Justin Martyr (c.110–c.165)
He [Jesus Christ] shall come from heaven with glory, when the man of apostasy [Antichrist], who speaks strange things against the Most High, shall venture to do unlawful deeds on the earth against us the Christians. (Dialogue with Trypho, CX)
The Shepherd of Hermas (c.95–c.150)
[Blessed are] you who endure the great tribulation that is coming on, and [blessed are] they who shall not deny their own life. (Vision 2:2)
Those, therefore, who continue steadfast, and are put through the fire, will be purified by means of it. . . . But the white part is the age that is to come, in which the elect of God will dwell, since those elected by God to eternal life will be spotless and pure…This then is the type of the great tribulation that is to come. (Vision 4:3)
Epistle of Barnabas (c.80–c.100)
In this epistle, the church is exhorted to persevere in this evil present time so it can stand firm when it encounters the future Antichrist.
The final stumbling-block (or source of danger) approaches . . . We take earnestheed in these last days; for the whole [past] time of your faith will profit you nothing, unless now in this wicked time we also withstand coming sources of danger, as becometh the sons of God. That the Black One [Antichrist] may find no means of entrance, let us flee from every vanity, let us utterly hate the works of the way of wickedness. Do not, by retiring apart, live a solitary life, as if you were already [fully] justified . . . Take heed, lest resting at our ease, as those who are the called [of God], we should fall asleep in our sins, and the wicked prince, acquiring power over us, should thrust us away from the kingdom of the Lord (Epistle of Barnabas, 4).
The following is one of the most devastating critiques of the pretribulation doctrine of imminence in our opinion. As you know, pretribulationism teaches that Matthew 24 does not apply to the church. They also teach that the warnings in the Bible about “watching” for Christ’s return requires that no prophesied event must occur before Christ’s return—i.e. imminence. However, George Eldon Ladd, in his seminal book, The Blessed Hope, reveals, to use his word, a “fatal” inconsistency in pretribulation theology.
He writes:
[Pretribulation teachers] have applied the commands of our Lord to watch in Matthew 24 to the Jewish remnant in the Tribulation. A. C. Gaebelein, interpreting the meaning of verse 43 and 44 says, “with these words of warning and exhortation to watch, our Lord closes the predictions relating to the end of the Jewish age. This warning will be understood and heeded by the Jewish remnant to which it is addressed. They are to watch for the Son of man; the church is to wait for the Lord” (The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. II, P. 217).
One of the most recent statements of a pretribulation rapture applies these verses in the same way. After quoting Matthew 24:37–42, English says, “The same circumstances that attended the time just prior to the judgment of the flood will pertain before the return of Christ in judgment upon the world. Business will be going on as usual. People will be occupied with the normal duties of life. . . . Then suddenly the Lord will come. . . . The allusion is most certainly to the time of the coming of the Son of man in power and glory. That coming is unquestionably after the tribulation. . . . This passage cannot be used as a proof text that the church will pass through the tribulation. It has to do with those who are on earth when Christ returns to earth—those taken will be those who have rejected God and his Christ; those left will be tribulation saints, Israel primarily, who will enter the earthly kingdom” (Rethinking the Rapture, pp. 49, 50).
Such admissions as these are fatal to the theory of an any-moment rapture and a secret coming of Christ which is based on the argument that the exhortations to watch require an any-moment return of Christ. If pretribulationists can apply these words without difficulty to the Jewish remnant in the Tribulation and yet admit that they are exhorted to watch for an event which will take place at the end of the seventieth week, although they “do no know the day or the hour,” then two results inevitably follow. First, if the exhortations do belong to the Jewish remnant, they do not apply to the Church. Jesus then did not exhort the Church to watch for an unexpected event. In this case, there does not appear either in the Gospels or in the Epistles or in the Revelation a teaching that the Church is to watch for a sudden, any-moment coming of Christ.
Secondly, if pretribulationists can apply the command to watch to anyone in the midst of the Tribulation whose end can be approximately known, then they cannot object to the application of these same exhortations to the Church on the ground that it is impossible for believers to watch for an event whose time can be approximately known. If the Jews can be told to “watch” for an event which will take place three and a half years after Antichrist breaks covenant with them, then Christians can be told to watch for an event which will not take places until the end of the Great Tribulation. In either case, it is impossible to build the teaching of a secret, any-moment coming of Christ to rapture the Church on these exhortations. The Blessed Hope, pp. 113–14.
The following is a brief note on the very first commentary in church history on the Olivet Discourse, which corroborates the biblical veracity of the prewrath position.
Prewrath eschatology affirms that the Bible teaches expectancy, not imminency of our Lord’s return. We believe that Christ could come back in any generation of the church, not at any moment. Pretribulational imminency, however, is a relatively new British/American teaching in church history that originated in the early 19th century by the Plymouth Brethren theologian John Nelson Darby. And if it is found in other parts of the world, it is only because it has been exported by American or British pretribulational missionaries since then. In contrast, the fundamental belief of the prewrath view reaches back to the very first century of the church.
The earliest attested Christian document outside of the New Testament writings is called, The Didache, written sometime between A.D. 50–120. There are two parts to it: (1) an instruction on the “Two Ways” and (2) a manual on church practice. The document concludes with a brief but salient commentary on Jesus’ Olivet Discourse. What is highly significant about the earliest commentary on Jesus’ teaching is that it explicitly places the coming of Christ to resurrect the dead after the Antichrist’s great tribulation, not before. Thus, it recognizes that the apostle Paul’s teaching on the resurrection in 1 Thessalonians 4 is the same teaching that Jesus taught in Matthew 24. The Didache states:
“(4) For as lawlessness increases, they will hate and persecute and betray one another. And then the deceiver of the world [Antichrist] will appear as a son of God and “will perform signs and wonders,” and the earth will be delivered into his hands, and he will commit abominations the likes of which have never happened before [great tribulation]. (5) Then all humankind will come to the fiery test, and “many will fall away” and perish; but “those who endure” in their faith “will be saved” [delivered from the day of the Lord] by the accursed one himself. (6) And “then there will appear the signs” of the truth: first the sign of an opening in heaven, then the sign of the sound of a trumpet, and third, the resurrection of the dead [resurrection]—(7) but not of all; rather, as it has been said, “The Lord will come, and all his saints with him.” (8) Then the world “will see the Lord coming upon the clouds of heaven” [shekinah glory] (The Apostolic Fathers, Second Edition, Ed. Michael W. Holmes, 16:4–8). Here is an online text of the document.
As is clearly shown the resurrection of the righteous follows after the Antichrist’s great tribulation.
The label “prewrath” is new, but its fundamental beliefs are ancient. Pretribulationism must wait 1,800 years to produce a document that teaches their theology!
