The Dispensationalists have distorted the meaning of the word rapture.

Rapture was never used to mean a future event of being caught up to meet the Lord at His return. Rapture was the emotions one felt when God revealed Himself in a personal way.

It carries the meaning as being personal to the individual experiencing an ecstatic experience. The Bible is full of these experiences. They start with the phrases “I saw,” “I heard,” “the Word of the Lord came to me,” “the Lord spoke to me,” etc.

When the Dispensationalists created “The Rapture” it was, just that, an ecstatic utterance. It started in Glasgow Scotland in 1830, when a woman named Margaret MacDonald had a series of visions. As an individual utterance, it should be subject to Biblical proof-text. However it did not meet any of the then established rules of hermeneutics.

Later Revs. John Darby, Edward Irving, and John Pusey created the hermeneutics of Dispensationalism to explain these visions. An adherent of this new view, C.I. Scofield put them into the notes of his famous Bible.

Their new rules for interpreting scripture depend on a irrational literal interpretation. Even the most bizarre passages of symbolic literature in the book of The Revelation are said to be literal. Their interpretations have little or no regard to the same language formate used in Fulfilled Prophecies of the Old Testament.

It is pretty much an “out come based theology” format; decide what the end is and tweak the interpretation to support that view. This often leaves the average church member confused and, perhaps over excited about a sensational extravagant future that is clearly improbable.