“…at times Christians have made the return of Christ seem either hokey or horrifying. In much of the popular media surrounding the “rapture” and the “apocalypse” – books, films, tracts, and so on — teachings about the eschaton, or the end times, are used as a scare tactic: give your life to Jesus or you’ll have to endure catastrophes to come. When I think of the second coming of Christ, my mind flits between Tim Lahaye’s Left Behind series, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, and bumper stickers that proclaim, “In case of rapture, this car will be un-manned.” My husband’s childhood church in Georgia had an in-case-of-rapture vault (no joke) that contained a TV, a VCR, and a video explanation of what to do after the rapture had occurred and you were left behind. I suppose they hoped someone would stumble in and find it amid the apocalypse.

Churches with rapture vaults would be incomprehensible to the vast majority of Christians throughout time. The idea of the rapture as it’s popularly conceived sprung up around the nineteenth century. But as a child and a teenager, my husband didn’t know this had not always been the church’s teaching about Scripture. These ideas were in part why he gave up on church for a while after he left home for college.

These bizarre teachings are not good news. Bad second-coming theology has done a number on our theological imaginations. It has made the return of Christ seem like the stuff of badly written fan fiction, apocalyptic horror, and anti-intellectual pie-in-the-sky escapism. These novel teachings have made many Christians anxious about a doctrine that has historically been a chief source of hope for the church. In order to faithfully and fully enter into this “coming” of Advent, then, we may have some unlearning to do.”

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— Tish Harrison Warren, Advent: The Season of Hope, pp.18-20