From Rapture to Revenge

How Jesus’ return morphed into a vengeance play

Original source: Jan Luyken, The Last Judgment

Originally published in a shorter version in The Backyard Church on Medium, July 20, 2025.

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During a recent interview on National Public Radio, an economics reporter claimed the US economy under Trump was faring better than economists had forecast. He and his interviewer referred to economists as the “expert class,” and did so with a note of irony. After all, the “expert class” missed the mark with predictions of economic trouble, particularly predictions about the impact of tariffs.

(For those of you wondering what this recollection has to do with Christianity and faith, bear with me.)

They covered the dire predictions of economic havoc and their short-term effect on the stock market, how predicted inflation failed to materialize, and how the expert class missed the mark. The conversation reminded me of conversations with members of my family and my first wife’s family, many of whom finished their education after high school, yet who derided people with college degrees as educated idiots with no practical knowledge.

Except, as the radio interview progressed, the reporter informed listeners that businesses ordered stockpiles of supplies before the tariffs as a hedge against price increases. He also reminded listeners that the Trump administration backed down on tariff threats, preventing the projected side effects.

What both left unsaid was that the expert class didn’t get it wrong as they’d originally suggested. The experts (and political scientists, and most reasonably well-read people) based their predictions on Trump’s threats to impose tariffs ranging from 35 to 140 percent on our allies, on China, and even unpopulated atolls in the South Pacific. When businesses preempted inflation by preordering, and Trump backed down, the conditions upon which the experts based their predictions vanished. But neither the interviewer nor the economics reporter gave the expert class credit for identifying the causes of a potential economic catastrophe. They never credited the expert class with their success.

This failure to recognize how expert predictions work reflects how Christian (and cultural) misunderstandings about prophecy have contributed to a widespread belief in a violent apocalypse orchestrated by a vengeful Jesus. A belief with a dangerous influence on the church, governance, and a wider cultural conflict.

Prophecy doesn’t predict the future, it allows us to reverse course before we incur the consequences.

Prophetic Tradition

In the Hebrew scriptures, God didn’t speak through kings and priests, he spoke through prophets. The prophets, in turn, delivered God’s guidance to kings and priests. Then something happened. The voices of the prophets apparently faded, and when their voices faded, the Hebrew Canon closed. We rarely ask ourselves why.

After Cyrus returned the people of Israel to their homeland, the active role of prophecy declined. Prophecy vanished with the rise of the Hasmonean Dynasty, whose kings often assumed the role of high priest as well. The assumption of power by the priestly class made listening to prophecy inconvenient. By Jesus’ time, the priesthood and pharisees controlled Jewish society. These authorities rationalized that the role of prophecy had ended with Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi (prophecy being unnecessary until God fulfilled history).

This convenient explanation doesn’t mean prophets disappeared. It means the ruling powers ignored them, struck them from the record. Records suggest that at the time of Jesus, prophets flourished outside the walls of the palace and temple, but only the powerless listened. At least until Jesus made it impossible for the Priests and Roman Empire to ignore prophecy any longer.

Barbara Rossing describes the traditional Jewish understanding of prophecy as “a mediation of divine spiritual comfort, encouragement, and guidance.” That understanding continued well into the second century of Christianity. To fulfill those exceptions, prophecy addressed God’s two key messages to the people.

First, prophecy protested institutional injustice in express violation of God’s covenant. As I also mentioned in last week’s post, the prophets protested the priests and landowners who defied God’s commands for those who prospered to share their gifts with those in need. Isaiah declared (3:14-15 NIV)

“The LORD enters into judgment
against the elders and leaders of his people:
“It is you who have ruined my vineyard;
the plunder from the poor is in your houses.

What do you mean by crushing my people
and grinding the faces of the poor?”
declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty.

These are the same injustices prevalent in imperial Roman society at Jesus’ time.

