Ahanu
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I'm curious Ahanu about your reasons for attending church as a Baha'i. Are there no Baha'is in your area? What kind of church do you go to?
No, as far as I know, there are no Baha'is in my area. Sean provided me with a list on here a while back, but the closest ones are like 2 to 3 hours away. Usually the religious make-up here is majority Christian fundamentalists and a few Muslim groups here and there. Actually, I have never met a Baha'i in person. I have another friend who is considering it, though. He is still reading a book I let them borrow. The church is of the Baptist denomination. This denomination is most dominate in my area, I think. The church I grew up in was Baptist too. The reason I brought it up is because the pastor was preaching a sermon on Corinthians chapter 15 this past week and he talked about the rapture throughout 50% of the sermon. After checking it out in more detail online, I found they hold to the idea of the pretribulation, which is the Rapture that occurs before the seven year tribulation. I really, really dislike this doctrine. As Sojourner Truth would say:
“You seem to be expecting to go up to some parlor away up somewhere and when the wicked have been burnt, you are coming back to walk in triumph over their ashes. This is to be your New Jerusalem? Now I can’t see anything so nice in that, coming to a world covered in the ashes of the wicked. Besides, if the Lord comes and burns, as you say He will, I am not going away. I am going to stay here and stand the fire like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and Jesus will walk with me through the fire and keep me from harm.”
Kudos!!Other protestants previous to Darby, such as John Locke, Joshua Spalding, Isaac Newton, and John Bidle never mention anything about rapture. You can get abstracts of their works from books.google.com. (Joshua Spaulding's The Devine Theory can be downloaded as a PDF, and you can see that though he's enthusiastic about the kingdom of God he never even treats a rapture idea.) Their very influential works extend from late 17th to early 19th century. Darby didn't start writing about rapture until mid 19th, so these provide a background to converse about rapture with your friend. You could point out that rapture is absent in previous Protestant literature. Physical return of Jesus, however, is a much broader discussion than Rapture, so make sure you don't get the two things crossed in conversation. Many (perhaps all) of the above protestants believed in a physical return but none discussed rapture.