AMERICA'S
PRETRIB RAPTURE TRAFFICKERS
by Jon Edwards
There are some who haven't been taken in by noisy "pretribulation
rapture" traffickers in America such as Thomas Ice. He's the "genius"
(with a Ph.D from a Texas cracker-box that was fined for illegally
issuing degrees, according to World Net Daily!) that LaHaye etc. count
on to stiff-arm historian Dave MacPherson's fastidiously accurate
research of many decades. (The late F. F. Bruce, who wrote a glowing
Foreword to one of MacPherson's books, found only one typo in it: the
accidental listing of something like "Vol. I" instead of "Vol. II" on
one page!) MacPherson's research has earned many kudos from scholars
who haven't had an axe to grind either for or against the same early
19th century endtime view (Google "Scholars Weigh My Research").
Although two tiny British sects of evangelical persuasion were the
original developers and missionaries of the same doctrine, almost no
one of importance in Britain continues to teach it. Today the escapist
pretrib rapture is headquartered in America where there is little
separation between evangelicalism and eschatology. Looming large in the
world of any-moment-rapturism-for-any-amount-you-can-donate"
merchandising is former Texan Thomas Ice. But unfortunately his
research is characterized by sloppiness - Google "Thomas Ice
(Bloopers)" - as well as deviousness. Embarrassed by MacPherson's
recently documented evidence that Scottish lassie Margaret Macdonald
was the real pretrib originator in 1830 (which grated against his
erroneous conclusion that it was originated in the 1st century), Ice
soon warmed up his revisionist pen. In a 1990 Bibliotheca Sacra article
on Macdonald, he quoted up to line 55 in her "revelation" explanation,
skipped over her main point in lines 58-63 (where she saw "one taken
and the other left" before the "WICKED" [II Thess. 2:8] is "revealed" -
phrases even Hal Lindsey views as "pretrib"), and resumed his extensive
quotation in line 72! Ice has knowingly repeated the same omission in
later writings because he's aware of her (pretrib) partial rapturism
(Google "X-Raying Margaret") which cancels out his falsehood that she
was a posttrib rapturist and not any sort of pretrib rapturist! He is
just as devious with his Pseudo-Ephraem and Morgan Edwards claims
(Google "Deceiving and Being Deceived" by MacPherson) and lately has
been claiming to find pretrib teaching in many pre-1830 writers (who
were actually posttrib) simply because they employed the word
"rapture"! Even the late John Walvoord could find only a trio of
ancient writers who seemed to support pretrib, but their support was
only a hint of the kind of imminence that Walvoord embraced - but was
really no support at all since the rest of the quotation, which
Walvoord chopped off, was posttrib through and through! Before anyone
bad-mouths MacPherson's research, he or she should see his bestselling
book "The Rapture Plot" (Armageddon Books online) or at least borrow it
cheaply via inter-library loan at any library. Or even more cheaply
Google his unique articles including "Famous Rapture Watchers,"
"Pretrib Rapture Diehards," "Walvoord's Posttrib Varieties - Plus,"
"Wily Jeffrey," "Thieves' Marketing," "The Unoriginal John Darby,"
"Pretrib Hypocrisy," "The Rapture Index (Mad Theology)," and "Roots of
(Warlike) Christian Zionism."