If you are reading these words after 24 September 2025, there is a chance that you have missed out on the fast track to Heaven.

Predictions have been circulating online that an event known as the Rapture will take place today or tomorrow. These claims seem to originate from a South African clergyman, Rev. Joshua Mhlakela.

There is a long tradition of people attempting to predict when the end times will take place. These attempts did not stop with the coming of the supposedly enlightened modern age. In the nineteenth century, the American Baptist minister William Miller announced that Christ would return by 1844. He didn’t, and the result was that Miller’s followers suffered what became known as the ‘Great Disappointment’. The founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Charles Taze Russell, famously predicted that the second coming of Christ would happen in 1914. When 1914 came and went, it was explained that Christ was simply beginning his invisible reign.

It is perhaps surprising that Christians would engage in these kinds of speculations in view of the Bible passages in which Christ states clearly that no-one but God the Father – not even Christ himself – knows when the end of the world will come (Matthew 24:36, Mark 13:32). And yet it seems that some people just can’t resist going there.

In Christian theology, the end of the world is not a single event. As is well known, Christians believe that Christ will return at the end of history. But a whole complex of doctrine has been constructed around this basic idea, drawing mostly on clues taken from the Bible. And there is no consensus among, or even within, Christian churches on exactly what the timetable of the end times will look like.

In this context, the Rapture (‘Snatching’) is a single specific event in the Christian narrative of the end times.

Belief in the Rapture is based on one of the oldest surviving Christian documents, the First Letter to the Thessalonians. This text was written by the apostle Paul in the first couple of decades of the Christian movement.

The early Christians believed that Jesus was about to return to earth in the near future to rule over his followers on a transformed earth. But what about people who had died after accepting the Gospel but before the coming of the Lord? Would they miss out in some way? No, says Paul:

….[W]e do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord for ever. (1 Thessalonians 4.13-17, NRSV)

The last part of this passage – the “caught up in the clouds” bit – is what inspired the doctrine of the Rapture. What Paul probably meant was that Christ would return to rule over a utopian earthly kingdom, and that Christians would be caught up into the air to join him for the final part of his descent from Heaven.

Pausing for a moment, this stuff may seem rather odd and outlandish even to practising Christians. It is certainly somewhat remote from the sort of thing that you are likely to hear in your local parish church on Sunday. But it was very real to the first Christians. As my old teacher Keith Hopkins used to say, “Jesus and Paul were not members of the Church of England”.

Going back to the Biblical text, the idea that Paul was talking about Christians coming up to meet Christ as he returned to begin his reign on earth was current in antiquity. Here is what the Greek church father St John Chrysostom had to say:

If He is about to descend, on what account shall we be caught up? For the sake of honour. For when a king drives into a city, those who are in honour go out to meet him; but the condemned await the judge within. And upon the coming of an affectionate father, his children indeed, and those who are worthy to be his children, are taken out in a chariot, that they may see and kiss him; but those of the domestics who have offended remain within.

Yet quite a lot of modern Evangelical Protestants see things differently. They believe that the Rapture will involve Christ snatching Christians up into heaven, leaving the rest of the world to continue on its course. The world will subsequently pass through seven years of tribulation; and only after that will the final return of Christ take place.

This theory was developed by John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), the founder of the sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. The Brethren are extreme even by Evangelical Protestant standards, so one might think that Darby’s interpretation would have remained largely contained within his own small subculture. But one would be wrong.

Darby’s eccentric reading of the Biblical text seems to have been popularised largely through the endeavours of the American clergyman and religious writer C. I. Scofield. Scofield put Darby’s theory into The Scofield Reference Bible, which was published in 1909 by no less an outlet than Oxford University Press. The work sold millions of copies.

The Rapture and associated beliefs have come to have a established place in Evangelical Christianity, particularly in America. This is true both at a theological level and at the level of popular culture. The Rapture turns up in Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson’s book The Late Great Planet Earth, which was published in 1970 and went on to become the best-selling non-fiction (sic) book of the decade. In the same tradition are the Left Behind novels, which were published by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins from 1995 to 2007 and spawned a film starring Nicholas Cage.

This stuff is easy to mock – see the bumper stickers saying ‘When the Rapture comes, can I have your car?’ But it’s not really funny. Being preoccupied with the end of the world is a pretty reliable sign of an unhealthy mind. It also has toxic political implications.

The kind of Christians who are into this sort of thing often like to tie current events to Biblical texts in an attempt to work out how far we are into the end times. A role of particular importance in all this is attributed to the state of Israel. These endeavours feed into a movement known as Christian Zionism (this is a specific composite term – it doesn’t just mean normie Christians who happen to be sympathetic to Zionism). Christian Zionists are zealously supportive not only of the state of Israel but of rightwing Israeli nationalism. A prominent example of a Christian Zionist is Rev. Mike Huckabee, who is currently Donald Trump’s ambassador to Israel: he thinks that God gave the whole of Israel/Palestine to the Jewish people in the Old Testament.

Secular Israeli politicians like Benjamin Netanyahu have been happy to court the support of Christian Zionists for geopolitical advantage; but it may be questioned how far they are true friends of the Jewish people. This points to a wider problem in Christian eschatology. Christians who think about the end times – and we are not just dealing here with Christian Zionist radicals – tend to assign a central place to Jews in their theories. Jews are very often not ok with this.

Christian eschatology has historically had a tendency to collapse into antisemitism. We find beliefs that the Antichrist will be Jewish and that he will deceive the Jews into accepting him as their Messiah. More broadly, we find fantasies of mass conversions of Jews to Christianity. Jews turn out to be pawns in the game of Christian theology. It is not surprising that some Jewish observers have taken the view that predicting the Rapture for Rosh haShanah, Jewish New Year, amounts to taking the piss.

If I was a betting man, I would bet a large amount of money that the Rapture will not take place today, or even on Wednesday. If I’m wrong about that, I will probably feel very silly. But in any event, the underlying ideas that are driving the current speculations are not going to go away any time soon. One of the classic texts of social psychology, When Prophecy Fails (1956) by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, noted that followers of end times movements tend to become more rather than less committed when their prophecies come to be unfulfilled.

Neurotic obsessions with the end of the world will always be with us. They are encouraged by the founding texts of Christianity – and, indeed, they may be found in many other religious and secular belief systems. They are also not without influence on contemporary geopolitics. You may not be interested in eschatology, but eschatology is interested in you.