Second, prophecy served as a channel for leadership. Prophets expressed God’s will directly to Israel and Christians assemblies without relying on intermediaries. Although Christian communities closer to Rome ceded authority to a clerical hierarchy of deacons, presbyters, and bishops early in the second century, prophets, including female prophets, remained in leadership roles in the Eastern communities beyond the reach of the Roman Empire.

The rise of clericalism developed over problems we might expect from reliance on prophetic leadership. Even prophetic authorities disagreed over criteria for judging a prophecy’s authenticity, how to interpret prophecies, the role of the Spirit, and women’s roles in leadership, especially their prophetic role. Prophets who traveled from assembly to assembly asking for hospitality and pay for their services vexed church leaders, as did the higher status given to prophets by worshipers.

When the Roman Empire embraced Christianity (or perhaps because Christianity embraced empire), Constantine assumed the role of leadership over the bishops and patriarchs. Christianity took on the appearance of the Hasmonean Dynasty. Not only did the church under Constantine codify Christian doctrine, they locked a few preferred texts into Biblical canon. Prophecy, so far as the church was concerned, had passed with the pages of Biblical history, and so did Christians’ understanding of prophecy and its role in the faith.

Prophecy v prediction

In popular culture, and in Christian thinking as well, prophecy is a predictor, like the weather or sports betting lines. Except most of us recognize weather and sports predictions as fallible. People need to weigh the prediction’s accuracy, decide whether to take an umbrella or bet on another game (or not at all). They rarely extend that courtesy to prophecy.

In Rossing’s words, “In some people’s minds the Bible is that kind of prophetic script or code, predicting future world events in detail—events as specific as the rise and fall of leaders in the Middle East and nations joining the European Common Market.”

As a result, people parse the words of prophets such as Nostradamus, combing through them for a match to historic events. But Rossing warns, “Prophecy does not mean prediction of the future. The Bible is not like a horoscope, giving specific predictions for the future.”

Jewish theologian Yehezkel Landau stresses that prophecy is conditional: “Biblical prophecy is not a foretelling of inevitable doom or destruction. Rather, it is a timely warning combined with a promise…for it is dependent on human behavior in response to God’s word.”

The story of Jonah teaches us more about prophecy than any other passage in scripture. Most people think of Jonah as a story about a man and a fish, with the fish winning. We shouldn’t fuss over whether a fish or a whale swallowed Jonah, or whether the fish was real. Whether real or fictional, the fish serves as a metaphor. God isolated and demanded that a prophet reflect on his refusal to serve.

The story really concerns what happens to Jonah after he agrees to serve as God’s prophet. Think of the story as a three-act play with the fish concluding Act One. In Act Two, Jonah delivers the prophecy to the people of Nineveh and the people repent. The prophesied judgment doesn’t come. When Act Three opens, Jonah is pissed that God didn’t make good on the judgment he prophesied.

Jonah prays, “Isn’t this what I said, LORD, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” (4:2 NIV) Jonah wanted God to punish the people of Nineveh for their transgressions, not to forgive them.

The story of Jonah teaches us two things. It reminds us what Jonah knew from the beginning that God doesn’t send prophecy to forecast judgment and punishment, but to offer people a chance to reverse course. But it also reminds us we often hope God doesn’t give people that chance. We would rather God punish than forgive.

The prophecy many Christians envision isn’t God’s prophecy, but Jonah’s. A forecast of inevitable doom (or a promise of unconditional reward). This isn’t prophecy but an exercise in schadenfreude. The preeminent face of that schadenfreude in evangelical and popular culture is predictions about the Rapture, especially as expressed in the theology of Hal Lindsey and the Left Behind fictional series created by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, where, as Rossing reports: “Millions of people are killed in these and other end-times novels—not by bows and arrows, as in the biblical scenes, but by assault rifles and missiles fired from helicopter gunships.”

This version of the end times provides structural support for, as Rossing suggests, “the theology called “Dominionism” or “Christian Reconstructionism” that seeks to replace what he calls America’s “secular humanist” government with government based on Old Testament biblical law, until Christ returns to earth”

Rapture and Left Behind