The peculiarly American concept of the "Rapture" didn't exist in Christianity until the 18th
century, when it was briefly mentioned by Increase and Cotton Mather.
Starting in 1827, the doctrine was honed and popularized by John Nelson
Darby, an Irish-American evangelist with the Plymouth Brethren. His
views would be disseminated by the Brethren, by Darby's follower Dwight
Moody, and by the Scofield Reference Bible (based on
Darby's own translation of scripture).
The "Rapture" is
suggested directly in just one passage of the New Testament, 1
Thessalonians 4:16-17: "[T]he Lord himself will come down from heaven...
and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still
alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to
meet the Lord in the air."
To explain: this passage reflects the prevalent Jewish view that on Judgment Day, the dead will rise bodily from their graves and return to God. What the apostle Paul was addressing was the question of what would happen to living human beings during this event - a pressing question, since Paul assumed the apocalypse was imminent. His extremely brief description of what came to be known as the "Rapture" was not given much attention or weight until early progenitors of American evangelicalism seized on this line in 1 Thessalonians.
Linking up this Pauline quote with
Revelation's rather non-Pauline description of the end-times (ie, the Tribulation),
Darby and others came to espouse
"premillennialism". This was a new doctrine created with an eye toward sparing the faithful from
earthly suffering under the Beast 666, red dragon, scorpion-tailed locusts, and
other colorful denizens of the Bible's last book.
This term, "premillennialism", drew on the existing "millennialism" - the literal belief in a coming thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, as described in Revelation. Premillenialism holds not just that this reign will be preceded by the Tribulation Revelation describes, but
also by a "Rapture" which will be wedged in just before the Tribulation, as suggested by 1 Thessalonians (and only there - not in Revelation - to be doubly clear). It's important to note that however familiar this Rapture scenario
is today, it is a relatively recent American invention unknown to
Christians of earlier eras.
Among Darby's other influential
views is Dispensationalism, which holds that God has a sequential plan
for humanity in which he manifests himself to the world in distinct
phases - even while He remains unitary and unchanged in His own self. In
particular, Darby held that after the death of Christ, a "Church Age"
began in which God's chosen people are no longer the Jews - since they rejected Jesus - but instead the worldwide "church" of true Christian believers.
Darby died on April 29, 1882.
