' statements were hard to understand.

So you read that part of the Gospel and you go, Golly, what did he mean by that?

Peter said that, right?

Exactly.

And so then you go down to the notes, and it's explained for you very, very simply, and you go, Oh, now I got it!

Now I understand what Jesus meant.

The only trouble is, you know, that may not be what Jesus did mean.

Now let me just say, because we talk about the book, Scott Hahn talks about it.

He said, I'm tempted to describe it as a virtual summa of apocalyptic texts and prophetic prophecies.

In Rapture, Curry gives us a comprehensive collection of the biblical texts that fundamentalist Protestants have commonly interpreted as end times predictions.

And this is what, is there 500 pages in this book?

I don't want to scare people off, but there's a lot of material here.

And he goes on to say he then subjects each passage to sane and sober analysis, correcting errors along the way and establishing a range of reasonable interpretations, all in harmony with the Catholic Church's living tradition.

So you go, just so that people understand, you take every argument, you put it up there, and then deal with it right from both perspectives to show why people would support this argument initially and ultimately why that argument falls.

Exactly, and then I try to go one more step and say, as Catholics, what's one possible view that we can take on that?

I try to be very careful not to say that this is the only Catholic view, but I do try to give an alternative.

I feel like there's no help to people if you destroy the one system that they understand unless you give them a good Catholic alternative.

Right, and here, as we were just talking before, the fundamentalist tendency, however, as opposed to the Catholic tendency, which is to read the Old Testament and the New Testament in fulfillment, is to read each biblical text in isolation from the other texts.

The problem, of course, is that the texts themselves are not written to be read this way.

You've got to understand that when Jesus spoke, he was speaking to people for whom the Old Testament was their national history, their religious history, their music, their culture—it was their everything.

And they understood it, and he spoke in that milieu.

Now, what's the threat here?

The word modernism pops up in your book.

It's kind of unusual.

We're going through all these texts, all this history of the early Church Fathers and the Darbyites and the Millerites and all these people that a lot of Catholics wouldn't be as familiar with here and there, and then modernism—the heresy from the turn of the 19th century.

Why is modernism something—and Gnosticism?

Why are those issues for Catholics today in reference to the Rapture, in your mind?

Well, the Gnostics were a group of people that denied that the supernatural could impinge on the material, and they had their own way of coming up with that.

But I agree with some of the popes that have said that the modernist heresy, which is still with us in Catholicism, is just a recreation, a resurrection of that ancient heresy, Gnosticism.

Yeah, Gnosticism is with us again in the modernist heresy.

And what that modernist heresy does, for example, Doug, in the Mass is that the two parts of the Mass are the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and they try to strip out the supernatural on both halves.

Now, most of us are familiar with how they try to do it with the Eucharist, and they say it's only a symbol.

Well, it is a symbol, but it's much more than a symbol.

It's a sacrament, which means it is what it symbolizes, and it has the power to give us what it symbolizes.

But they do the same thing in the Liturgy of the Word, and what they do is they try to take the Word and say, Well, it's just a human book, or There are errors in it, and those kinds of things.

When that heresy comes into the Church, premillennialism or this Rapture idea pops its head up because?

I think it's because of a reaction of the average Catholic that sees his faith under assault.

Okay, so it's a reaction to that?

It's a reaction to that modernism.

The guy sitting in the pew says, You know what?

My priest is telling me that...

Let's just take a real simple one: the coin in the mouth of the fish.

My priest is telling me in a sermon that that really didn't happen, that there was no purpose to it, and that was just added by the Church later.

And here’s a man sitting in the pew.

He may not be able to explain his faith very well, but he has experienced Christ.

He knows Christ; Christ is in his life, and he's excited about his faith.

He says, That doesn't sound right to me.

It smells off.

I can't argue with my priest, but it smells off.

And what that man will eventually do is go play someplace where the supernatural is accepted, and that's at the premillennial scale.

Okay, very good.

We are just out of time, David.

Good luck with this work, and we look forward to more work from you in the future.

Thank you.

Just out of time with David Curry, the book Rapture: The End Times Era That Leaves the Bible Behind, published by Sophia Institute Press, available nationally through EWTN's Religious Catalog.

Worth a look!

Check us out next time as well right here on EWTN's Bookmark.

If you are interested in the book just discussed on this program, call the EWTN Religious Catalog at 1-800-854-6316. 800-854-6316.