The Rapture

The word “rapture” comes from the Latin raptus, translating Paul's promise that the living faithful will be “caught up… to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:17). For most of Christian history this was read simply as part of the general resurrection at Christ's return. The distinctive idea of a separate, secret removal of believers before a final tribulation — the pretribulational Rapture — was systematized only in the 1830s by John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren, and it became the dominant eschatological framework of much of modern Evangelicalism. Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant, and historic Reformed traditions reject or reframe it.